TOCA Race Driver 2: The Ultimate Racing Simulator

Race Driver 2 Impressions

We recently met Codemasters' Gavin Raeburn at Microsoft's X03 event in France to check out the first playable build of Race Driver 2: The Ultimate Racing Simulator. The game was by Codemasters just last week and is currently scheduled for release on the Xbox in spring 2004.

Codemasters has described Race Driver 2 as its most ambitious motorsport game to date, and it's not difficult to see why. The game will feature no fewer than 15 distinct types of racing, and as they progress through the game, players will get to drive around 35 licensed vehicles ranging from stock cars and trucks to Aston Martins and Jaguars. All of the vehicles in the game will feature realistic damage models and, according to Raeburn, will need to be well looked after if they're to finish the races intact, since terminal damage has now been implemented.

Like its predecessor, Race Driver 2 will feature a story-driven career mode with cutscenes showing interaction with agents, pit crews, other drivers, and the like. The big difference this time around, though, is that players won't be assuming the role of a character like Ryan McKane and will instead be playing as themselves and, as such, viewing all of the new FMV sequences from a first-person perspective. We got to see one of the new sequences played out in which our chief mechanic was arguing with the team's publicity manager over the fact that a photographer had been allowed into the garage. As in , the cutscenes will be relatively short in length so as not to frustrate players who are eager to get on with their next race.

The structure of the career mode in Race Driver 2 will be somewhat different from that in Pro Race Driver and will see players assuming the role of one of 12 young drivers hoping for a seat in the Grand Prix competition at the end of the game. The player's career will be divided into eight "gates" in which they'll have to successfully complete six of eight available competitions before they can progress. The choices of which competitions to enter will be limited--four of the events in the gate we were shown were mandatory, and there were two points at which players could select which of two available championships they wanted to compete in. Players will no longer get to choose which teams they drive for in each of the game's 30-plus championships from around the world either but will occasionally get the chance to compete in competitions for different teams as their career progresses.

One of the best features in Pro Race Driver was that the CPU racers drove very realistically--sometimes pulling off spectacular overtaking maneuvers, sometimes getting them wrong and spinning off the circuit. The same will also be true in Race Driver 2, and Codemasters has added a challenge by giving the drivers different mentalities depending on which event they're competing in. The nonplayer drivers need to be aware not only of each of the different vehicles' handling characteristics, but also of how much damage they can sustain--collisions in truck racing, for example, will often result in enough damage to put drivers out of a race. Because the damage in Race Driver 2 will be less forgiving than in previous games, players will have the option to restart any race they fail to finish rather than have to play through an entire championship again because of one mistake.

In addition to the single-player game, Race Driver 2 will feature Xbox Live support for up to 12 players. In order to create an online game using vehicles from a certain championship, players will need to have unlocked them in the single-player game first. Joining players, however, will have access to whatever content the host of the game has unlocked. The game will feature a matchmaking service so that players can compete with others with a similar track record, but the ranking system will reward players more if they beat stronger opponents than if they continue to race against newbies. Losing to a newbie will also see players slip down the rankings more quickly than if they fail to win against experienced opposition.

Race Driver 2 is still in the early stages of development, and Raeburn admitted to us that the code we were shown wouldn't usually have been considered suitable for a demonstration. We were allowed to get our hands on the controls for a brief time, however, and can report that the handling of the GT40 that we drove on one of the game's street circuits already seemed more realistic than that of the cars in Pro Race Driver. Since it took us a little while to master the new controls, we can also report that the damage models in the game are working just fine and that large chunks of debris littering the track are a distinct possibility. If anything, the damage in the game actually seemed a little too punishing at this stage, but it's conceivable that the demo was designed to show off the new damage models rather than just have us drive around indefinitely.

We'll bring you more information on Race Driver 2: The Ultimate Racing Simulator as soon as it becomes available.

Gamespot