E3 06: GTR 2 Impressions

LOS ANGELES--GTR 2 is a PC racing game set for a worldwide release in August that recreates the official FIA GT racing series. If it's not something you're familiar with, it's basically a whole load of supercars (Ferraris, Porsches, Lamborghinis, and the like) stripped bare and race specced. The original game was a hit with hardcore racers, but considered generally inaccessible and too difficult to drive. Now developers SimBin are back with a sequel that promises to be far more mainstream-friendly, while retaining strong commitment to realism.

The first of the new features we were shown in a demonstration at E3 was the Driving School mode. It looked similar in style to that found in the Gran Turismo series, and featured a range of lessons based on acceleration, braking, cornering, and overtaking. In each one you will try to outperform the instructor's ghost car to achieve a gold medal, or beat the slightly slower time limit for a silver. As you accumulate medals you'll unlock new content, which by the looks of it consists of additional racing series.

The main focus of the game still rests with the official GT series, however, and the license includes all of the drivers, teams, and circuits from the 2003 and 2004 seasons. There are 36 different track layouts in all, although some of them are different formations of the same circuit (factoring in changes made to the real locations between the two licensed seasons). On top of that there are around 40 different car models, with several different specifications of each, meaning about 140 different vehicle types to choose from. Each one is highly detailed, both outside and in, even down to the driver's right foot stamping on the accelerator or brake.

That level of detail is replicated across the game, with a highly researched driving experience and realistic weather effects. We were shown one race taking place in pouring rain, where all of the cars threw up a realistic amount of spray. It was clear that the artificial intelligence drivers were tiptoeing around the track because of the difficult conditions, and according to the developers once the rain stops and the clouds begin to lift a dry line will appear. However, that line won't be uniform around the circuit, but instead will reflect the way that the individual circuits tend to dry in real life, and even better, you'll be able to tell those parts of the track drying quicker by the way they look and feel. What's more, as the cars drive they'll leave more noticeable wheel tracks on those parts of the circuit that have more standing water. Awesome.

Crowds and pit crew will be fully animated, and the new damage system was also displayed. When a car collides with something and a piece of bodywork is lost, that object is modelled in 3D and has mass, meaning that if it hits another car it could cause damage independently of the car it's fallen from. The replay facility also demonstrated the particle effects for braking glass and flying sparks.

Endurance races will feature in the game, and contain a realistic day-night cycle, and for the new game the AI cars will no longer have an advantage at the start of a race. Whereas before they would begin with warm tires and a perfect knowledge of the circuit conditions, computer drivers will now feel their way around for the first few laps until their tires are up to temperature.

Because GT races feature more than one classification of car in the same race at the same time, there will be 64 vehicles competing together in full races. For multiplayer online this will drop to 32, but the new time trial mode also lets players save special laps and upload the ghost data to the game's servers for others to download and race against.

In order to make the driving experience more friendly for those gamers that don't own top of the range steering peripherals, SimBin have added support for mouse-steering, as well as tweaking the keyboard controls. There's still some optimisation that needs to take place, and it's likely that to run the game on the highest detail settings and resolutions you'll need a hefty machine, but from what we've seen so far there's very good reason for PC racers to get excited. We'll have more on this as it becomes available.