Codemasters, the developers of the Grid racing series, have announced their third entry. Grid Autosport is currently under development for Xbox 360, Playstation 3, and PC. However, it appears that Grid Autosport will not make it onto Playstation 4 and Xbox One. According to Codemasters, they didn’t want to force the game onto these next-gen consoles.
The lead designer of Grid Autosport, James Nicholls, gave an explanation as to why the focus is on last generation consoles, as opposed to next-gen. “One of the unique things for us is we’ve got our own internal Ego technology” explains Nicholls. “We built this one off the same heritage of all the previous games have been built to this point. That means we’ve already got a ready-made engine that’s highly optimized for the current-gen hardware, but also PC can really benefit from that. If we moved that particular engine onto next-gen, it’s almost a port job and you’re not really doing a next-gen game. We’re building something that’s forced onto those consoles, that’s not naturally built for them”
Even with that being said, Codemasters has plans for the next-gen platforms. They are currently working on technology that will allow them to achieve optimization for next-gen. “What we’ve traditionally done at Codemasters is we’ve always released games that have been built for that new hardware in mind” says Nicholls. “So the engines we’re building internally for the new version of Ego of next-gen and the games that are built on that are taking that platform extensions, those new things into account. For our game it didn’t feel right to force a game out.”