Codemasters: nobody uses cockpit view
Codemasters caused quite some controversy by not including a cockpit view in their upcoming racing sequel, GRID 2, but in an interview with Eurogamer executive producer Clive Moody made it clear why that decision was taken: nobody seems to use it anyway!
“There seems to be some confusion about where we get our data from to help us make these decisions. While we do use research and focus groups, the most important data source for us is the enormous amount of telemetry data we can obtain from our servers that tells us exactly how and what our players are doing across all our games. So it’s not a case of just a sample of people we’ve spoken to in research, it’s a fact that only five per cent of Codemasters Racing game players ever used the in-car view.
In other words: all those people who complain about there not being a cockpit view are the small 5% of Codemasters fans who actually use it. And everyone else should keep their mouths shut as they’ve never used it anyway. And if they would want to use it now, then tough luck!
It seems that having a cockpit view not only would use more time from the developers, but also more resources from consoles. So by dropping this, Codemasters can use the available resources for other stuff:
“Video game development is always about trade-offs and in this case taking the hard decision to lose the in-car views for five per cent of our players (and remember we still have bonnet cam and bumper cam, which many people with racing wheels use) is something we felt was more beneficial to everyone. They are expensive to run due to the requirement for high-resolution interior textures which are seen close-up and require a considerable amount of in-game memory (to store) and processing (to render).
“What this means in practice is that the benefit to our vehicle models, environment models and the hundreds of other things in the environment sapping memory is huge. By making this educated call, we can use the extra available memory to make the on-track racing a truly mind-blowingly immersive experience.”
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