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Codemasters Racing and RaceNet Announced
With the recent failed attempts to create successful action games, Codemasters has revealed that it will focus on racing titles from now on, as F1 creative director Steve Hood of CM explains:
Codemasters is a big company, but we’re not a giant. We’re still a developer that’s very British in its outlook and development processes and we’re making the most of what’s available to us,” said Hood. “It doesn’t make any sense to spread ourselves thinly across loads of different genres when it’s very important to recruit specialists for each particular game anyway. You can’t just find loads of people to do FPSs and RPGs, action titles and racing games, that just very hard to recruit for.
Codemasters’ latest game, DiRT Showdown, due out on May 25, will be released under the new publisher name of “Codemasters Racing”.
With this new focus on racing titles, CM has put their resources into its recently announced, “online racing hub called RaceNet.”
It’ll bring together a huge amount of information for players, giving them a one-stop hub for all things racing while offering Codies a new opportunity to engage with its fan base.
RaceNet is the new service from Codemasters that allows you to track your Codemasters Racing career through all RaceNet enabled titles.
By joining up you’ll be able to take part in community events, compare your stats with friends, check out your progress and be kept up to date with all the latest Codemasters Racing news.
CM plans to use this system for all of its future racing games, including the already announced F1 2012.
Features available May 1:
- RaceNet sign up and RaceNet account creation.
- Link RaceNet account to a PSN, Xbox Live or STEAM ID.
- Contribute and track progress towards community challenges.
- Gain access to RaceNet community through forums.
- Unique ‘Founder Status’ RaceNet Award and a RaceNet XP boost for anyone signing up during the demo.
- All Codemasters Racing games that are RaceNet enabled will be automatically connected in future.
Features from May 25:
- Weekly RaceNet Events for DiRT Showdown.
- Regular general community events.
- Add other RaceNet users as Friends and import your Friends from PSN / XBL / Steam
- Link your Facebook and Twitter accounts to your Race Profile
- View Driver Profile page and track your progress across all RaceNet enabled games in one place.
- View your Showdown career progress on RaceNet and compare and share your progress with others.
- Link your YouTube account to view uploaded YouTube movies from Showdown on Racenet.
[source: nowgamer][source: 360magazine][source: videogamer]
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9 Comments
If this means they will allow the community to have their own dedicated servers to host steampowered races and have the results stored at RaceNet I applaud the idea. However when nothing changes on their PC gaming side it doesn’t add anything at all.
Statistics are and were never the problem. The old fashioned way of hosting PC games is.
Bram you have said it …. spot on, no dedicated support for us PC Guys, then it means nothing, i dont plan on buying a CM game anytime soon, infact i have no esire to or follow their content anymore, they’ve lost a fan.
Ill buy it alright as the game it self is still very good for my F1 kicks. Just online is not my cup of tea but that is personal I think.
Any improvement from GFWL is an improvement indeed. Grid had a decent online system, but everything that followed was just horrible. I’m just glad they’re trying to turn it around and hopefully it will evolve into something really special. I think turning to Steam and this RaceNet system is definitely a step in the right direction.
GFWL is just fine, no issues there, is the ability of being able to have a ded server. U can use GFWL as ur sign in and just be able to browse racing servers. GFWL is not to blame here, unless you just have major network issues, or have no idea how it works. Steampowered? it already is, you can buy their games on steam and supports steam updates not just thru gfwl.
I would love for the GFWL profile to carry over Racenet since I play F1 and other series on Xbox also, but use the Racenet for online competition hell yeah! just like the Battlelog for BF3. but please just add ded servers, keep gfwl cuz i love those challenging achievements.
I have no stop buying codies games, they make them good, good games, except they flopped BIG time with the F1 series, especially the online part. Dirt series and other genred from Codies are not disappointing, they are actually really good so i dont see the rant against Codies here except their Brit base F1 team….and the sad part is that they are British….they should know more about F1
Id much rather that they just decided to release games in a better state, and if there are bugs, that they fix them. They use their one year development as a continuous excuse but if a one year dev time cannot produce a shippable game the only way to fix that is use longer dev cycles.
RaceNet sounds just like a copy of CODs and others systems, just another item copied to divert attention away from their obvious shortcomings as a dev of solid titles.
Overall, CM does come out with solid games and I own quite a few of them, but I’m hoping that this focus on racing games results in better AI efforts. I understand that not every game is going to have true to life sim handling because that kind of difficulty only applies to a certain crowd; of course they need to appeal to everyone to make money. However, there is no excuse for having problems like the “out of sight” bug, pit release bug, and table-generated faked times during a race. Maybe they can use the newly freed extra resources to build a new engine more suitable for F1 or other similar future projects.
Too bad all publishers can’t be more like CDProjekt (i.e. The Witcher series) and release free updates to address the major shortcomings of their games. That kind of dedication to perfection will gain them more fans in the end than anything else they try to do. For instance, I shouldn’t have to rely on modders to figure out why my puddles are disappearing in the game after an official patch. It just speaks to lack of testing and ultimately lack of pride in their offerings
mod-edit such comments are really not needed