News Grid 2’s single player World Series of Racing outlined

As promised, following last week's gameplay teaser trailer comes the latest Grid 2 gameplay video in full, which showcases a handful of previously unseen tracks. A slew of supercars can be seen bombing around several real-world circuits, including Paris, Barcelona, Chicago, California and the Red Bull Ring.

Details regarding the single player portion of Grid 2 are also starting to slowly trickle through. Codemasters has revealed that the career campaign will be centered on the World Series of Racing, a grandiose, globe-trotting tournament that combines a variety of racing disciplines staged by head honcho Patrick Callahan, a self-made millionaire petrolhead on a quest to find the world's greatest driver.

Essentially this means you'll be working from the ground-up, starting in a backstreet garage with a handful of tier 1 cars. The first season takes place in the US as both you and Callahan attempt to recruit car clubs and attract sponsors. Before long, the ESPN starts to take notice and provides media coverage of the WSR, presented in live action cut scenes featuring Sportscenter's Kevin Connors and motorsports analyst Toby Moody, as it gains international recognition, which leads to you taking on the top drivers as you rank up in races that encompass a wide breadth of racing disciplines and real world locations across the USA, Europe and Asia. It all sounds like a pretty standard career structure, then, but there's an added focus on a narrative reminiscent of the original Race Driver series – an element that was noticeably absent in the original GRiD. 

As the WSR progresses, so does the flamboyancy of the tracks. Stages in the early seasons of the WSR will be sparsely populated with spectators as you compete against local car clubs, for example, whereas later seasons will reflect the rise of the WSR, taking place in tracks brimming with cheering crowds, advertising billboards and fireworks. It probably won't be a particularly unfamiliar sight for those who are used to swallowing the spectacle in DiRT, but it does at least highlight your sense of progression and rise to fame.

The narrative clearly serves as a way for Codemasters to justify the WSR's variety of disciplines that would normally never compete in the same championship, from US muscle cars to hot hatches and single seaters. We just hope the story will be engaging and encapsulate the character of motorsport that Codemasters love to keep reiterating, rather than a series of inconsequential cut scenes that will have you hammering the skip button. After all, there's often just as much drama off the track as there is on the track as driver's personalities clash and tempers flare, so there's definitely some scope for Codemasters to work with.    

And that's it as far as new details are concerned – not quite the big reveal we were initially inclined to believe, then. Indeed, Codemasters still seem to be keeping things closely under wraps for now, so stay tuned for more information in the run-up to Grid 2's final release on May 28th 2013.

In the meantime, Alan headed over to Codemasters HQ to provide some hands-on video coverage of the event where you can see all the new aforementioned tracks in action along with an interview with Associate Producer Toby Evan-Jones and our impressions of the current build. 

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