GRID 2 will soon be receiving a Community Patch from Codemasters, this update will fix and add a variety of different things. Two of the biggest features of the upcoming patch is mod support on the PC and a new racing mode, namely Demo Derby.
The patch allow modification of the game's files and when modification is detected, the game will automatically create a separate save file for your "modded" progress, that way your vanilla save games will remain safe, as will your online progress. For reasons of fairness as well, RaceNet will be disabled for those running mods.
As Codemasters state "We understand that many mods are made with absolutely no intent of inconveniencing other players. These guys want to play the game in their own way, but as it stood the game would not save their progress if they were to modify a protected file."
It is important to note that this is the first time that modding will be supported in a GRID game and as such the developers are looking forward to players' feedback. There are no plans yet for Steam Workshop support. However the team is currently discussing this. Mod support will (obviously) be a PC-only feature and a quick start guide will be posted once the Community Patch is released.
This is not the only change in the Community Patch though, below you will find a full list of the confirmed patch changes/additions:
- Increased rewards in Custom Playlist
- New playlist called 'Hardcore'
- Level cap raised to 99
- Fastest lap times for online play
- Liveries that previously were single-player only, will now be available in multiplayer
- Maximum number of laps allowed in a race increased from 5 to 10
- Veto weighting has been changed to require 51% of the vote
- Player's online license plates will now display their country flags
- Rewards for racing clean has been increased
- Vote kicking added
- Level up graphic is now skippable
- Modding Support v1.0 (only on PC)
- Various bug fixes and background improvements
No concrete date has been set yet for the update and more improvements and additions are still in the work. Sometime next week though we should hear more from Codemasters about this update.
It is good to see Codemasters work on some of my complaints about GRID 2 in our review however, some changes do mystify me. For example they have added certain single-player only liveries to multiplayer, but yet they say nothing about doing the reverse as well. For example the vanilla liveries for the cars are currently only available on multiplayer but I would like to see them on single-player as well. The vote kick option is both good and bad, it opens the way to party-based trolling, in which if you have a big enough party playing online and some poor sob joins that game they can vote kick him if he is winning. Still, good to see Codemasters shift their focus from paid DLC to finally, free updates.
