Codemasters’ First Quest-native Racing Sim to Release on Quest 2 Next Week

By
Scott Hayden
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56

EA’s Codemasters is getting ready to launch its first Quest-native title next week, a VR version of popular arcade racing sim GRID Legends.

GRID Legends for Quest is set to launch on January 12th, which is quite the surprise since we haven’t heard anything of it before finding the listing on the Quest Store. The game is currently available for pre-order, priced regularly at $30, but on pre-order sale for $27.

The game is said to include the full single-player story mode, race creator to design races, and online multiplayer, which unfortunately doesn’t include cross-play with flatscreen versions of the game.

The only info available for now comes from the store listing, which includes a trailer and a few images showing off some gameplay stills and the garage.

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Image courtesy EA Games
Image courtesy EA Games
Image courtesy EA Games
Image courtesy EA Games

From the listing, it’s clear GRID Legends is going to be a hefty download at an expected 31.1GB, so make sure to have plenty of storage room available.

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New Valve VR Game Reportedly in Development Alongside Long-rumored Standalone Headset

This isn’t EA’s or Codemasters’ first VR title, although it is their first Quest-native game, collectively speaking. The studios launched PC VR support for F1 2022, bringing the beloved racing sim franchise to VR for the first time. EA’s Motive Studios also launched the well-received Star Wars: Squadrons arcade dogfighter to SteamVR and PSVR in October 2020.

EA’s Respawn Entertainment holds the honor of the parent company’s first Quest-native title with Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond, which launched on Quest 2 and SteamVR headsets in December 2020.

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Scott Hayden
Well before the first modern XR products hit the market, Scott recognized the potential of the technology and set out to understand and document its growth. He has been professionally reporting on the space for nearly a decade as Editor at Road to VR, authoring more than 4,000 articles on the topic. Scott brings that seasoned insight to his reporting from major industry events across the globe.
  • Wes Osborne

    how they do steering will make or break this game, hopefully its good.

    • XRC

      Can you connect a gamepad to quest?

      Something like Xbox controller works well enough for racing and space applications, if you don’t have space or money for wheel/pedals or yoke

      • Wes Osborne

        Actually yes I think you can connect Xbox controller to quest 2. Problem solved thanks xrc

      • namekuseijin

        dude, you realize Quest controllers are as much a gamepad as Nintendo joy cons?

  • namekuseijin

    total lack of hype prior to release and a crappy incredibly low resolution trailer suggests total lack of confidence in the product. I think it’s going to be a trainwreck. I’m now trying to decide over just cancelling the pre-order or going on good faith and eventually refunding…

    • Tommy

      There’s a trailer on YouTube. It’s PS2 graphics minus the shadows. Somewhere between GT2 and GT3. I’m not impressed but many will be happy that Quest has a racing sim, at all. Talk about lowering the bar…
      The good news here is seeing a major developer supporting VR still.

      • Runesr2

        Exactly, but the young Quest kids and teenagers have no clue what you mean by “GT2” and “GT3”. Maybe they need some help – GT stand for Gran Turismo. GT3 arrived in 2001 – 21 years ago. Today such quality is close to trash – but seems many love to buy trash these days.
        Instead we could have gotten a great PCVR version, but no, Grid devs wanted to make more Quest trash.

        • ViRGiN

          PCVR users will wait 4 years to buy it $5 cheaper on steam dumpster sales.

        • namekuseijin

          Tbh, probably Meta funded this long ago but didn’t come in time as they couldn’t get it to run great at all, so it’s late, Quest audiences have moved on, so needs no hype…

          expecting total disaster Thursday, perhaps still a bit good…

      • namekuseijin

        You’re right, looking very much like GT3 VR with cockpit view, even resolution looks 480p Lol… but given a better part of the Quest deal is indeed classic games like the many Dr Beef mods, GT3 in good enough to me.

        EA has actually great support for VR so far: SW Squadrons, Dirt Rally, F1 2022…

  • Arek A

    Why!!!!? Are we having mobile games instead of PCVR?

  • Kenny Thompson

    Antialiasing is turned off is the screenshots? Hummmm….

    • Runesr2

      Nope (well yes) – the Quest 2 phone gpu (Adreno 650) can’t do antialiasing when having to render everything else – unless you want to cut fps in half, lol.
      What you see is what you get.

      • ViRGiN

        PCVR is too weak to handle Resident Evil 4 in native VR.

        Also no amount of PCVR money is capable of bringing hand tracking through built in cameras of the headset. Hmm I wonder why.

      • namekuseijin

        lack of AA is shockingly noticeable in the pictures here immediately exactly because few Quest games last AA…

        perhaps it uses temporal AA and so stills can’t tell the whole picture. Or perhaps they have video options to turn it off: you decide whether jaggie or blurry…

        • Marc-André Désilets

          Even TAA has a performance cost, they are still optimizing the game so there’s a chance they can add AA to the final release. That beign said, looking at a static screen and the real vr scene in stereo rendering isn’t the same thing at all. I think it’ll probably look way better in the headset.

          Same thing was happening with the 3ds, when turning the 3d mode on, “hard” pixels were almost disappearing with stereo rendering.

      • Marc-André Désilets

        Actually it’s a Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2, it’s not a powerhouse but it’s still ~twice the power of a nintendo switch.

        • Eh-jhey

          The thing to keep in mind there is that a switch is only rendering a game one time. VR has to do it twice

          • Marc-André Désilets

            Stereo rendering is not exactly like rendering twice. There’s stereo batching that calculate all objects in the same drawcall to reduce cpu calls. Since all the asset are already loaded the memory cost is the same for rendering 1 eye ou 2 eyes. There’s also fixed FOV rendering that allows to reduce resolution based on the focal point, it’s not like rendering 50% of a frame but it still saves significant amount of gpu performance…

  • gothicvillas

    I have a feeling this will eventually end up in psvr2 but trailer was shockingly bad sorry

    • ApocalypseShadow

      Me too. I got that feeling. And it will look a bucket load better. Just like GT 7.

      But at least Quest 2 gets some racing finally. It needs it.

    • Sven Viking

      Quest can come close to matching PC graphics with either a highly stylised game that hides the lack of dynamic lighting, high poly counts etc., or a game brilliantly designed with a bunch of tricks and choices to get the maximum effect out of the hardware’s strengths while avoiding its weaknesses.

      Not saying Codemasters has necessarily put in the same level of optimisation work here as the Red Matter 2 devs, but mostly this is just the reality of trying to put a VR game like this with a bunch of realistic vehicles on-screen simultaneously in a realistically-styled environment with dynamic lighting effects on a mobile chip. It looks fairly impressive if you have realistic expectations.

      Quest 3 will probably allow for pretty significant improvements. One advantage mobile VR does have is that it’s still a long way from the point of diminishing returns where it can be difficult to tell a next-gen game from the previous gen if you don’t look closely.

    • Arno van Wingerde

      I suspect the required speed – racing, remember? – with the limited hardware of the Quest2 is what might cause the low-res. But by all means: let’s wait till the game is out and the actual reviews come in!

      • ViRGiN

        nah, let’s just shit on quest like you always do. it’s quest, not rtx4090 huh? quest will never reach the graphics level of the most popular pcvr games, like rec room, beat saber or gorilla tag.

  • Ballsy VR

    Wait wait wait – 31.1GB? You need double whatever the game size is to install it on Quest 2, so you’ll need 62.2GB to install this game, which means owners of 64GB systems will not be able to play it, since the System files take up more than 4GB.

    • Anonymous_Dude

      You’ll only need 31.1 gigs to download, then it will take 29 gigs of storage.

      • Ballsy VR

        The final amount of storage used will be around 30gb, but every time you initially download a game the Quest demands you have double the space first, so it’ll need 60gb, I don’t know why but it’s true. Try filling your storage and then download something that should fit, you’ll see what it does.

        • Ballsy VR

          Aha, I found an explanation from a helpful Reddit guy:

          “To download and install needs almost double the game size as it needs to download and then unpack / install the game”

          So yeah, you’ll need around 60gb free to download and install GRID Legends.

          • Sven Viking

            Medal of Honor for Quest is listed as requiring 44GB, significantly more than GRID, and it (barely) fits on a 64GB Quest, so either the requirements listed on the store already take installation into account, or the download is split into a smaller APK that does need to be extracted (requiring double the space) and a huge OBB file that doesn’t need to be extracted.

          • Take the L on this one, man.
            You’re wrong.

          • Ballsy VR

            I’m 100% correct, try it on your own headset, this isn’t opinion, it’s fact. Fill up your storage until you have just enough to install a game of your choosing, then try to download and install it, it’ll say there isn’t enough storage space until you clear double what it needs.

          • ViRGiN

            he is kinda right.

          • “Kinda right” isn’t right, it’s wrong.

          • ViRGiN

            nah, he is fully right.
            you can’t install a 999mb game while having 1gb free.

          • Sven

            He is kinda right, but he’s specifically saying you need double the space listed in the store requirements to install, which is provably false with games like the >40 gigabyte Medal of Honor not requiring 80+ GB of free space to install on a 64GB Quest.

            Most likely this is due some applications being separated into APK files, which need to be extracted locally, and OBB files, which don’t. The extra space requirements for installation are probably why Google Play has a maximum APK download size limit of iirc 150MB. Any size limit Meta might have is definitely way higher than that, but it’s still unlikely a >31GB game will try to fit everything into the APK and make itself likely unusable on 64GB headsets.

    • namekuseijin

      MoH took 41GB and still installs to Q2 64GB model… though of course you’ll need to uninstall most things…

  • Jonathan Winters III

    I’d say roadtovr are doing a big disservice to the devs by ripping this lowres vid from Meta’s product page, then reposting it on Youtube. It was never meant to be viewed fullscreen, but rather in the small area at the top of Meta’s product page.

    • It isn’t “lo-rez”.
      Stop comparing Quest 2 to a 4090.

      • Runesr2

        It’s totally low-res trash. Can’t get much worse – but it’s using a bottom-end phone gpu with 1% of the power of the RTX 4090, lol. Remember Quest uses Adreno 650 gpu, part of the XR2 soc. Adreno 650 has 1.2 tflops on a good day. RTX 4090 has 83 tflops – so Adreno 650 has 1.4% of the performance of a RTX 4090.
        Then again, RTX 4090 also uses 100 times more power than the Quest 2 phone gpu, lol.

        • ViRGiN

          RTX4090 users on PCVR uses less than 1% of the power lol

        • PointR

          Even though the Adreno 650 is significantly weaker than the RTX 4090, your comparison isn’t apples to apples and measuring a GPU’s processing power by teraflops only is extremely dated and flawed.

          The Adreno 650 is ARM based, meaning it’s already opperating on a reduced instructions set. You cannot compare this to a desktop GPU. This is the same deal with Apple M chips. The best you can do is compare both hardware’s capabilities at doing the same tasks, not read their specs sheets and tell which one’s better. This even is something you cannot do with desktop hardware accross manufacturers and generations as architectures differ a lot from each other.

          • Arno van Wingerde

            I think there is something else too: slugging around more pixels takes more GPU power, but 4 times the pixels looks only 2x as sharp… Above a certain threshold, you hardly see any improvement at all. Nvidia is pushing raytracing, not because you cannot get good effects with rasterisation albeit with more effort on the software side, but because there simply isn’t anything else you could use that graphics power for. So: yes you get significantly better graphics on a 4090 or even PS5, just not as much better as you would expect from TFLOPs.

        • namekuseijin

          Too bad rtx 4090 is not getting VR games…

          • ViRGiN

            Don’t worry, RTX 5090 might out come this year and it will revolutionize the market, making high-end GPUs accessible to normal citizens. That’s when all these developers who were working hard behind the scenes will release uncompromised set of games.

  • Till Eulenspiegel

    Tame your enthusiasm, it’s going to end in disappointment.

    • Why do you say that …??

    • Runesr2

      Exactly – looks like a 20 years old PC game, lol – or something dumped on a Playstation 2. See those jaggies – no antialiasing, no dynamic shadows, low-poly cars.
      Looks extremely bad. And $30?! I would not even pay $5.

  • Wes Osborne

    It’s quest native I don’t know how you would connect a decent wheel and pedals to that platform but if you know please share

    • Dave

      My mistake, I had assumed this would have been supported at least wirelessly or through the USB port. Hopefully if more games like GRID Legends turn up this will change as I’m sure this is just a software issue.

  • Mike EY

    You need simulation of real vehicle weight, friction, downforce in modern racing games. It’s the difference between “darty and panicky” play once, and playable, immersed & hooked.

  • FrankB

    Crossbuy Pc version would be a nice to have.

  • PointR

    Mate after reading your own comments you really shouldn’t even dare saying that.

  • namekuseijin

    if you’re watching on a phone screen, please get a grip and watch it on an actual big screen. The video quality is incredibly low resolution and blurry. I hope the game is not that low resolution, there’s a chance this is a clipped footage zoomed up bigger, but why would they want to give that awful impression to their marketing material is beyond me…

    Anyway, counting the days for extreme exhilaration or disappointment…

  • Gabriel Cash

    I really hope this is a good game. Quest 2 badly needs a proper racing title. Maybe San Andreas will finally get a release date soon?

  • ViRGiN

    Saw a few videos, nobody mentioned hand steering so I’ll pass. Everything else seemed acceptable given it’s on standalone.
    But I ain’t gonna race with a thumbstick.

  • namekuseijin

    update here: driving, physics and content were already top-notch since the release, but a month or so ago they updated the game with resolution options AND tilt controls. It looks and plays much better. if you don’t have a wheel, do like me and use a regular fan (off of course) and rest both hands with controllers at the opposing blades – incredibly cheap and immersive way to play this.

    by far my favorite game ever on the Quest. haters and shills can go cry in the bathroom