Confirmed: Codemasters' and the Biggest Racing Game Ever

Codemasters has lifted the veil on its upcoming open-world racer, Fuel, the game news that Mark SPOnG first broke on July 31st following a chat with Chris Deering, who sits on Codies' board.

Think Burnout Paradise meets MotorStorm meets Mad Max. Interested? We thought so.

The game, in a nutshell, is a vast, multi-vehicle, multi-terrain racer set in a ravaged alternate present. It's apparently been in development for four years over at Asobo Studios in France. It's planned for the PS3, Xbox 360 and PC.

How vast is it? 5,000 square miles (14,000+ km²). That's the same size as the Wilkins ice sheet, the largest on the Antarctic Peninsula. That's the same size as the algae bloom that threatened to ruin Olympic (Zzzzz) sailing. According to Asobo, it's also the biggest world offered in a racing game ever. Bigger than the area covered by Paradise City in the latest Burnout game, then. That's also roughly the same size as Shawnee County in Kansas, so SPOnG's included a satellite image of the place to give you a sense of how much terrain we're looking at.

The title is set in a world where climate change has ravaged the world, creating huge great wastelands. Said climate change has also driven the cost of oil sky high, making it a precious commodity to be won by racing junkies in their DIY vehicles.

The terrain will include a Pacific coastline ravaged by tsunami and what Codies describes as “Nevada wastelands” complete with the Grand Canyon, snow-capped mountains, thick forest, deserts and abandoned lakeside resorts.

Both four and two-wheeled vehicles are promised, as are crazy-ass stunts. Given that climate change has knackered the world a fair bit, daft weather ranging from lovely sunshine to tornadoes, sandstorms, thunderstorms, blizzards and lightening strikes will make the going a bit tricky. Asobo has also built in day and night cycles to keep things... well, disorienting, from the sound of things.

As you'd expect from any racing game in this bright new generation of gaming, Fuel will feature online multiplayer.

Sebastian Wloch, CEO of Asobo, cockily proclaims, “Fuel raises the bar in terms of scale and exhilaration for racing games. We begin with the largest racing environment to appear in gaming – ever. With our accelerated effects of climate change and dynamic weather system we add an extra dimension that change races on-the-fly and constantly presents new challenges to players.

“Player choice lies at the heart of Fuel’s action-packed races and with a huge range of vehicles, packs of up to 16 vehicles speeding across diverse terrain and a no-boundaries, no-limits approach to racing, means players have never had so much freedom to conquer the wilderness and take the chequered flag.”