Slightly Mad Studios' World of Speed MMO won't make you spend any real-world money

Upcoming racing-centric massively multiplayer online game World of Speed will be free; However, it won't feature the trappings typical to free-to-play games, Slightly Mad Studios creative director Andy Tudor told Edge.

The game, which was revealed just this year, will not use real-money payments for microtransactions on packs and other in-game items, said Tudor.

"It's not free-to-play, it's free," said Tudor. "It's very obvious when you start putting walls into your game that require people to pay money to get over. I don't know why games do it; we're certainly not going to do that, ever. It's also annoying when another player gets an advantage because they've put money into the game. We will never have a super-nitrous pack that will allow somebody to accelerate away from you. We expect you to get to the upper echelons of the game, with the best kit and best cars, and not have spent a single penny."

World of Speed will share an engine with the studio's partially crowdfunded Project Cars: the scalable Madness tech which powered Shift 2 Unleashed. The game will focus on team-based play with XP handed out for meeting certain objectives including successful drifts and first place in races. Additionally, players will take place in Territory Wars events to maintain ownership of certain tracks which, once owned, will feature the team's logo across the track.

The studio is set to launch a closed beta this spring, and the game is scheduled to be released in 2014.