Dirt 4 - More dirty cars and challenges

  • June 6th, 2017
  • Launches with at least 50 cars
  • Five rally locations in Australia, Spain, Michigan, Sweden and Wales

[quote]
"Dirt 4 sports an all-new system called Your Stage; an innovative rally route creation tool that allows you to produce a near infinite number of unique stages at the touch of a button. Choosing your location and setting the route parameters , Your Stage does the hard work to create a unique rally stage that you can race, share with your friends and then challenge them to beat your time.

“Your Stage allows experienced rally players to create longer, more technical routes, whilst newcomers can create simpler shorter routes as they hone their skills.”[/quote]

Dirt Rally is easily my favorite racing game ever. I was hoping more for Dirt Rally 2 but will see where they take this before I start jumping up and down and yelling.

http://imgur.com/Phu8eXt.gifv

Same here! Internet High Five!

On the positive side, Telefrog’s post mentions only where the rally stages will be. And the quote in his post also specifies a feature from Rally. So this is already sounding like DiRT Rally 2 to me.

EDIT: Gosh, I’m so excited so early in the morning already. I need to calm down. This isn’t like DiRT Rally where they announced and then released it the next day. This won’t be out until June.

Ohhhh, this already sounds orders of magnitude better than Dirt 3.

I don’t think Codemasters necessarily set out to make Dirt Rally into what it ultimately became, but the way they responded to early feedback on issues like wheel support and force feedback meant they semi-accidentally ended up making an amazing game.

Then F1 2016 came out and may have been the best F1 game they’ve done for a long time too.

Fingers cross for this one. If it doesn’t include the word “Gymkhana” anywhere that would be ok.

Oh yes, oh god yes.

Cautiously optimistic…

I’m optimistic, but that launch trailer is terrible.

It basically shows a real guy get into a real car, interspersed with short sections of a poor clip from DiRT Rally. As far as I could tell.

Ars Technica has a preview.

  • The handling model is pure DiRT Rally with improvements.
  • They have a bunch of assist modes on top of that.
  • I’m super-excited for procedural stage generation.

As someone that misses the longer tracks from games like Mobil 1 RC and RBR, the ability to make your own tracks sounds really cool. Then again, I haven’t played a racing game in a long time. I have a G25 sitting in a box downstairs that I’ve never used (my son has, though, at least) that I bought after the cat chewed through the cable on my logi momo.

That all sounds fantastic.

I’m a bit leery of the procedural stage generation though. That other crappy Rally game has really long but soulless tracks. Of course it doesn’t help that their physics kind of suck. But even if they had better physics, every track in DiRT Rally in Wales, Monte Carlo, Greece and Germany felt so unique and interesting in comparison to the tracks in that other game. The only places that felt visually uninteresting were Finland and Sweden in DiRT Rally. And procedurally generated tracks will probably have to look something along those lines.

Still, it sounds like a good bonus to extend gameplay beyond the given tracks, as long as the hand-crafted tracks are as good as the ones mentioned above.

Count me in too. I think Codies finally “get it”

First you give me a high-5 and we’re friends, but now you say bad things about Finland, Finland is awesome !! if you take that back I will still be your friend.

I’ve been following the rumor thread at Codemasters and am feeling a little better about things. If things like Landrush and buggies bring them more people and they don’t cut back on Rally I am ok with that.

No offense intended toward Finland’s tracks! Finland is indeed awesome. On the difficulty curve, it is the pinnacle. It’s what you strive to get good at after you’ve mastered all the other areas in the game. It’s tough as nails and it’s really satisfying if you can get it right. It’s also scary as hell, and most of the time I rode through Finland while whimpering like a baby.

I was just talking about the look and feel of a track. There are distinctive areas in the Finland tracks like when there’s a red barn and several houses, etc, but for most of the track the scenery that goes by feels like procedurally generated trees. That’s the only narrow thing I was talking about earlier.

The customizable game difficulty is promising, usually I want something more trending to realistic but I don’t have interest on playing the same track 6 times in a row until I’m able to do a good time against the AI to be able to progress.

Now Top Gear has a preview, and they say it’s hard to tell the difference between the handcrafted stages in Dirt Rally and the generated stages in Dirt 4.

I have an idea in mind for the Qt3 hardcore league already: one restart per stage, with the intention being that you drive it once slowly as though your codriver is taking/reviewing his pace notes, and onces at full speed.

And the Qt3 Casual league can actually be casual this time! In that it can have casual handling, which will have its own leaderboards.

The Eurogamer preview was very encouraging about all aspects of the game. But here’s the bit about the casual handling:

[quote]Thankfully the handling that marked Dirt Rally out as something special is intact, and Codemasters can’t be accused of dumbing down. It has moved towards something more accessible, though, with players able to opt out of the simulation handling for a more forgiving ride. From a brief hands-on with the new (and optional) handling mode it certainly works, even if it feels a little muted coming straight from the full-blooded sim. Still, the option to be able to enjoy Dirt while sitting back on the sofa is a welcome one, and Codemasters has put some thought into how best to smooth off its simulation for some players.

“We tried putting real world assists in, putting loads of traction control - but people hated them,” Coleman explains. “They were feeling like they couldn’t drive fast, they couldn’t enjoy it, so we looked at how we did things with Dirt 2 and Dirt 3, and a lot of the stuff comes from the way the controller interacts with the game, and how we manage the weight shift. One of the solutions we came up with is removing that need to understand that you have to have the car’s weight over the front wheels to have the grip there. Removing that from the equation, the player was able to make much later decisions about the direction they wanted to go in, and get away with making as a driver I’d term a mistake. They get much more enjoyment out of throwing the car around and staying on the track a lot more.”[/quote]

Removing the need to understand weight shifting pretty much means that your tires will always have more traction, right? It’s an interesting sounding way to do casual handling.

It’s the single most important thing to understand (pretty sure I first truly learned this from NFS:Porsche Unleashed). If players don’t learn that, I wonder how they will ever improve?