DiRT Rally 2.0 - Ain't no ordinary Rally, it's evolved!

Why aren’t you playing from an external view then? Is there any incentive to use the cockpit view? Or are you just challenging yourself?

-Tom

Two part answer.

First, I do prefer first person views, not for being more challenging, but just being the perspective I’m used to. 3rd person perspective usually have me crashing into stuff more because I’m so used to turning when the camera gets close to the turn, not when the car gets close. So any 3rd person racing game is always really tough for me.

Secondly, I do have the option turned to lock the view to inside the car. This makes it convenient to just switch between the two inside-the-car views in the game, while I’m driving, and not have to go through the external views when I’m pressing the change camera buttons.

However, you’re right, I should turn that option off for this particular car, since the internal view sucks. I should find an external view that’s still first person, like a hood cam or something. I’m just lazy and didn’t want to turn it off just for this one car, and then turn it back on for other cars. It’s easier just to avoid this car and drive the others. On the other hand, I didn’t know you could adjust your seat height. So thank you to @Malkael for the heads up on that. I’ll go look up the key binding for that tonight.

And maybe I’ll stop being lazy and turn off the option to restrict camera views to inside the car and look for a more suitable first person camera outside the car.

“Where exactly is my car pointing” is a key question in rally games, and it’s easier to answer from the in-car view (or the hood camera external view, which is more or less the same thing).

At some point I need to go into the graphics options and dig around. Any time the game has huge crowds, my frame just goes to hell. Most of the time the game hovers around 45fps for me, and that plays great. But any time I get near huge crowds, as in lots of in-game fake people who stand around, the frame goes into the 20s, and it doesn’t just slow the frame rate, the whole game seems to slow down. I think my CPU is the bottleneck, not my graphics card, since my CPU is from 2009. I think there’s something about those fake people that’s really CPU-intensive.

I hope they have the option to have less people in the crowds. There’s only a few occasions in the game that have it. The Argentina track is the worst. So many goddamn people. Go home! And then there’s a few spots in New England and the other tracks that have people too.

Update:

@tomchick: I turned on External Cameras. The first person cameras outside the cars are quite thrilling, but they do feel less immersive, and as @Fishbreath said, it’s a little tougher to know exactly where I am with my wheels as compared to when I’m inside the car. Plus the hood cam is centered right in the middle of the car, so even though it’s a left hand drive car, as god intended, the camera’s not on the left side, which will take some getting used to.

@Malkael, I went into controller mapping and found Seat Adjustment UP and assigned it to the only button not taken on the controller. (Left on the d-pad). I thought about looking up Seat Adjustment Down, but then thought, nah, I’ll never need that.

I was able to raise the seat in the Skoda so that it felt very nice!

Then I raised the seat in the Golf GTI, and it became way too high! I was mostly looking through a low ceiling now, most of my view blocked by the ceiling of the car! Oh no! I paused the game, went into options and found the keyboard bindings:

Seat Adjustment Up is Numpad 5
Seat Adjustment Down is Numpad 2

Just FYI, in case one of you ever needs to do it, pretty easy to remember.

Also, I looked in the Graphics options, and there’s a setting for crowds. Hallelujah! I turned it down from ultra to None. Now there are no crowds. The game runs smooth like butter now in comparison. I’m sometimes getting in the 70s fps on Argentina now instead of 20s! Every other setting is still on Ultra.

Yeah, when it comes to optimising performance turning Crowds down to Low was one of the first things I did. Still get a decent framerate whilst still having the visual spectacle of roadside spectators out on stage. Ground Cover can be another good one to adjust down since it lowers the amount of grass and other trackside flora that can absolutely litter some stages on High or Ultra, makes those sneakily hidden rocks a little easier to spot occasionally too.

Also, good to hear that the seat adjustment controls managed to make things better for you. Makes some of the cars in the game a lot better to drive from the internal cockpit camera.

Yesterday morning I did the three daily challenges. So yesterday afternoon when I had the chance to play, I did two of the weekly challenges, and last night I briefly started the Weekly AI challenge.

I’m starting to wonder on the H1 FWD category if there’s a much better car than the Lancia Fulvia. Even on the runs where I made almost no mistakes and had no accidents or resets, I’d be about 30 seconds behind the leader on the short courses, and 60 seconds behind on the long courses. Which just really confounds me. Where are they getting 30 whole seconds of improvements from? That’s a massive amount of time in a 4.5 minute race.

I wish you could see the top of the leaderboard. Instead when I select “Go to Top” on the leaderboard, it takes me to like position 2000, and refuses to go any higher. So i can’t even see what the top leaderboard people use for their cars. I wish I could see what they drove, and a replay of how they did it. The game is seriously lacking in social features like that. Project Gotham Racing 2 did that in 2003, for god’s sake. You could check out the leaderboard and watch anyone’s race.

One of the weekly challenges was a Group A race. For that I bought a Lancia Delta Integrale. Just like in the first DiRT Rally, I’m constantly amazed at how much momentum this car has, and how it always feels underpowered. Arrrrgh, just go, you’re pointing in the right direction, just put power to the wheels so you can can stop sliding to the left.

Now that I’ve made my choice, I’ll try to stick with it until it’s fully upgraded, obviously. Then I’ll try the 1995 Subaru next in that category. From DiRT Rally, I remember that car being kind of funky to drive too. Heavier than the Integrale, but better somehow.

Monte Carlo has arrived, and for anyone who didn’t pick up the Deluxe Edition but wants some “new” locations the pricing for individual locations seems pretty fair at the moment. Well worth the price of admission I would say, this is more than just a mere visual upgrade of the original DiRT Rally’s Monte Carlo. Tackle the snow, slush and ice at speed at your peril, even on the Winter tire choice, because they really nailed the trouble the real life WRC drivers have with grip levels in Monte Carlo when facing those conditions.


@Rock8man, there are some crazy fast drivers out there in the community that even I have trouble getting within 15 seconds of. That said, certain locations (e.g. Argentina) definitely favour the Mini Cooper over the Lancia Fulvia. Also, since the community events use your Career\My Team cars it really pays to upgrade the engine performance and such. The performance difference between a car with an unupgraded engine package and a fully upgraded engine package is kind of nutty.

The Lancia Delta Integrale (Group A), whilst often the fastest car in the class performance wise, is one of the toughest for handling for most people. If I remember correctly, based on the stock setup, it has a tendency and preference to understeer through corners. So you need to accommodate for that in your driving style or make some setup changes to lessen the understeer, such as shifting the brake bias back to induce car rotation\oversteer.

I should clarify that the reason I was comparing the Lancia Fulvia and not the other cars I own is because the Fulvia is the only car that’s fully upgraded that I can still actively drive in the Daily/Weekly/Monthly challenges. All the other cars (other than the Alpine, which is busy in a championship, and the Porsche, which I don’t know how to drive) are still on their way to being upgraded. So the Fulvia is really the only car in which I can compare my time to other people’s so far.

Edit: I was just about to log in for my daily challenge, but there’s a 7.9 GB update to the game? Wow. That must be Monte Carlo. Damn. I wonder how it’s going to be presented in the game. I know I can’t play the D+ challenges in the game, those are reserved only for Season owners. I wonder if I’ll be able to play the Monte Carlos tracks even without owning the seasons. Maybe they’ll integrate them into the Career/Championships?

Really enjoying this at the moment and improving steadily. However I won’t declare this one beaten until I have managed to run over the guy at the end!

I somehow managed to go past him yesterday. And the stage wouldn’t end! I was sitting there going “why is this taking so long?” Then I realized maybe the guy really wants me to pull up to the proper spot, so I put it in reverse and backed up to him, and sure enough, the stage ended then.

Here’s a nice feature, anyone can play with the DLC content (both cars and stages) in the mulitplayer lobbies so long as the host owns it. Hopefully that extends to Clubs when they return for DiRT Rally 2.0, that way League participation won’t be heavily effected by needing to own the DLCs (unless hosting) either.


Ice patches, the bane of my all-wheel drive existence in Monte Carlo. Even with the Winter tires bolted on to the car those things mess with you in all sorts of ways. Whether it be by screwing with your breaking, causing you to lose traction to a powered wheel for a moment, making you slide wide, or other such shenanigans.


Only gets worse with the soft tires bolted on, what little grip there is through the snowy slush and ice just disappears. However, it does make for some amazing drift exhibitions just slaloming your way through the corners, haha.

Yeah, I really love the way your car reacts on the ice patches. It definitely reminds me of driving over ice patches in real life.

I really wish that the loading screen had some kind of button press required when it gets done loading.

Twice yesterday I had to give up on Weekly/Daily challenges because I was called away to help with a diaper change during a loading screen. During the loading screen, there’s no way to pause the game, and when it’s done loading, it puts you in your car, with the countdown. And then a few seconds later, it disqualifies you from the race and you’re forced to retire from the challenge. So I couldn’t finish the Monte Carlo weekly challenge. :(

I was standing in the next room, preventing my son from making a move toward his poop-filled diapers. And I could hear the countdown in the other room. Noooo. Stupid game, just put a button prompt in there after the loading screen.

The first DiRT Rally also had the launch thing, where you had to press Handbrake to do the launch, and the countdown wouldn’t start until you pressed the handbrake button. That launch is still an option under options, but I’ve had it on and it hasn’t let me do a launch even once yet. Hopefully that’s coming in a future patch too.

Huh, well that is curious. The launch control feature, when enabled in the game settings, typically works for me without issue. Wonder if that is an undiscovered issue specific to the online challenges because I haven’t encountered any issues with it in the career, custom Freeplay events (both offline and online), or time trial so far.



Have to love some of the attention to detail that goes into the graphical effects for the game. When going over the snow slush the car’s wheels will often kick up a bit of a slush storm behind you. Also, Monte Carlo has some really nice locations and camera angles in replay mode for taking beautiful screenshots on Ultra graphics.

Woah, no way! It’s never worked for me in any mode. I’ve had it on from the beginning, and it’s never worked in career, challenges, custom mode or time trial.

Had a look at my game preferences to remember which way Launch Control has to set to enable the manual starts. You will want to set Launch Control to Off, similar to DiRT Rally where it was called Automatic Launch Control.

That should solve the issue for you hopefully. The sometimes lacking tooltip information in the UI hurts this game at times, especially after how well many of the different settings were explained in the original DiRT Rally.

I have to turn Launch Control to off in order to turn on Launch control. Got it. :) Honestly that never would have occurred to me.

The Daily challenge in Monte Carlo in a Lancia Integrale is a lot of fun today. I recommend it.

And I get it now: Launch control is in the “Assists” portion of the options menu, therefore by saying “off”, I’m turning off the launch control assist, not turning off launch control.

Back to Australia and the R5s today for some Time Trials in the Citroen C3. Feels good to actually have some grip after spending a while in Monte Carlo with the snow and ice. Though the HDR contrast can be a little excessive at times, it might be bright in Australia but sometimes the glare can be over the top.