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

Games
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It’s pretty cool that we’re less than two weeks away from the new Rally cars, and less than a month away from the Greece tracks being released. I didn’t expect the new stuff to be suddenly upon us right after the announcement.

Last night I started doing the New England rally in the campaign. It’s the last section of the Pro Championship. I’m doing really well, first place so far, and it’s a hell of a lot of fun in my Subaru Impreza. Unfortunately the overall championship results are not liable to change no matter what happens in New England. I’m well behind first place, and well ahead of 3rd place, so no matter the results, I will end this championship in 2nd place, and I will get promoted from Pro to… well, whatever follows Pro.

The 4WD Under 2000cc is such a fun category, I might actually stick with that category on the next tier above Pro. My other choice would be the NR4 category or whatever that’s called. I’ve got a subaru in that category too, but for some reason that Subaru isn’t nearly as fun to drive. The R5 category I chose the VW Polo that’s the cover car for this game. But you know, for being the cover car, it’s not as fun as the Ford Fiesta I drove in the first game in this category. Maybe I’ll stop leveling up the VW Polo and buy a Ford Fiesta.

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Btw, most of the DLC is on sale on Steam, with the exception of a couple of items.

I’m tempted to get the Ford Focus, it’s the only car I don’t have yet in the under 2000cc category.

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Update: So I got the Ford Focus during that last sale. I’ve been driving it in the Daily Challenges that require this class of car, and I’m really loving it so far. Just like the other 3 cars I bought in this category, it’s just powerful enough and maneuverable enough to be the best mix of the two.

Plus I love the engine growl of the Ford Focus. It’s got bite!

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Yeah, I love all four of the cars from the 2000cc class. Each is enjoyable to drive in part to how well they handle in-spite of how much power they can generate, yet extracting the maximum performance from them still requires some skill so there is still that element of satisfying progression as you get better. The 2007 Ford Focus is even pretty simple to make a bit more tail-happy if so desired, as simply adjusting the strength of the centre differential towards being looser (less strong) allows the rear end to step out more.

I have a soft spot for the Subaru Impreza though since it is probably the least fancied of the cars in the class.

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Yesterday when I was doing the Daily Challenges, I got the message that the two new cars for Season 3 are out. As predicted, Season 3+4 are only sold together, for $30! That’s pretty high. So yeah, I guess buying the DLC piecemeal is the way to go.

Reminder: The two new cars available are the Subaru Impreza 2001 and Ford Focus RS Rally 2001. I’m still currently leveling up the Subaru Impreza NR4 and the Ford Focus 2007, so I’ll wait on buying the new cars for now. Maybe they’ll be on sale by the time I get to them.

Greece gets here in 2 weeks. I don’t think I’ll be able to resist buying that one right away.

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I just logged in, and after taking an extra long time to connect to racenet, it said I had zero credits, and I got a message that my progress locally and my progress on the racenet servers didn’t agree, so my progress had been reset in the Championship.

So I’m not longer working my way through Elite Championship, all progress is gone? Hahahah. What? What is this bullshit?

I guess I’ll try to log in again tomorrow. If they don’t fix it, I guess I won’t be buying Greece on Tuesday after all.

Edit: Thread on Steam forums, apparently it’s happening to a lot of people today. No comments from Codemasters yet.

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Reason #4832 why always-online SP modes are bullshit.

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Should be fixed by now thankfully.

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So my progress was kind of reset to last week. Must have been a restore point they could go back to. I suddenly got last Tuesday’s daily rewards and the weekly reward like I did last Tuesday. I think everything I did since then is gone.

Well, it was a little worse than that. They did reset my entire Elite Championship. I had already done Australia and New Zealand, the two hardest ones in the set, and all of that progress was reset.

Still, I was back. So I got Greece last night, and just played the Daily Challenge this morning.

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Ah yes. It’s good to be back.

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Greece is sooooooo hard in the NR4 category. When the game reset my progress, I had been playing the career in that category with the Subaru. So when I was given a clean slate and reset progress on the Elite career championship, I figured I might as well try the other NR4 car, the Mitsubishi Evolution X.

In Greece, it is so freaking hard to get down that mountain. And you know, I just thought it was the new physics, with loose gravel in Greece being looser than the other locations, it’s not uncommon to just keep on sliding down the hill along with the loose gravel. But this morning the Daily challenge was to do that same run in a 4WD Under 2000cc category car, so I did it in a Skoda.

The Skoda does not have this problem at all! It’s super zippy around the corners, even downhill I have so much more control than the two NR4 cateogry cars. I think it’s because the NR4 cars are so much heavier. The loose gravel is a much bigger problem on downhill runs because of that I think.

But the AI doesn’t seem to have the same problem as me when riding the NR4 cars. On Elite difficulty, the AI can do those downhill runs so much faster than me. It does make me suspect that there’s a driving trick I’m missing or something.

My best runs in the NR4s on those downhill runs finally came when I started using the brake and the handbrake together. So head downhill full speed towards the hairpin and the approaching death, and then slam on the brake and the handbrake at the same time, give it a second going straight towards death, then turn the car toward the turn without letting go of the handbrake, but let go of the normal break and switch to acceleration instead. That seems to be the best I can do, and the closest thing to a “trick” that I learned.

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Yeah, the added weight that the NR4 cars carry compared to the R5 and 2000cc cars is certainly a factor when tackling downhill sections in locations like Greece. All that additional weight adds up when it comes to the car’s momentum heading into corner and the inertial forces you need to overcome. The F2 Kit Cars come with a similar kind of challenge, but of a different nature, with how much torque is going through the front two wheels getting into a situation where one has more grip than the other can lead to ‘torque steer’.

Additionally, 2kliksphilip finally got around to doing a DiRT Rally 2.0 video after his DiRT Rally video years ago. Contains the usual expected memes along with some actual sagely advice on consistency; the “madman” is still using keyboard to drive, haha.

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I couldn’t resist anymore, last night I succumbed and bought a SEAT Ibeza Kit car.

After doing yesterday’s daily challenge, and today’s daily challenge, I think Codemasters was right on with their suggestion of using this as a stepping stone after the H1 historical car. The Seat Ibiza is a really slow car, at least to start off with. Obviously there’s 4 or 5 upgrades I’ll be able to do to eventually, but how it starts off, it feels really slow and underpowered as a vehicle. More so than the R2 category car I have (Peugot).

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The biggest disappointment to me in this game so far has been the cover car: The VW Polo. It was a car that was added to the first DiRT Rally really late in its life, after I’d already played the game for over 400 hours, so I never really got to try it out. So when it was the cover car for DiRT Rally 2.0, I knew right away which R5 car I was going to get first.

And right away, it was disappointing. The Ford Fiesta R5 in the first game was amaaaazing. It was like cheating. It had brakes that can stop your car almost instantly, even downhill, it has fantastic acceleration, and otherworldly handling. The Polo is nothing like that. It’s got a lot of momentum, it takes time to slow it down, the acceleration is lacking and the handling is nowhere near as good. So I figure, well, it’s because I have to upgrade it 7 times first.

Well, I’ve got it upgraded to upgrade 6 now, and only one more to go, and it’s not much better.

Meanwhile, the game added a new mode called World Series:

http://blog.codemasters.com/dirt/09/dr2_esports_announce/

Each week you take part in qualifiers. They don’t allow any custom tuning, so these are the same cars everyone is driving with the same tuning, so I assume this is the fully upgraded version of each car. So anyway, I tried the Ford Fiesta 2.0 for the first time in this game while doing the World Series qualifier this week.

Holy shit you guys! It’s just as much of a cheating car as I remember it from the first game. It’s so quick to brake, so fast to accelerate, and the handling is like it predicts what you’re going to want to do and does it by itself before you tell it what to do.

Here I was thinking maybe the physics in DiRT Rally 2 being different is the reason the Polo sucks in comparison, but no, the car just sucks compared to the Fiesta R5.

Summary: Don’t get suckered in by its good looks and the fact that it’s the cover car for the game, the VW Polo sucks.

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I’m surprised there aren’t any city races like this, where you just go down random streets.

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All 5 of the Daily Challenges today (including the Daily AI Challenge) are just superb.

Have you ever wondered if there was a track in which Front Wheel Drive is superior to both 4WD and RWD? Today’s Kit Car challenge in Poland will show you one. Have you ever wondered what it would be like if you were trying to level another H3 car from scratch in Poland and Spain? It’s painful, but it’s still quite interesting. The Ford Cosworth doesn’t control anything like the Nissan Z that I leveled up in that category in the past. The Daily AI challenge had me on the hand brake constantly, swinging my NR4 Subaru around all those hairpins. God, I love an easy challenge like that (the times are very generous, I beat them by over 14 seconds).

And finally have you ever wondered if a Group B 4WD Delta S4 was powerful enough that it could even overpower the new wet mud conditions in Wales? (Spoiler answer: Yes! It’s so powerful, it can even overpower MUD!)

This is the best game of all time.

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I haven’t played in ages and would probably need to start the career mode over. Is that what you’d recommend, focus on career? At what point would I be able to try the challenges without sucking?

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Career mode will gradually get you to be better, yeah, but it will also get you money, which will get you a car in each category. Once you have a car in every category you can start doing all the daily/weekly/monthly challenges.

There is no downside to them. They’re good practice and good fun. Even if you mess up, you still get paid for finishing one. What does it matter whether you’ve come in 3000th in the world by really messing up? And if you’re competitive, maybe you’ll have the best run of your life and come in under 500. The reward for finishing it is not all that different either way. Instead of earning 20,000 credits in the first scenario, you could early 29,000 in the second scenario. A nice bonus, but nothing big in the grand scheme. The main thing the challenges give you is an excuse to try all the variety the game has to offer.

In the campaign, you’ll likely be sticking to the car categories that you’re good at. Nothing wrong with that. But the challenges will still let you play in the categories that you don’t normally play. And you might discover, eventually, that you’re pretty good at them after all.

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As for hiring/training your staff in career mode. I assume its best to first train up your two starting engineers before adding new ones?

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Yes, that’s what I do. First I actually leveled up my co-driver. Don’t discount his abilities. For example, if you run over a pedestrian, if you level up your co-driver, he can have you back in the center of the track with only a 4 second penalty. Similarly for changing a tire, he can cut it down to only a 30 second penalty for a tire change.

After the co-driver, I did the chief engineer, almost all the way up. Then the next engineer almost all the way, then hired another and took them almost all the way up, etc.

I think I have them all leveled now, but I have one slot still open. Once I win the Elite Champtionship (fingers crossed), I’ll be able to hire the last guy, and hopefully buy the remaining cars I don’t own yet (I think there’s still 5 or 6 cars I still down own in the game).

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Ok thought training core staff first would be best way, but wanted to be sure bout it.