That’s funny, I loved the snow and found driving on asphalt quite difficult after.
With all the other tracks, I got an intuitive understanding on when I could push it, and when I had to be careful and really listen for every turn from my co-driver. On Snow, I never got that intuitive sense honed in. For months I just did those tracks with absolutely no idea if I should be pushing it or being careful. In the end, I was just always mindlessly trying to follow the instructions I heard, and I finally realized I was never having any fun. Snow was just snow, and I had no idea if I was doing well or not except for when the checkpoints told me. In all the other tracks, I always had a gut feeling for how fast I should be, and if I wasn’t doing well, or if I was kicking ass. On Snow, I just never had any idea.
I succumbed. Looking forward to Tuesday.
It is. Though I was almost glad that I could barely see where I was going. Suspect I would have been scared as f*uck otherwise :-)
Sorry to beat a dead Lancia, but am I correct that there is no incentive to play with assists off, using manual transmission, in cockpit view, and so forth? It seems to me a staple of the Dirt games was adjusting the money or xp you earned by how you set the difficulty level. Am I misremembering? Because that seems completely missing in Dirt Rally 2.0. :(
-Tom
The fact that with higher end cars they aren’t nearly as helpful, so if you drive with them on in the lower tiers you never really learn how to drive properly and it bites you in the tail later?
You get to call yourself a man.
I think I’ll just crawl back to DIRT 3 and 4.
Now that Tom Chick has reminded me, I am curious why there is no added incentives for playing with assists off, using manual transmission, and being limited to the internal cameras views in My Team\Career. Both DiRT Rally and DiRT 4 incentivized up-ing the stakes, so I wonder why DiRT Rally 2.0 did away with it. I would have loved to have been able to enable Hardcore Damage and even be incentivized to do it.
On an entirely different note, me likey the Ford Escort RS Cosworth (Group A) in this game so far. The default gearing is so much better than that of the original DiRT Rally so far, so no need to go in and tinker with fiddly gear ratio magic. Out of the box every gear change keeps the car in it’s optimal power band, so this little Colin McRae driven beauty just powers along stages like a tearaway.
How do you activate this?
Btw, the game is indeed phenomenal. Feels much better on a game pad than the first game. Really nice sense of control even with all the assists off (except automatic transmission).
It’s an option that appears in the Freeplay modes when setting up a custom championship or playing through the Historic Rally or WRX championships. It isn’t available in the Career\My Team mode for some reason, unless it appears in the later career championship tiers, otherwise I would have it enabled there too.
I played the Greece tracks in career mode last night. All is right in the world.
My only complaint so far is that wherever you try to quit career mode, you get a message saying all unsaved progress will be lost. But it never tells you what progress it has saved, so you have no idea what you’re losing. So in the four Greece tracks, for instance, if I had done 3 of them, and quit before I did the fourth, would I have lost all progress? After I did all 4, it gave me the same message. Would I have lost all 4 tracks’ worth of progress? So just to be safe, I went into the next area (New England), and then quit there and got the same message. So hopefully I can continue from there.
Is historical mode you can stop between any stage. I ran one stage and then quit to menu and the game saved there, even though there wasn’t a repair checkpoint there.
Historical mode is in the second menu to the right, correct? I haven’t checked that out yet. Is it a separate career type track?
I ran a Spanish rally in career mode last night. The first stages were dry-wet-dry, so I made my two permitted tyre changes and then hit the last stage… it wasn’t raining, but apparently it had rained all night because the track was soaked and I was on dry tyres.
At one point I hit the brakes and my car was like “lolno” and I slewed off onto the grass and then ended up trapped on the wrong side of the barrier meant to stop me from falling down a massive hill. I’ve done enough of this sort of accidental short cutting in Wales in DR1 to know to just keep my foot in and hope the bit of grass you’ve found doesn’t get too thin.
link for when Discourse decides to crap the bed with streamable
Even watching that back I’m still chuckling at the point where I put the brakes on and the car goes “Haha! Good one!”
Tyre compounds haven’t been a thing to worry about in prior Dirts, so it was fun trying to skate through the last stage with the wrong boots on.
The good ol’ dry weather but wet road surface combination strikes again I see. The tyres took one look at the low coefficient of friction and noped the heck out of there, haha.
I played for over 90 minutes yesterday. I had started on Monday and Tuesday with stages in Spain and then New England. Yesterday I finished the four stages in New England, 4 Stages in Poland, 4 stages in New Zealand, 4 stages in Argentina, and 3 stages in Australia. I almost finished the last stage in Australia, but I busted my “tyres” half way through and limping along on grinding metal for half the race isn’t fun, so I quit for the night.
Overall I’m really impressed with these stages. Argentina is something new to the series entirely, I can’t really compare it to anything in DiRT 1 through 4 or DiRT Rally. Meanwhile, Australia is the best thing ever. It has the lump-in-your-throat-oh-shit speed of Finland, but the technical corners and dangers of Wales. Spain reminds me of Monte Carlo a bit with it’s tarmac sections. Of course, Spain also reminds me of Spain from DiRT 1. New Zealand kind of reminds me of Croatia in DiRT 2 a little bit, a little bit of Greece from DiRT Rally.
New Zealand is fascinating—tight, technical jungle sections where there’s almost zero room for error, and wide-open ‘flat left into right 6 long 250 past gate 400’ sections too. It takes some mental recalibration for me to go between the two.
Sooo, after winning the first career championship (H1), I moved up in difficulty to Clubhouse and in cars to H2, which are RWD.
I can’t place higher than 10, and that’s when I have a really good go. I need to figure out what the hell I’m doing wrong. The best I did was winning 5 stages in Spain, only to lose the 6th (wet pavement, which the AI times seem to ignore) by over 4 minutes and placing last…