FINALLY! They announced it. Oh my god, it feels like the longest wait.
Yes, the stupid sounding “Like Racing But Rally” is their byline, not mine.
Oh man, I want it. Stupid slogan and all. I even want the 3 days of early access.
Here’s the Epic Store page:
https://store.epicgames.com/en-US/p/wrc-23
Really happy to see the low system requirements.
Here’s the Steam page
Here’s the official press release.
So they created the whole thing in the Unreal Engine.
Combining the power of the Unreal Engine with the DiRT Rally series physics, EA SPORTS WRC delivers longer, more detailed stages than previously possible, with 18** official FIA World Rally Championship locations and over 600km of unforgiving asphalt, gravel, and snow stages. The game also boasts 10 current WRC, WRC2, and Junior WRC vehicles and 68 of the most iconic rally cars spanning 60 years of the sport. Working together with official WRC teams and manufacturers, such as Ford, Toyota, and Hyundai, each vehicle is built to tackle every challenge they’ll face throughout the season. The hybrid-powered 4WD Rally1 cars are some of the fastest in the sport’s history, capable of incredible speeds while tackling gravity-defying jumps, deteriorating surfaces, and adverse weather.
The advanced Dynamic Handling System refines Codemasters’ original model and gives players the most realistic off-road experience to date. Taking feedback from drivers, including former FIA Junior WRC title contender and 2023 FIA European Rally Championship ERC3 champion, and game designer Jon Armstrong, players can choose a professional driver set-up mirroring the experience drivers encounter every race week. New players can personalise the handling, enabling them to make adjustments to help them master the ultimate player versus environment off-road challenge. The realism extends to audio, with each car intricately replicated, and new pace notes, including simplified commands for rookie drivers, give much-needed information to the player as they battle through each stage.
The introduction of Builder fulfils the dream of those longing to build their very own modern-era rally car. Select the chassis, body shells, and all-important mechanical parts before customising the interior and exterior, finally personalising with the livery editor. Put the car through its paces and make any necessary adjustments before competing for the World Championship against the best competition WRC has to offer.
Building your own rally car could be cool. I loved that feature in Sega Rally on the Dreamcast.
**Central Europe Rally will be available as a post-launch update.
Interesting (maybe)… But I’m still going to sit on my hands and wait to see if & how EA fuck this up.
The switch to Unreal Engine makes me nervous, for sure. But as far as I can tell from the trailer, it looks the same as DiRT Rally 2, I think? I’m fine with that, or even a little bit of a downgrade over DR2, visually, as long as they get the physics right. I hope they give us more details soon about the 18 locations.
Well it is EA, so the whole mention of VIP Passes for seasonal content fills me dread for them trying to Battle Pass rallying. Apart from that, I’m cautiously excited for it!
Five more of the cars on the car list and that some of the longest stages in the game will be over 30 kilometres in length got revealed on last night’s ‘The Racing Line’ Twitch stream. The switch to the Unreal Engine might have helped Codies achieve that finally goal, since I know the EGO engine had some limitations that limited how long stages could feasibly be.
I wonder how long this is compared to the longer stages in DR2, and the longest stages in the recent WRC games done by the other studio.
Dirt Rally 2.0’s longest stage is 16.46 kilometers-long, which is Zaróbka or Zagórze (depending on direction) in Poland. Meanwhile, WRC Generations’ longest stage is 25.9 kilometres-long, which is Örträsk or Örträsk Reverse (depending on direction) in Sweden. I can’t recall KT Racing’s WRC games featuring anything longer than 25.9km in the past, not even when Poland was included.
So, EA Sports’ WRC having some stages that are over 30 kilometers in length will top the previous best efforts of both prior Dirt Rally and WRC games.
Wow, longer than KT Racing’s tracks? That doesn’t seem possible. Those games had some really, really long tracks in some of the more recent iterations.
Hmmmm, I’m not sure if such a long track will be cool or just tedious to drive.
Though, in a top of the line Rally 1 WRC car 30-ish kilometres is still probably only about 15-20 minutes of actual driving; and a Rally 2 (R5) car wouldn’t be too much slower for times either.
Have to wait and see how EA Sports’ WRC does stage composition for any career modes and such. KT Racing’s WRC games typically only have you run the epic (long) stage once per event location with the rest being shorter stages and any super special stage. Whilst Dirt Rally has typically tied the stage composition of events to the difficulty\progression, so higher championship tiers\difficulties typically had a higher chance of featuring the long stages and\or tougher weather conditions.
Come to think of it, DR and DR2’s courses were all approximately the same length in terms of “time”, not kilometers. I guess Poland was the longest because it had a lot of straightaways where you could go really fast. But it was still approximately the same length in terms of time.
Yeah, generally, locations like Poland and Finland have longer stages because the average speed is higher. Then you get to Argentina and the stages are shorter but far more complicated, thus lowering the average speed. Meaning that whilst the long stages can vary in length by over a few kilometers, often they’ll be within the small ballpark for time taken.
The full official car list dropped today. A wide selection of cars, with not only a bunch of returning cars previously featured in the Dirt Rally games but also a bunch of new additions. Entirely new cars include the likes of the Vauxhall Nova Sport (H1 FWD), Talbot Sunbeam Lotus (H2 RWD), Mitsubishi Galant VR4 (Group A), and Renault Twingo II (Rally 4).
Oh god, the Kit Cars are back? It’s the only category I didn’t enjoy in past games.
30km is probably the max anyone is going to want to do in a single stage, so that’s pretty cool. I’d love some to do a stage builder, but that will probably never happen. That’s what we have season passes for buddy!
I’m pretty sure this will be awesome, but I am scared about how badly they add in micro transactions. NBA2k24 has set a new bar for how shitty you can be, but I don’t doubt EA could top it. In NBA2k24 if you want to the play online modes (I don’t thankfully) you pretty much have to drop 100-150 on top of the price of the game to not have to grind 40-50 hours a week. AND they have a battle pass with seasons. What are we doing with our lives? ;)
Thanks for that! That all sounds great. I can’t believe they are actually going to have Spring/Summer/Fall/Winter versions of tracks. I wonder how many locations they’ll do that with? That’s really neat.
Can’t watch it in full now, but will in a bit. Looks like they spent more time on the details of the stages which is awesome. The one knock I had on Dirt 2 was that the stages kind of looked pretty generic. Especially if you compared it to the rally game which had amazing stages. (And not so amazing other things.)
My online racing league has a group of rally people using Dirt (and now I think they use D2). I got talked into joining their rally league, supposedly the casual league. You’d have a weekly rally to complete. OK Cool. But then I got into it and each rally had alot of stages. It was a while ago, but maybe 7 or 9. I think I lasted 2 weeks because it was a massive time commitment to just run all the stages, much less maybe doing at least one practice run so you didn’t bin the car in stage 1 or 2. Actually I think that is when I quit is when I did bin the car in an early stage.
Oh geez they modeled the stages after the real roads. That would explain why it looked so much better to me. That was really the only thing Dirt was missing so I’m super excited now.