WRC vesus Dirt?

WRC 6 just came out today. For people who aren’t into sports as much as I am, WRC stands for World Rally Cross, or World Rally Champion, or maybe World Rallycross Committee. Something like that. The game is about driving cars down the road really fast while a bunch of people stand foolishly close on the shoulder and the guy in the passenger seat uses math to describe how you should turn.

What does the WRC series bring to the table compared to Codemasters Dirt games, and specifically the most recent one, Dirt Rally? I can’t imagine how WRC 6 can compete with something as awesome, comprehensive, and gorgeous as Dirt Rally. Is WRC more hardcore or something?

-Tom

I don’t know about the latest one, but I tried the demo of the last WRC game. It was pretty lame. Just the physics was more arcadey and collisions were kind of weird. The scenery was very uninspired. The game was supposed to have much much more content, I think, compared to Dirt Rally, with lots of locations and courses, but the courses in the demo were much more boring and uninteresting to drive through compared to DiRT Rally.

Now, it is possible that maybe the demo was not a good indicator for the full game, but the game didn’t get very good reviews either, though it was supposedly the best of the WRC games so far, but all the reviews agreed it still was nowhere in the same league as DiRT Rally. So I felt pretty safe in relying on my impressions based on the demo because of that.

My experience with WRC is that the handling (with wimp mode…er, assists, off) is more sim like than Dirt games. To be fair though I haven’t played either of the newest games (too poor for a wheel). Dirt generally seems to be a more complete “game” from what I have seen.

That said, if you want a great handling arcadey sim just fire up Driveclub and switch to hardcore handling. It’s sublime!

Dirt Rally is quite sim-focused compared to your traditional Dirt games though, with all the car setups and tweakings you could desire.

But all you really need to know is that WRC 6 has no VR support!

WRC is on the arcade side relative to Dirt Rally.

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2019-09-04-wrc-8-review-a-new-pretender-to-the-driving-crown

Apparently WRC 8 is very good.

I got WRC 7 to experience the long long long rally courses, and those were indeed very good, but I just couldn’t stand the physics, it was all weird. But WRC 8 sounds like it’s better.

Oh yeah, the trailer.

V-Rally was a great series, when it was developed by Eden before that studio was dissolved.

I watched a bunch of streamers playing this and it just looked like a lot of fun. Picked it up today and I can say that I’m having a total blast with it so far. The tracks are fantastic and the driving is just fun. I have just been giggling as I slide through turns and fly over jumps. I haven’t had nearly as much fun with Dirt 2 for some reason. Seriously drive Germany in Wrc8 and you will be grinning ear to ear. Major thumbs up so far. Also it actually has a fleshed out single player which is a major perk for me.

How does multiplayer work? I mean, the cars can’t all start together at the same moment I think?

I haven’t looked. I’m sure it’s like Dirt where you are just posting times, but I generally suck too much in these games to care about online. :) I’m going to drive Monte Carlo Rally in both games and compare. From my experience so far and others online the road driving is much better in WCR8. I feel it’s a bit easier than Dirt, but I’m also just driving the Junior car right now so I could be totally wrong about that. It’s nice to have multiple options that’s for sure.

That’s good to hear. I bought WRC 7 a few months ago, and I was completely lost in it. I couldn’t even get close to the AI times, it felt much much harder than DiRT Rally 2.0 to me, so I eventually abandoned it.

I only played for like 2-3 hours, but I had no assists on with Medium AI difficulty and got through all the German tracks easy peasy. This was using the baby car though. :) The AI on medium seems a bit slow, the next level up seems a bit fast. That’s something that I’m sure could be tweaked if it was really a big issue so it doesn’t worry me much.

Maybe it’s the tracks, but I just found I wasn’t crashing out as much as I was in Dirt. I tried to play dirt the other day and just gave up as I was eating it too much. This was with an Xbox One controller btw. It drives really well with the controller.

I played this a bunch over the weekend and still give it a major thumbs up. Dirt has more cars and might be a better simulation, but this is a just better game IMHO. The career mode is fun and has some kind of point. The stages are fantastic. The driving is more accessible to me and I’m just having way more fun with it. Highly recommend it if you don’t mind the lack of historical cars. There’s a few and I’m sure they will add more but it will never match to dirt in that regard.

Do players get the same sorts of queues for when to turn, how much to turn, etc. like in real life?

Yup just like any other rally game. The voice in dirt is better but it’s pretty good.

I’ve been playing some career mode in WRC 7. The graphics are a huge letdown compared to DiRT Rally, but the courses are quite nice. I’ve only played Corsica and Sardegna so far in the career, and both have great. I think Career also starts me off on baby difficulty because I’ve been going really slow and coming in 1st. So that’s good too. I’m glad it starts off easy. I’m still not sure why I don’t enjoy the physics. The cars don’t feel as connected, they don’t respond the same way.

Still, it’s not bad. I just wish the graphics were a bit better. When you’re slowly making your way through on easy difficulty, you want the eye candy to be superb.

Still making my way through the career mode slowly. I’m trying to get my 3 year old excited about racing. He might be starting to come around.

By the way, the German rally track that’s really really huge has got sections in it that are very much like the German rally track in the first DiRT game, and also the latest DiRT rally games. So the track is so long, it has three or four different styles of terrain over the course of one track.

I love the German stages in this one. So of the sections are super crazy narrow. I don’t see that as much in dirt.

I hadn’t realized that KT Racing was going to be releasing at least one more WRC game, announced last month:

I guess when Codemasters bought the license to do WRC games, that doesn’t kick in until next year maybe?

It does seem like KT Racing’s games have been improving with each iteration though, so maybe that’s one to look forward to. As well as whatever the DiRT Rally team comes up with for the next WRC officially sponsored game of course.