Codemasters contract for the WRC license begins in 2023 and runs until 2027, if not renewed for longer at some point. Ergo, there will likely be one more WRC game from KT Racing, next year’s installment, before they handover the license.
It’s a shame as I think the WRC games were getting better and better each year. Now EA will just waste the license on Ultimate Team stickers for your car or something equally lame.
I’ve been tempted to get WRC 9 a few times since it’s been on sale for $24 or so each time. But I always think, no, I should finish play WRC 8 first, since I own that through Games with Gold. I enjoyed doing one full season in WRC 7. I should do the same with WRC 8. I started it, but I think I only got to 2 locations so far.
Do you know if 7 and 8 have the same kind of career mode as WRC9? I didn’t get very far with WRC9, but I loved how its career shifted the focus from the usual car upgrades to managing a rally team. If 7 and 8 didn’t have the same structure, you’re in for a treat with 9. Or at least a change of pace.
-Tom
I really need to play WRC 9 on PS5. All the reviews say the DualSense implementation is the best of the racing games so far.
WRC 10 (Sept 7th release date listed) is up for pre-order on Amazon for Xbox One and PS4. It’s only $40. No next gen versions listed yet. I wonder if it’s going to be released at a lower price for all platforms or just the last gen versions?
WRC 8 also has team management where you unlock team abilities and things like that. Honestly I’m a bit annoyed by it because when I fire up a rally game, I just want to race. I don’t want to tinker around with “my rally team”.
I feel like I remember there being a separate, adjacent singleplayer mode in WRC 8 for people who wanted to play through WRC seasons but without all the team management cruff added on. Seasons Mode or something like that.
I just realized WRC 10 has been out for over a month now. I only realized this last week because WRC 9 was on sale on Xbox Live. The others were all added to Game Pass, or Games with Gold, so I’m holding out.
From the reviews, it sounds like they polished the WRC formula just a little more and left the franchise at a good state.
It’s not all that much different than 9. They are going to add a few more stages in the next month or two, but I’d say it’s in a solid wait for a sale state. There were also some pretty bad performance issues with stutter. I haven’t checked in the last few weeks to see if that’s been addressed yet.
WRC Generations comes out this week. I think this will be the last WRC game from KT Racing, and next year’s game will be from Codemasters, the DiRT Rally team.
WRC 10 had a free preview weekend last weekend, and I tried it briefly. It still feels like the same game to me as all the others (WRC 6, 7, 8, 9), with slight improvements as usual. It did trick me into resting for one of the days in the campaign mode because resting is the only thing that restores your teams’ stats, but then I failed the mini-missions which involved doing X number of training exercises in the first few weeks. Oops. I’m not a fan of this weird campaign format.
I tried WRC 9 or something and it wasn’t fun. I think the last WRC I liked might have been done by Eden. Oops that was V-Rally.
Is WRC Generations yet another iteration of their WRC games, or is it a fresh build? I suppose it wouldn’t make much sense for them to invest in an overhaul if they know they’re handing the contract over to another studio.
It’s supposedly just another iteration. Maybe Generations sounded better than “Eleven”.
I’m playing WRC Generations over this free preview weekend.
I have to admit that for the first hour or so, all I could think about was how much more I’d be enjoying this track or that track in the DiRT Rally games instead. There’s just something about the graphics and the feel of the controller in my hands, and the physics and the sounds on the screen that doesn’t feel right to me in the WRC series. It feels like I’m playing a game. When I’m playing DiRT, I honestly get so lost in it sometimes, it feels so real. I don’t react to the driving like I’m playing a game, I react to it like I do in my car in real life.
But you know what happened then? I reached the snow in the Sweden Rally, and holy shit I have to eat my words because that’s one place that’s just terrible in DiRT, it doesn’t feel real, it’s boring as hell, and here in WRC it is exciting. It is just stellar compared to the DiRT Rally games. They did the track design so much better, the scenery so much better and it is honestly just a nail biting course. There’s sections here where they let you go so fast on the snow with the studded snow tires, and then the slight turns start showing up that are just called out as 6 turns, so very shallow turns, but you’re going so fast that it feels like the most dangerous turns in the world. DiRT Rally has tracks like that too, of course, but not in the snow. It’s the one place where they need massive improvement and this WRC game is really great at showing off why.
I have not heard this take before! Do you mean the immersion, or are the snow physics markedly better? I distinctly recall snow in Dirt Rally 2.0 being done so well that an Impreza felt like my real Subaru even over a controller the first time I booted up the game. The ABS vibrations may have had something to do with the feeling there. Handling on my actual sim rig was probably not one-to-one, but I also drive my Crosstrek to survive, not to race, when I go skiboarding.
Or is it 100% a matter of track design?
Pretty much track design. I won’t deny that the DiRT games do physics much much better, even in snow. But I really find their Sweden snow tracks boring, while the ones in this WRC game are really good. Lots of interesting scenery to see and to navigate through.
To be fair, WRC Generations finally let Kylotonn totally redeveloped Sweden as an event location. So, I would certainly hope that the new Sweden stages are better given all the years developers have had to hone their stage design craft. Prior to WRC Generations’ revamp of Sweden there was no competition between WRC and DiRT for who had the better stages, as prior to WRC Generations those Sweden stages dated as far back as WRC 6.
Even with the remaster into DiRT Rally 2.0, the DiRT stages are basically almost 10 year-old stages by now. And despite how famous the stages DiRT Rally chose to replicate are in rally history, these days they aren’t that reflective of current Rally Sweden as a WRC event. Which since 2022 has had to relocate itself several hundred kilometers further north, away from Värmland, in search of more consistent snowfall.
WRC Generations is currently $23/28 CAD (half off) at GMG
I have been having a hard time avoiding the temptation of WRC 8, 9, 10 with all DLC packaged together for $25 on Xbox. But I don’t have time for all these games! Best to wait for Codies to take their turn at WRC later this year, right?
Well, that might be closer than I was expecting. If this leaker is right, the end of July!?!