DiRT Rally

caw2007

[H]ard|Gawd
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Looks like the DiRT team hasn't just been migrating DiRT 3 to Steamworks! DiRT Rally is just what is says, all rallying all the time, and looks to be PC exclusive!

It's early access on Steam, but I'm going to jump in as soon I get home to my gaming PC.. :D

Steam link:

http://store.steampowered.com/app/310560

Eurogamer article:

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2015-04-27-dirt-rally-could-well-be-codemasters-first-real-sim

"About This Game
Welcome to DiRT Rally - a new world of DiRT. A pure expression of rally, the pinnacle of off-road motor racing and it begins now, in Early Access, with regular free updates including new locations, new game modes and new vehicles.

DiRT Rally captures the essence of what makes rally unique – that sense of trying to remain in control of your emotions, as you hurtle along dangerous, undulating roads at breakneck speed, aiming to squeeze everything out of your car whilst knowing that one crash could irreparably harm your stage time. It’s the ultimate test of a driver’s skill, and it’s the ultimate in high risk, high reward gameplay.

Every stage will test you differently, as you feel out grip across varying surfaces and adapt your style to a range of different weather types. As the car suffers attrition you’ll need to account for mechanical damage whilst your dedicated rally team tries to keep you competitive with time-limited repairs between stages. As stages string together, each rally becomes a marathon-like test of concentration and skill, as you trust in your co-driver and your own ability to react and adapt, in order to stay competitive and chase that ever-elusive perfect run.

• DiRT RALLY AND THE COMMUNITY: The community is DiRT Rally’s co-driver and their feedback will help shape the evolution of the experience. For players joining DiRT Rally in Early Access and the road ahead, the team want their feedback. They’ll be helping to test theories and providing vital data that will help to refine DiRT Rally.
• EXPERIENCE 3 MASSIVE NEW REAL-WORLD RALLY LOCATIONS: From the start of Early Access, DiRT Rally offers three massive environments and 36 challenging stages, with more to follow. Drive them during the day - in dry, overcast, sunny, misty, wet, rainy and snowy conditions - and then take them on at night for a very different, intense experience that will challenge the elite.

• Powys, Wales - Muddy, wet gravel stages and forest runs often in the rain during the day and at night.
• Monte Carlo, Monaco – Tight, twisting, dangerous roads covered with snow and ice that wind through the Alps. Snow and mist affect visibility during the day and at night.
• Argolis, Greece – Sweeping dusty gravel stages that take their toll on even the strongest rally cars in the intense heat of the Mediterranean in the bright daylight or at night.

• 14 CARS OVER 6 NEW AND CLASSIC CLASSES TO DRIVE NOW: Rally is about having the right car and DiRT Rally will have all of the right cars. At the start of Early Access, DiRT Rally delivers 14 cars and will be adding more cars over more classes in the future.
• NEW DRIVING MODEL: The physical simulation for DIRT Rally has been completely rebuilt to adequately capture how it feels to race across changing surfaces, and loose surfaces collect under the wheels during lateral sliding, creating a completely new feel to sliding around corners.
• RALLY CHAMPIONSHIPS, RALLY ASYNC & CUSTOM RALLY EVENTS: Take on a single stage and learn the calls in Custom Rally events, compete against increasingly skilled opposition in Rally Seasons or prove yourself against the entire community of players in Rally Async challenges.
• TEAM MANAGEMENT: Hire up to four engineering staff to work on your vehicle between stages. Drill down and hire them based on their contract length, wage demands, and on the insight they can offer over upgrades to the vehicles you own. Keep renewing an engineer’s contract and you’ll be able to give them perks that will help upgrade specific vehicles faster.
• UPGRADES: As you drive a vehicle in events your engineers will become more familiar with it and will research upgrades that will unlock the full potential of the car. DiRT Rally’s comprehensive upgrade system makes meaningful improvements to the car’s handling and performance to stay competitive
• TUNING: Delivering the most comprehensive tuning system ever in a DiRT game, DiRT Rally enables players to tune their cars based on weather conditions, car condition and more to ensure they can refine their setup and get the car feeling right for their driving style.
• DAMAGE & REPAIRS: Off-road racing is tough and unforgiving; competing causes vehicles to suffer wear and tear as replicated by DiRT Rally’s comprehensive mechanical damage system. Thankfully, damage can be repaired by hiring eEngineers to work in the team’s Service Area between stages. Much as in the Colin McRae Rally games, there’s a finite amount of time to repair cars between rally stages.
• PHYSICS-BASED ASSISTS: Being fast is about skill, not raw speed. Whilst DiRT Rally allows players to experience cars in their purest form it also offers a selection of real world assists, similar to those seen in race and road vehicles. Traction Control works to minimise wheel spin, ABS increases your braking ability by preventing the wheels from locking up and Stability Control keeps your car from over rotating in the corners."
 
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Unless it's anything like Dirt 1 or Colin Mcrae... NOPE..

And lol @ Early Access.. Will wait till after it goes gold and read plenty of reviews..
 
Unless it's anything like Dirt 1 or Colin Mcrae... NOPE..

And lol @ Early Access.. Will wait till after it goes gold and read plenty of reviews..

It's more sim than the first. Check out the Eurogamer video. I'm really thinking of getting it even on Early Access. Lol.
 
Unless it's anything like Dirt 1 or Colin Mcrae... NOPE..

And lol @ Early Access.. Will wait till after it goes gold and read plenty of reviews..

Yeah, if you read the article it states that it more akin to RBR than anything they have ever done before.
 
Yeah, if you read the article it states that it more akin to RBR than anything they have ever done before.

Again.. I'll wait to hear actual in depth reviews from multiple sources.. Codemasters are good at marketing and have done it before. I'm not impulse buying... It looks promising but so have others and weren't..
 
PC only!! :cool:

enjoyed DiRT 2 and 3 but haven't played any racing games since...hope this does well
 
Dirt 2 is my favourite racing game.
Didnt like the progression system or the non racing elements of Dirt 3 and then got a bug that wouldnt let me finish the game.

Looking forward to see what this is like.
Hopefully its huuuuge and has good AI.
 
Thanks! Going to grab this later this week. The driving looks wickedly nasty. Can't wait to drift around some corners!
 
wow the steam reviews are all positive.. finally this may be what we've been waiting for..

after CMR2005 wouldn't work on WIndows7 I have been waiting for a game to replace it..

here is hoping :)
 
This actually look really good. Dirt is one of those franchises that got worse with every release though, IMO. Dirt 3, for example, I loved the driving, but I hated shit like forced gymkhana, that annoying asshole who tried to hard to be my friend, being asked to upload everything to YouTube, etc.

According to Steam reviews, all that shit is gone. Sounds good to me... I'm very tempted to jump on this. Been looking for more things to bring my G27 out.
 
Watched a video of it on youtube and it looks good and realistic so will probably buy later on.
 
Guys do me one favor. When you mention bugs, can you take into account that there is a year of development left? Kinda annoying to read through pages of people crying that the game isn't perfect while it is being actively developed. As it gets closer to release shout to the heavens about bugs.

:)
 
Put in about an hour, and thus far, I am really pleased overall. There is a ton of potential here. Unfortunately, I, like many, don't have co-driver audio. Driving blind is damn tough, and making an already difficult game significantly more difficult. Codemasters has already acknowledged it though, so hopefully they can sort it out soon.

Aside from that one issue, everything else is truly great. The driving feels great. The game looks great, and performs great. The core game seems to be there, and mostly functional. Frankly, I've seen buggier retail releases :p. A bit of bug fixing and more content, and we have a winner here. It certainly feels more functional than any other early access title i've gotten behind.
 
Put in about an hour, and thus far, I am really pleased overall. There is a ton of potential here. Unfortunately, I, like many, don't have co-driver audio. Driving blind is damn tough, and making an already difficult game significantly more difficult. Codemasters has already acknowledged it though, so hopefully they can sort it out soon.

Aside from that one issue, everything else is truly great. The driving feels great. The game looks great, and performs great. The core game seems to be there, and mostly functional. Frankly, I've seen buggier retail releases :p. A bit of bug fixing and more content, and we have a winner here. It certainly feels more functional than any other early access title i've gotten behind.

Damn I might not be able to make it to Friday...
 
Holy shit, I LOVE proper rally games (Richard Burns Rally is still the reigning champion) and this looks fantastic... but I've made commitment to not buy EA games any more.
 
Performance numbers from the in-game benchmark:

Min FPS: 76
Avg FPS: 97
Max FPS: 113

That's at 1440p, 8xMSAA, every setting (of which there are many) maxed/ultra. Running on two 980's. VRAM usage sits right around 3.5GB. SLI appears to be working, both my cards run at ~95% usage the whole time.


The available in-game settings are as follows:

Resolution
Fullscreen: On, Off
Multisampling: CMAA, 2x/4x/8x MSAA
Aspect Ratio: Auto, 4:3, 5:4, 16:9. 16:10, 5:3
Refresh Rate
Vsync: On of Off
Gamma

Night Lighting: Low, Medium, High, Ultra
Shadows: Ultra Low, Low, Medium, High, Ultra
Advanced Fog: On or Off
Particles: Off, Low, Medium, High, Ultra
Weather: Low, High
Crowd: Off, Ultra Low, Low, Medium, High, Ultra
Cloth: Off, Low, High
Ambient Occlusion: Ultra Low, Low, Medium, High, Ultra
Advanced Ambient Occlusion: On or Off
Mirrors: Off, Low, Medium, High
Ground Cover: Off, Low, High, Ultra
Vehicle Details: Ultra Low, Low, Medium, High, Ultra
Track: Medium, High, Ultra
Trees: Ultra Low, Medium, High, Ultra
Objects: Low, Medium, High, Ultra
Vehicle Reflections: Low, Medium, High, Ultra
Water: Low, Medium, High, Ultra
Skidmarks: On or Off
Texture Details: Low, Medium, High, Ultra
Shader Detail: Ultra Low, Low, Medium, High
Anisotropic Filtering: Off, Low, High, Ultra
Smoke Shadows: On or Off


No conolitis here :p
 
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Damnit damnit damnit, must resist breaking my promise on EA games...

I'd hate to lure anyone away from what would normally be a pretty sound stance on early access games (especially if you end up disagreeing with me), but this really doesn't feel early access. Especially from a technical standpoint. Again, I've got ONE bug. It's a big one, and it's frustrating, but its one bug, and it's really the only widespread issue I am seeing. How many full retail releases have you come across where you can only come up with one bug?

Every other early access title I've bought has either been more of a glorified tech demo where the EA state of the game does not reflect the final product (such as Wreckfest and Theme Park Studio) or a game that doesn't play well from a gameplay mechanic or technical standpoint (like DayZ missing promised features and running like dogshit/being very glitchy, or Stranded Deep which has basically nothing to do). This is neither. From the get go, the game has a menu system of a fully polished retail product. Everything is visually appealing, well laid out, and seems mostly feature-complete. Visuals are top notch, as is performance, and with things like SLI working you again already basically have parity with what you'd expect (and still often not get) out of a retail release. Career mode, while basic, is here. Vehicle tuning is here. Handling is top notch. The core game seems to be there, fully operational.

What's missing is content. More cars, more courses, more event types. Multiplayer, hopefully. Obviously you still have potential risk if they don't deliver on the promise of more content, but at it's core you already have a game that will feel like a retail product, and I find that pretty important. Being that Codemasters is a big name though, I think it's pretty low risk. This isn't some Joe Everyman who comes up with a good idea and then figures out after they have your money that they lack the ability, resources, or desire to deliver what they promised.

If you really do enjoy rally... proper rally... and want a game that's nothing like the last few Dirt games, I'd watch some YouTube videos and give this some serious consideration. The whole Early Access system would be a helluva lot better if every game that utilized it released in this state.

Then you are in luck. This is a codemasters game :)

In his case, EA = early access, not Electronic Arts.
 
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Also, worthy of noting (since I assume almost nobody will want to play this with a keyboard)...

360 pad works flawlessly out of the box. It has all the appropriate button icons for navigation, has a button preset, and lets you adjust steering sensitivity and linearity, as well as vibration strength.

G27 also works out of the box. It too has button icons (ex. a circle with an 18 in it to show that button 18 is your menu select button). These also show up in race for things like resetting your vehicle. The game has a control preset for the G27. It has options for a clutch + h-shifter, although I haven't been using them while I get acquainted with the controls, so I cannot comment on how functional they are.

For the G27 I get the following wheel options: Steering deadzone, saturation, and linearity. Throttle deadzone and saturation. Break deadzone and saturation. Vibration strength, wheel strength, and wheel weight. Force feedback seems to be working, but its not great. Based on discussions on Steam, the general consensus is that it needs to be inverted. One thing that seems to be absent is degrees of rotation. Unless I'm missing something, it's fixed at 180.



EDIT: Trying not to create too many posts, but trying to spread as much information as I can so that people can make well informed decisions on whether they want this or not. Figured I'd add in what vehicle tuning options exist. At first you can adjust brake bias (rear to front), differential - front (loose to strong), gears (short to long), suspension - front (soft to firm), damping - front (soft to firm), suspension - rear (soft to firm), damping - rear (soft to firm). Upon upgrading your vehicle to support advanced setup, you locked a wealth of additional customization. Brake strength (lb-ft), LSD driving lock, LSD braking lock, LSD preload, individual gear ratios, ride height, spring rate, anti-roll bar strength, camber angle, toe angle, damping bump, fast bump, fast bump threshold, rebound, fast rebound, and fast rebound threshold. The last 11 options there for advanced damping and suspension adjustments are made separately for both front and rear. Needless to say, there is a lot to tinker with. You can save settings into preset slots and quick toggle between presets.

As for handling options, you can adjust traction control, stability control, and ABS. Each can be off, or else a setting of 1 to 5 on how strong you want the assist to be. You can also turn off launch control, in which case you must use the handbrake prior to getting the green light, and can be penalized for early starts.
 
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I liked the second dirt, didnt care much for the gameplay of the third. I'll wait and see how this turns out but I am interested.
 
It's been great so far using a G27. There are already posts popping up all over the place with recommended wheel settings.
 
Had a lot of fun with this last night but do have a few problems.

The big one is no co-pilot / directions. I was able to consistently place in 4th but I wouldn't expect to win any races until this is fixed.

Full screen 5760x1200 r290s in xfire has a bunch of artifacting. Windowed mode works fine but then you lose xfire support. Not really a problem since 1 290 still did fine at max settings.

In eyefinity the starting menus are unreadable. It took some fumbling around to find my way to settings and get the res high enough to read.

Car resets are available when you get way off track but in a couple cases I just got hung up on a rock or the ridge of the road and was not offered a reset. Even after 30+ second of being stuck. I did notice a reset option in the start menu last night so I'll give that a shot if it happens again.

Part upgrades are just unlocks as you run the car. I was hoping for more of a GT or Forza modding setup.

All in all I had a blast though. As long as the co-driver is fixed I would be happy enough to overlook the other minor issues. I'm excited that this game has a year left of development still. I have played beta for plenty of games releasing in a month that weren't this well put together.
 
I thought about streaming it yesterday but having to play on a single monitor wasn't worth it lol.

You're doing pretty well, commenters don't understand how much harder driving blind is.
 
Thanks Viper and Kardonxt for the info.

Interested in more info about triple screen support and comparisons to RBR on the physics side. Kardonxt has eyefinity - has anyone tried it on nVidia surround (2d)?
 
Well I caved and bought it.

It definitely doesn't have anything on RBR in terms of physics. Physics-wise I'd say it's a lot like WRC 4 by Milestone, which is to say "meh." It's still realistic enough to enjoy, but in some cases - particularly driving on tarmac in Monaco - the cars just feel really wooden and the road surface feels way too perfect and smooth. Driving on gravel is a lot better but the cars still have way too much grip. It's difficult to get even the Group B cars to slide around, when instead they should have enough power to power-on oversteer in just about any section of the course. The other cars feel absolutely sluggish for some reason, even the Group A or 2010s cars with ~300hp feel like they're running with restricter plates or something.

I feel like the most fun you can have in the game is with the 70s and 80s RWD cars in Greece and Wales. That's where the game shines the most. Driving the BMW through Greece is a total blast.

Everything else about the actual gameplay is great though, especially the sound. Wow, the sounds are insanely good. Playing on surround sound with the volume cranked is a trip.

The menu system in place for things like career mode make the game feel more like a simple interconnection of single stage rallies than like a real career mode. In other games like WRC, RBR, or even previous Dirt games you'd see your car in the mechanic's area and such which helped with immersion and whatnot. It could really stand to be improved in that area.

Overall I'd give it about 8/10 for general racing genre games, and if you're into rally games and have played the best ones over the years, closer to 6/10. It's good but has lots of room for improvement (hopefully Early Access development will continue and this stuff can be changed, rather than just simply adding more content.)
 
New patch (notes on reddit) fixes the silent co-driver.

Wooooo.

I kinda wish they didn't fix the co-driver. I still suck, and now I have nothing to blame :p.

Seriously though, kudos to Codemasters. Releasing an early access game, and fixing really the only widespread problem in 24 hours... that's commendable. I'll say it again guys, don't be scared away by the early access badge. This is a wickedly fun game. It's tough, but it makes me feel like such a badass when I do well.
 
My god I suck at this game. Could be because I have the volume low and it's difficult to pay attention to the co-driver, but every I time I start feeling like I'm doing decently I sling myself either off a cliff or into an embankment.

The mini isn't that fun to drive to me and I haven't unlocked anything else yet. Hopefully the rwd cars are better.
 
They're all in the 3-6 minute range I think.. definitely nothing in the 10+ minute range. Also what's disappointing is each of the "12" courses is really just a different arrangement of one larger area, so as you're driving around you'll continuously recognize sections.
 
I saw a video on Youtube and the game look good. I'll give it a try and repost here.
 
I tried it with my G27 + Fanatec Clubsport Shifter SQ... experience was about 1000x more fun! Definitely a worthy successor to RBR with a few tweaks.
 
A pal of mine recommended this to me and I have to say its incredible. I've not had a game feel so 'real' to me. The physics are right on the mark. However as a fan of the dirt series I was massively shocked as to how radically different the handling actually is. I always thought Dirt 3 was more realistic than arcadey but I was way off. I'm terrible at it. Think I need a hell of a lot more practice just like this guy.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CP3A5TUsvz4

If you want to know what the game is like coming from the DiRT series to this new game then give that a watch. He sucks so bad until he gets used to the new handling model.
 
Going back and forth between DiRT3 and DiRT Rally is eye-opening for sure. It does remind me more of Colin McRae Dirt (in presentation) but with a physics simulation more like Richard Burns Rally. There are a few things that still - no matter what physics model - seem very strange. If you've seen cars mid-air you'll know what I mean. As soon as all four wheels detach, they get oddly floaty.

Overall, the difficulty level is pretty intense.
 
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