DiRT 4 So, first impressions? Where does it stand versus DR?

[Helmut Skrdla]

Title says it all. It's available now, so for those with much more skill than me, how does it fare? Especially compared to Dirt Rally?

 

[W_Akira]

Loose surface and tarmac reacts very differently to diff-changes, but a loose differential is always better for corner entry oversteer. If you want to drive with a full lock, have fun, but please don´t complain about understeering cars.

Ok. But I'm talking about keeping the drift. Maybe you could share some car setup and show how to keep a drift with throttle control because in D4 is really more difficult for me.

 

[Case_]

I don´t make videos. Just take out the Subaru, BWM M3, Renault Turbo, Ford Fiesta R5 for example and take some spins around Australia, which is notorious for oversteer and seems it rains a lot there

Been there, done that. No dice. That's why I'd like to see a video. For example, just today I saw a video from a guy who claimed that he's powersliding through the corners in D4 easily, only to find out what he calls powersliding had very little to do with actual powersliding, it was more of him trying to get the car sideways in any way he could and it pretty much instantly correcting itself back in a very unnatural way. I'm not saying he (or you in this instance) was intentionally lying, I'm just saying people can have different views on what powersliding (or oversteering) means and that's why a video is worth a thousand words.

For example, here's my video, featuring probably the closest I've been able to make the car actually kinda sorta powerslide so far - though it still feels weird (as can be seen in the video), it's like the rear end is unable to break traction and there's a constant traction control assist turned on, except there isn't. The only way to break traction seems to be to touch the grass, which then results in a violent snap oversteer. Even trying to do a bit of a pendulum turn is really hard as the car just tends to go where it's pointed to at the moment as soon as you give it a bit of throttle, like it's on rails, not on a loose surface. With AWDs like this, it maybe kinda makes sense, but with RWDs, it's just plain weird.

Stiffer diff induce understeer, loosen it for more oversteer.

As already mentioned, you have it backwards. Yes, stiffer diff induces understeer on corner entry and looser diff gives you better turn-in, but when it comes to powersliding and corner exit, you want the rear diff stiff to induce on-throttle oversteer, which is what we're complaining about.

When i´m reading comments here it´s like some people talking about a hole different game.

I know the feeling...

 

[LuMue]

@Martin Fiala : Just saw your video and to me it seems as you do not steer enough. (3:44 and 4:06)
But that's just my impression I get from watching your video. I drove the Evo X at Michigan yesterday, put the brake balance 2 clicks to the rear and when I stood on the brakes hardly when heading to a hairpin, the rear went sideways. Also I steer to nearly full lock before entering hairpins, open hairpins and 1 and 2 corners and the car tends to oversteer. Seems to me you enter some corners to fast which results in this oversteer...
It's not the same feeling as in DR but in D4 you feel the cars weight more realistic (in my eyes).

Also I drove the Kadett at Spain yesterday, played a bit with the setup and the Opel did great slides through the corners. Saved some screenshots which I will upload tonight and show here tomorrow. In DR the Kadett was very nervous on tarmac, especially when you put the foot from the accelerator before a corner. Now it feels a lot better, it is far better controlable but still not easy to drive. That's how a historic RWD car should behave...

 

[Akra]

I keep seeing people talk about setting up the rear suspension and brake balance to induce oversteer. That's not power sliding. That isn't the same thing. Anyone can just shove the brake balance to the rear and spin the car, but that doesn't mean the grip levels are correct. Given you cannot slide the Group B RWD cars properly under power, there is something wrong, and moving the brake balance about doesn't change that.

The only way to break traction seems to be to touch the grass, which then results in a violent snap oversteer.

This comment sums up Dirt 4, and applies to FWD, AWD and RWD cars. FWD cars should spin out if you're braking and turning at the same time, but don't. AWD cars should be able to brake traction quite easily, and don't. RWD Cars should spin out if you mash the throttle, and don't.

 

[Eckhart von Glan]

plenty of spinning at my level of control ...
anyway, played another hour or so, bought my first car (and managed to grab a rallyx not a rally car, lol, i better read what it says on the screen next time). setting up your team and painting your car is just plain awesome, best i have seen in any game so far other than doing skins and importing them. so, having bought a rallyx car, i did a rallyx event to at least cash in some money. love the extra detail, e.g. the spotter second-guessing in advance, where you will end up after your extra lap or the way you repair the car between races where one serious bump means you are fast running out of options.
i used my old g27 settings for ffb and: they do not work anymore, so the changes to the physical aspects must have been significant. What felt natural in d4 now feels wobbly and mushy, i will try to go halfway back to the baseline settings tonight, and then slowly work my way to a good ffb setup.
Not to forget: I did my first online challenge and it was a long long stretch of welsh forest and fields i had never touched before. the closest gaming experience in my memory would be rally championship 2000 which had the real life stages of the british championship, miles and miles of them and which i absolutely loved.

finally i went back to my career, because i need to earn some money to get a proper rally car but then decided i felt too tired to go on playing. however, it looks like the system now knows my level of competency and pits me against the stage times of other players on my level? or did i again not look at my screen well enough? well, will find out tonight.

 

[Matthew Allington]

painting your car is just plain awesome, best i have seen in any game so far other than doing skins and importing them

Despite being not a particularly good game otherwise, I recall that the 2010 WRC game (the only one of Milestone's efforts that I owned) had a similar way of doing liveries - but with about 50 different patterns to choose from!

 

[Leynad777]

Breakbalance to the back and open the diff, cars going sideways like in DR with powerslides as you like. This discussion is ridiculous. You can´t setup your car, it´s your fault, not the fault of the game.
But drifting in Rally is 70's and 80's style with mostly DNF results. Today you better keep the car more or less straight and induce slides with the handbreak if needed.

 

[Eric Rowland]

the closest gaming experience in my memory would be rally championship 2000 which had the real life stages of the british championship, miles and miles of them and which i absolutely loved.

That was a great sim!

 

[Case_]

@LuMue I was actually hesitating if I should even include the video because my driving leaves a lot to be desired, but it actually has a lot to do with how weird the car handling feels to me. I still can't help but feel the car just goes where you point it, so having more steering input feels like it would result in me going off the stage instead of upsetting the car to get a controlled slide going. And shifting the brake balance to the rear doesn't really help me much as well, due to the car correcting itself very quickly it results in this weird struggle between oversteer and understeer.

And I definitely do enter some of the corners too fast, I'm absolutely aware of that. It wasn't a video to showcase my (fairly limited) driving skills, it was just a quick video of Dirt 4 I wanted to put up on my channel before I got something better.

But I'll try some more and see how it goes, thanks for you comments, appreciated!

Breakbalance to the back and open the diff, cars going sideways like in DR with powerslides as you like. This discussion is ridiculous. You can´t setup your car, it´s your fault, not the fault of the game.
But drifting in Rally is 70's and 80's style with mostly DNF results. Today you better keep the car more or less straight and induce slides with the handbreak if needed.

Too bad you don't do videos. You could teach us a lot, apparently.

 

[Ole Marius Myrvold]

I've not driven enough to make any proper say in how the game are, it is a bit different than DiRT Rally, but I need some more hours to decide if it's different towards "worse" or towards "better". That I have no idea of. One thing I know is that I feel the outside replays look slow. But I did read a lot here before driving, and I do think the different cars are quite different in terms of some handling like we 'expect', while others are way off.

I just took a small recording of my first ever rally in the game, so I have no experience with the car or surface or anything. I would guess that with more experience you can drive more aggressively and throw the car more around, but I didn't have any extreme understeer or anything like that. (Video is not really edited in a nice way)

Also, a big thanks to the user here at RD who surprised me with a Steam gift during the night - which enabled me to play D4! Extremely grateful for that!

 

[bogani]

I've not driven enough to make any proper say in how the game are, it is a bit different than DiRT Rally, but I need some more hours to decide if it's different towards "worse" or towards "better". That I have no idea of. One thing I know is that I feel the outside replays look slow. But I did read a lot here before driving, and I do think the cars are quite different.

I just took a small recording of my first ever rally in the game, so I have no experience with the car or surface or anything. I would guess that with more experience you can drive more aggressively and throw the car more around, but I didn't have any extreme understeer or anything like that. (Video is not really edited in a nice way)

Also, a big thanks to the user here at RD who surprised me with a Steam gift during the night - which enabled me to play D4! Extremely grateful for that!

I was actualy thinking about gifting you a copy as a thank you for your hard work on RDRC! Guess it's too late now though

The Subaru NR4 is quite slow but is absolutely one of the better feeling cars in the game. It has a nice balance to it. I just did the weekly challenge in Michigan and it feels quite similar to Finland. Lots and lots of crests coupled with the new feeling of weight in the cars make it truly enjoyable to tackle.

As I've said before, most cars feels truly excellent in the Dirtfish playground(M3). Out on the gravel stages it feels like there isn't enough progressive grip atm.

 

[W_Akira]

I've not driven enough to make any proper say in how the game are, it is a bit different than DiRT Rally, but I need some more hours to decide if it's different towards "worse" or towards "better". That I have no idea of. One thing I know is that I feel the outside replays look slow. But I did read a lot here before driving, and I do think the cars are quite different.

I just took a small recording of my first ever rally in the game, so I have no experience with the car or surface or anything. I would guess that with more experience you can drive more aggressively and throw the car more around, but I didn't have any extreme understeer or anything like that. (Video is not really edited in a nice way)

Also, a big thanks to the user here at RD who surprised me with a Steam gift during the night - which enabled me to play D4! Extremely grateful for that!

Nice driving. But the problem is more that I can't do power oversteer on RWD like in this vídeo below:

 

[Eckhart von Glan]

I was actualy thinking about gifting you a copy as a thank you for your hard work on RDRC! Guess it's too late now though

+1, checked his steam account before gifting and the man had already done an hour or so of gaming in dirt4, so i called it off. you're quite well liked, ole, lol

 

[Thomas Lambaerts]

I was actualy thinking about gifting you a copy as a thank you for your hard work on RDRC! Guess it's too late now though

Same here, I was thinking about raising some money to gift it to Ole

 

[Jack Hintz]

You guys are awesome.

 

[Ole Marius Myrvold]

Nice driving. But the problem is more that I can't do power oversteer on RWD like in this vídeo below:

I did some Mk2 driving tonight in an online session, and I couldn't do that either, but at the same time I use soft lock in D4, and with 900 degrees rotation, I was pretty useless at everything really. I would need to set up the wheel so it is pretty equal to DR to be able to even try to drive the same way I'll see if I have time to do it on Sunday!

 

[Ole Marius Myrvold]

I was actualy thinking about gifting you a copy as a thank you for your hard work on RDRC! Guess it's too late now though

+1, checked his steam account before gifting and the man had already done an hour or so of gaming in dirt4, so i called it off. you're quite well liked, ole, lol

Same here, I was thinking about raising some money to gift it to Ole

*insert blush emoji*(of joy)

Well thanks for the thoughts guys! (and the buy Eckhart?)!
Just to clarify though, this was not the reason why I've stated the reason for not buying the game myself, I just felt that you all deserved a proper reason, and not a "I won't buy this yet" Also, while I of course would like free games or discounted games due to the work I put down, I would rather have that from the devs/publishers, not from you guys, as I do what I do because I enjoy it, not because I want to get stuff from the participants.

Regardless, you guys made me a bit wet in my eyes, and I am quite honestly amazed that anyone, never mind more than one of you thinks that way. Made my month!

You guys are awesome.

Indeed! Indeed!

 

[Case_]

Spent some more time with the game, and...no, I'm sorry, the rally mode is just not right. It's not my driving or setup doing this. You just have to compare the car handling in rallycross mode and in rally mode (or in DirtFish). In rallycross, the cars react to your inputs exactly as you'd expect, you can do nice controlled powerslides, modulate throttle and all that stuff. You can't really do that in rally mode. If you step on the gas in the middle of the corner in rallycross, the rear steps out nicely. If you do that in rally mode, the rear stays put or even somehow gets more grip and the car understeers. Even with RWD cars. That's just not right.

If the cars in rally mode handled like the ones in rallycross mode, it would be an amazing game. The way it is now, it's needlessly dragged down by these issues. It has an amazing potential (it is definitely an improvement over Dirt Rally in many ways), but the car handling really needs some fixing.

 

[Leynad777]

I hope Codemasters doesn´t "fix" anything, because the physics are just far better than in DR and this "powersliding" doesn´t work in many cars for real, is not effective at all and a complete oldschool style. Just bought this crazy Opel Manta and you see him powersliding? Keep the car straight seems the trick.

You want to go drifting, get the BMW M3 or the Ford Fiesta RX5 for example. They like going sideways.

 

[Case_]

Yes, I see plenty of powersliding in that video. Don't you? He's obviously keeping it under control as much as possible, since this is on tarmac, not on gravel, but it's still there. A notable example - the left hand corner through the village at around 0:50 (right after the co-driver warns him about the surface in the village) - you can clearly see how he's trying to contain the powerslide.