DiRT Rally 2.0 The Expectations Behind Dirt Rally 2.0

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What do you believe Codemasters has in store for us?


After the pretty sad epilogue that saw Dirt 4 go down pretty much unnoticed by the virtual racing community, it was an exciting turn of events seeing a new Dirt title announced recently, this time rooting back into the ‘Rally’ origins and branded as 2.0. Following after the persistent requests from those who loved the original Dirt Rally to have some sort of a sequel to the unforgettable sim that caught everyone by surprise back when it was released in Early Access, it looks like now our wishes have been granted. Codemasters seems to have learned from its mistakes, and with this new iteration in the franchise is no longer trying to bridge a gap at all costs between simracers and arcaders, but it is now focusing entirely on the former. There is much to be excited about, but something to be worried of too.

Looking at the trailers and bits of gameplay released so far, I could not help but notice some pretty evident compromises still made in the physics department in order to make the game at least lenient towards the casual driver, but taking away realism from the hard-core player. It is not a sin, of course, as the first Dirt Rally had some noticeable inconsistencies too in the driving experience and the title, as a whole, tried to also meet the expectations of the arcade racer. This did not really happen however, since many console players and non-simracer PC users still complained that the game was “too hard” and rejected it. My question then is, why try this approach again? Why trying to make a sim with some arcadish features blending in, like the first one, if it won’t be enough for casual players to enjoy the game anyway? Why not going all-in for the absolute simracing experience and please just one audience, but at least pleasing it to the fullest?

Another thing I am not entirely convinced with is the amount of marketing and promotional videos we are being bombarded with as of late. A continuous stream of content, even if just one minute long at times, sponsoring the new game. This is a matter of concern to me. The first Dirt Rally came out unexpectedly. One day, it was there, without anyone really knowing it was going to, and leaving everyone speechless. It was not perfect, but it was an amazing and well-received surprise. During Early Access, the title was developed, improved, and with its quality did its own marketing. The game spoke volumes for itself and let players and their useful feedback be the cornering stone of its success. I honestly would have preferred in this case the same pragmatic approach that distinguished the original one.

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I loved the first Dirt Rally, and I am a long time player of the Dirt franchise. I played almost all of them, and liked them. Therefore, my wish is that Dirt Rally 2.0 will nail it on the head, and will give to all of us rally lovers (even though I consider myself merely a novice in the field) what we have been waiting for so long. A realistic, complete rally driving experience. The first one came already incredibly close, and its sequel has now the chance to hit the bull’s eye with its brand new features like track degradation or tyre selection and management (the one I am most excited for). This gives me the reason to stay confident, despite any doubt I may have so far.

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What do you think we can expect from Dirt Rally 2.0? Do you believe it will be up to the expectations of the simracing community? Which features are you most excited about or which one would you like to see included in the final game?

Let us know in the comments below!

 
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Nicely written piece :)

I'm curious about the "evident compromises" you are talking about? You didn't elaborate further.

Thanks!

Yes I did not, mainly because I am afraid it would start a war in the comments and that is not the purpose of my article. I wanted to share some general doubts, but also some hopes I have about this title, as all of us do, while letting other people share theirs (in a polite way, as these are always opinions and we know very little still about the game).
 
There is much to be excited about, but something to be worried of too.

I feel the same way but I am very low on the excitement meter. This is looking to be more of a DR DLC than fully-fledged new game. I am worried about lack of content again. DR was way too thin on pure rally stages. On top of that they are going to divide the user base with DLC which will be a disaster for leagues/clubs (if they are even in - there hasn't been confirmation that leagues will be present and they don't answer people who ask about it).

I don't mind Rallycross but I think it's time they took RX and made a stand-alone game. I'm sick of Codies financing the RX license by "including" some rally content in DR, D4 and now DR 2.0. And now that the series is on the verge of collapse, I think it's time we get a proper point-to-point rally game. No more of this hybrid RX/rally game stuff. Codemasters has a bad enough chronic content-creation problem as it is without spending resources on RX. And despite being the second licensed RX game, it will still be four tracks short of the official season unless you wait six months and buy two DLCs.

I don't think I will pay full price for another rally game unless it has Your Stage 2.0 or at a minimum the hybrid route generator in V-Rally 4 which is a decent compromise between bespoke stages and a random generator (which is probably not feasible for rally due to difficulties it would have to create accurate pace notes). Your Stage was a great idea but in typical Codies fashion it was underdeveloped. If they had done it right with 10x more tiles and 10x more types of curves and straights it would have been a fantastic system.

Ross Gowing said in an interview with VVV that the community asked for hand made stages that we can run over and over again to familiarize ourselves and better our times. That's ridiculous. While some of the community has asked for the return of bespoke stages, many of us have also asked for a Your Stage 2.0 to go along with them because what's the point of rallying if you memorize everything? DR had only 140km of stages (not counting reversed) and the game quickly turned in to a time attack rather than a rally game. I could honestly just turn the codriver off at this point as he's no longer necessary. That's not rally and I honestly get upset every time Codies talks about listening to the community.

Why not going all-in for the absolute simracing experience and please just one audience, but at least pleasing it to the fullest?

I don't think Codemasters is able to make a full-fledged sim. They never made one in the past. D4 corrected a lot of the wacky stuff in Codies physics but in turn introduced more wacky stuff in the rear axle making RWD and most other cars outside the R5 class downright unpleasant to drive.

brand new features like track degradation

They are implementing track degradation in the wrong way. Road sweeping for the first five cars, optimum conditions for cars 5-10, and horrible conditions with ruts for cars 11 to ¡150! Let's face it: when racing the AI 90% of us 99% of the time are in the top five, which makes the degradation implementation moot since most of us will only experience the road sweeping effect (unless they put the leaders starting in position 150 which means we will always be driving in the ruts. Either way, it's the wrong way to implement it. This would be the correct way:

Road sweeping for car #1.
Decent but loose conditions for cars 2 and 3.
Optimal conditions for cars 4-10
Ruts for cars 11+

And then of course there is the #NoVrNoBuy crowd. They are a minority but I support them in that any modern sim needs VR support just to show that the developer is on the cutting edge, cares about its product, and it shows technical prowess. That said, I suspect that the lack of VR in D4 and DR 2.0 is down to limitations of the dinosaur EGO engine rather than a business desicion. Codies just refuses to admit that EGO needs to be archived and they need to invest in a new engine or move to Unreal like Milestone, Bigmoon and Kunos have done. My wife tried the PSVR the other day at a friend's house and is literally forcing me to buy one so I guess I will soon be a member of the #NoVrNoBuy movement :D.

So yeah, this is all very underwhelming so far to me. I will definitely not buy day 1, especially after getting burned by D4, and no way I'm spending eighty bucks for what looks like a thin-content DR DLC.

Just my $0.02. I really hope they prove me wrong and nail the physics, give us 750km of stages and prove that tire choice and road position are more than marketing gimmicks, but Codies being Codies, I'm not optimistic at this point.
 
I mostly suppose it is all about making money, it's a business afterall....I think a hardcore Sim Racer such as myself is always going to be in the minority....'The needs of the many, outweigh the needs of the few'
 
I still cant fathom how Dirt Rally has VR support and years later Dirt Rally 2 does not....if the engine is the same and it was possible to have VR in 2015 there is no excuse to not support VR in 2018. The market for buyers with VR has to be at least 100X what it was in 2015....which makes it appear to be a very poor business decision.
 
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Codies likes to listen but have their own agenda. It's like they are suffering delusions of grandeur. They will tell us what we want to hear, but will deliver only what they want to or are told to. And about memorizing tracks, most WRC and other series are run on the same(not all) tracks year in and out, with reversal and change in exit and starts to break it up. How many times has Lamb or Monte Carlo been raced? We won't talk about Finland...
 
My expectation are low after DIRT4 which was supposed to be improved dirt rally. Another thing I am thinking about is that I really like the tyre selection, tyre wear and stage deformation, but I am afraid that these things will have negligible effect on the driving just like radiator or suspension damage in Dirt Rally.
 
Well about the heavy DR2's marketing campaign vs the unobstrusive early access of DR1, I think you answered by yourself : DR1 has been rejected by the majority of players (and sim racers have been saying that DR1 is bad since DR2 has been announced after having praised it during several years) ; so a good marketing campaign should be more effective for sales, whatever the game is. That's pretty logical. They don't do that to lose money and fire people, they do that to earn money and keep on doing games. Solid arcade racers base vs versatile sim racers, I would go for the marketing campaign to speak to the first ones lol.

About the repetitiveness of the rally tracks, well problem solved, DR2 becomes the official rallycross sim with rally content. Now it's quiet normal to race tracks and improving times.

It doesn't worry me in terms of realism but indeed, the focus is different, towards races against opponents. It may be a test by Codemasters...

Personnally, since I've used DR1 with VR and understood how much natural racing becomes (I'd always been struggling in rally games before), I can't take that title seriously and expect a lot from it ; VR is part of the simulation experience in 2018. So I'll wait for a sale as I'm waiting a good sale on F1 2018... I did it for Dirt4 and wasn't disappointed for the price.
 
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Maybe my bad, but I can't get my Fanatec to work with DR or D4 without re-mapping every time I use either game.
I have tried so many things I eventually gave up.

Current possibility of me purchasing DR2 at this moment? 0%!

Unless I find verifiable and totally convincing proof this game will support every device possible I'm not even considering getting this.
 
I feel the same way but I am very low on the excitement meter. This is looking to be more of a DR DLC than fully-fledged new game. I am worried about lack of content again. DR was way too thin on pure rally stages. On top of that they are going to divide the user base with DLC which will be a disaster for leagues/clubs (if they are even in - there hasn't been confirmation that leagues will be present and they don't answer people who ask about it).

I don't mind Rallycross but I think it's time they took RX and made a stand-alone game. I'm sick of Codies financing the RX license by "including" some rally content in DR, D4 and now DR 2.0. And now that the series is on the verge of collapse, I think it's time we get a proper point-to-point rally game. No more of this hybrid RX/rally game stuff. Codemasters has a bad enough chronic content-creation problem as it is without spending resources on RX. And despite being the second licensed RX game, it will still be four tracks short of the official season unless you wait six months and buy two DLCs.

I don't think I will pay full price for another rally game unless it has Your Stage 2.0 or at a minimum the hybrid route generator in V-Rally 4 which is a decent compromise between bespoke stages and a random generator (which is probably not feasible for rally due to difficulties it would have to create accurate pace notes). Your Stage was a great idea but in typical Codies fashion it was underdeveloped. If they had done it right with 10x more tiles and 10x more types of curves and straights it would have been a fantastic system.

Ross Gowing said in an interview with VVV that the community asked for hand made stages that we can run over and over again to familiarize ourselves and better our times. That's ridiculous. While some of the community has asked for the return of bespoke stages, many of us have also asked for a Your Stage 2.0 to go along with them because what's the point of rallying if you memorize everything? DR had only 140km of stages (not counting reversed) and the game quickly turned in to a time attack rather than a rally game. I could honestly just turn the codriver off at this point as he's no longer necessary. That's not rally and I honestly get upset every time Codies talks about listening to the community.



I don't think Codemasters is able to make a full-fledged sim. They never made one in the past. D4 corrected a lot of the wacky stuff in Codies physics but in turn introduced more wacky stuff in the rear axle making RWD and most other cars outside the R5 class downright unpleasant to drive.



They are implementing track degradation in the wrong way. Road sweeping for the first five cars, optimum conditions for cars 5-10, and horrible conditions with ruts for cars 11 to ¡150! Let's face it: when racing the AI 90% of us 99% of the time are in the top five, which makes the degradation implementation moot since most of us will only experience the road sweeping effect (unless they put the leaders starting in position 150 which means we will always be driving in the ruts. Either way, it's the wrong way to implement it. This would be the correct way:

Road sweeping for car #1.
Decent but loose conditions for cars 2 and 3.
Optimal conditions for cars 4-10
Ruts for cars 11+

And then of course there is the #NoVrNoBuy crowd. They are a minority but I support them in that any modern sim needs VR support just to show that the developer is on the cutting edge, cares about its product, and it shows technical prowess. That said, I suspect that the lack of VR in D4 and DR 2.0 is down to limitations of the dinosaur EGO engine rather than a business desicion. Codies just refuses to admit that EGO needs to be archived and they need to invest in a new engine or move to Unreal like Milestone, Bigmoon and Kunos have done. My wife tried the PSVR the other day at a friend's house and is literally forcing me to buy one so I guess I will soon be a member of the #NoVrNoBuy movement :D.

So yeah, this is all very underwhelming so far to me. I will definitely not buy day 1, especially after getting burned by D4, and no way I'm spending eighty bucks for what looks like a thin-content DR DLC.

Just my $0.02. I really hope they prove me wrong and nail the physics, give us 750km of stages and prove that tire choice and road position are more than marketing gimmicks, but Codies being Codies, I'm not optimistic at this point.

10x more tiles and 10x more curves and straights? I agree that would be ace, but you do realize the pretty much impossible amount of work that would have to be done to achieve that many tiles? They would have to come up with another solution than the first Your Stage to have as much content as you want.

Stage kilometers will always be the achilles heel for rally games.
Dirt Rally had fantastic detailed stages with soul and heart, but the amount of work meant few of them. Dirt 4 had "unique" stages but in the end it turned out to be bland, repetitive an soul less. You could drive 10 unique stages in Wales yet every stage felt pretty much the same over and over.
 
Thanks!

Yes I did not, mainly because I am afraid it would start a war in the comments and that is not the purpose of my article. I wanted to share some general doubts, but also some hopes I have about this title, as all of us do, while letting other people share theirs (in a polite way, as these are always opinions and we know very little still about the game).

I can only comment on the testing phase we did with the handling model, which was not any of the cars/locations we've seen this far.

We started out with something that felt like a slightly more dynamic Dirt 4 as a base and tested and provided feedback from there. They made changes from build to build from the feedback gathered from us testers, as well as validating with Jon Armstrong/Ryan Champion. The last build felt drastically different from what we started out with.

Now this is only my opinion, but what we ended up with feels like Dirt Rally, minus the wonky aero bits. I would say many other things have changed for the better as well.

The 4WD cars can be setup nicely at an angle before corner entry.
RWD cars are back to their glory days of Dirt Rally. Now you can dictate where you want the rear by simply use your right foot, something that was severely lacking in D4.
FWD will feel understeery by the nature of them, but nothing wrong with that.

Will it be perfect? Most certanly not. Will it be a "fully fledged sim"? Whatever that is, probably not. What it will be is an authentic rally experience with the same ingredients made Dirt Rally as appreciated as it is. I have no doubt.
 
Maybe my bad, but I can't get my Fanatec to work with DR or D4 without re-mapping every time I use either game.
I have tried so many things I eventually gave up.

Current possibility of me purchasing DR2 at this moment? 0%!

Unless I find verifiable and totally convincing proof this game will support every device possible I'm not even considering getting this.

There's a bug in Codemasters games. When you open the game, you have to press the start button with your wheel, if you press Enter, it will reset the wheel bindings. The start button on the wheel is usually the same as the one you select menus

Dirt Rally, is a very fun game, but there is still huge gap between DR and RBR .. in terms physics.

Vanilla RBR was hard just for the sake of being hard, the cars drove like they were on ice
 

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