2023-10-31 08:47:27
Let’s be completely honest from the beginning. WRC Generations is a terrible rally game. It feels like the car is floating 12 centimeters off the ground, the shifting of the center of gravity is poorly analogized, the sense of speed is substandard, the scaling of the environments is terrible (some of the mailboxes in the game are bigger than the cars you drive through them) and The sound is catastrophic. When it was announced that Kylotonn Games would no longer be developing an official WRC game, but would instead be made by the team behind Dirt Rally and Dirt Rally 2.0, I clapped until my palms burned for days. No racing game news makes me happier than this. Now that Codemasters’ first official WRC game has arrived, I’ve certainly scrutinized every micromillimetre. Unlike WRC Generations, Dirt Rally 2.0 is an excellent rally game. However, it’s far from perfect. The car slips a little too much on the surface, grip is unrealistically poor on dry pavement on new tires, and there are too few unique stages. The graphics were and still are gorgeous, but the abundance of flowers and excessive shading made it look more arcade-y than it did in the past, which it sometimes is. In EA Sports WRC, Codemasters, led by producer Ross Gowing, attempts to solve all of these problems. The 2023 WRC cars are super fast and the chassis is super fun to drive, but the grip is a bit too high, which is certainly realistic and correct, but takes away some of the “risk” of rally racing. Here’s an ad: EA Sports WRC contains the same number of cars as Dirt Rally 2.0, the physics engine is the same, and everything else is new. Codemasters has replaced the old proprietary Ego Engine with Unreal Engine 4 (4.8), and while the team’s previous game featured 19 miles of unique rally roads, this contains over 65 miles of unique roads. Offers 17 countries, 204 stages and 82 cars, as well as a career mode, a car builder mode where you can craft the car of your dreams and allows daily challenges and upcoming races for the world’s top virtual rally drivers Of course it will be crowned. To say this game is rich or content-heavy would be a massive understatement. One thing Codemasters talked about with us at Gamereactor in February was that they managed to transfer car physics from Dirt Rally 2.0 to Unreal Engine and EA Sports WRC without loss. With more detailed force feedback and better tire physics, it was easier for me to steer the car with the brakes, and by shifting my center of gravity at the right time, I was able to put the car exactly where it was supposed to be. Part of me suspects the grip here might be a little exaggerated, but after completing the game for a few weeks and having the chance to jump between Dirt Rally 2.0 and our racing rig, I’m convinced by the actual car physics and feel behind the wheel – It’s better here, through and through. The physics of the cars have been transferred over from Dirt Rally 2.0 and further refined, with force feedback noticeably better than last time. The driving feel here is the best in the official WRC game, by a wide margin. The weight of the car, the feel of the suspension on the steering wheel and the way the tires grip the road are all very well done and while the difficulty level is high, while EA Sports WRC is difficult it’s not unforgiving as it makes the driving feel just choppy and the car Uncontrollable, I often experience Richard Burns Rally etc. in rally classics. The feeling of speed isn’t as hysterical as in Dirt Rally 2.0, but it’s very good and feels very realistic. This is partly due to the fact that the roads themselves are much narrower here. In some countries where the roads are so narrow that it feels like there are trees in the rearview mirror, driving through Japan in a 90s car takes a lot of patience and a lot of practice. Here’s an ad: The graphics are absolutely stunning at times and a bit dull at other times. For all of us who drive behind the wheel, the force feedback system (only) as well as the sharpened car physics have become tighter and more detailed, it feels like there is now a center point, a center where the weight of the car is analogized and conveyed And sporty, that’s not the case with Dirt Rally 2.0. In that race, force feedback was clearly approved, but just as noticeable was the lack of reaction on the steering wheel until the driver tilted the wheel and reached the tire slip angle. As long as all four wheels are pointed forward, the steering wheel feels dead – not the case with EA Sports WRC. The biggest and most important reason why Codemasters for this game (and for the first time) ditched their own Ego Engine in favor of Epic Games’ super popular Unreal Engine is that their own game engine doesn’t allow for more than 13km of Special Stage, while EA Sports WRC accommodates a stage twice as long. This, combined with Epic’s Unreal Editor makes level creation easier and faster, and the changes here make sense, to say the least. Along with the Ego Engine changes came the graphics of course, part of me misses the bloom of Dirt Rally 2.0 and thinks the Unreal Engine’s slightly raw, contrast and anti-aliasing issues look and style may not always be perfectly suited to rally racing , but there’s no doubt that this is a great-looking game. The beta version I played over a month ago suffered from some low-resolution textures, optimization issues, and a god ray that was able to cause the image to bleed too much, but luckily Codemasters’ talented graphics team has fixed most of the issues. There are still some ground textures that aren’t great in some countries, for example I think the sun in Mexico is very strong and it looks like you’ve turned the brightness and contrast on the TV to 100%, but EA Sports WRC looks great. Don’t think otherwise. It’s also very well optimized. Better optimized than the nearly five-year-old Dirt Rally 2.0. The 1997 WRC cars, including Loeb’s iconic Xsara, were the best in the game, and Rally Kenya was a lot of fun. The sound is also good, although a bit uneven. The sound team at Codemasters reduced the amount of reverb and instead tried to capture the true, original sound of each car model and show it through. There are more differences in sound between cars than there are in Dirt Rally and Dirt Rally 2.0, and some cars sound absolutely heavenly here. Incredibly good. While others sound a little too thin, a little too weak, I miss the gravel pads on the undercarriage. In a future patch, I hope Codemasters will throw in more gravel pads. The best part of EA Sports WRC is the stages, not only do they look more like the country they are in, more varied and eventful, they contain more turns per kilometer (on average), are more technical and therefore more demanding. Many of them are modeled at 1:1 scale on actual WRC stages and it shows. Driving a special stage in Chile or Kenya that takes 22 minutes to complete is a sweaty experience to say the least, clearly requiring inhuman concentration, and the rhythm note here is better than Dirt Rally 2.0. Jon Armstrong wrote all the rhythm notes and Jonathan Jackson read them, and he’s absolutely brilliant. The combination of new cars and old classics is top notch. A career mode was what Dirt Rally 2.0 lacked at launch, but it was added some 18 months later with the “Colin McRae Flat Out” update, which allowed us to play as Colin for a few hours and complete his journey as a rally legend The character’s legendary career. In EA Sports WRC, Codemasters has created a career mode that is more reminiscent of the career mode in Kylotonn Games’ WRC 10, and I’m sure many people will undoubtedly enjoy it. I’m not a career mode connoisseur when it comes to sim racing, and I didn’t find what was on offer here particularly interesting. Anyway, not because it was bad, but because I never really got into the different types of challenge and progression. I think it’s become a little impersonal, a little old-fashioned – and that’s the case here too. In EA Sports WRC, the builder mode where we had the opportunity to build our own rally car was a fun and informative way to gain a deeper understanding of what it takes to assemble a competitive WRC car, but unfortunately, the car The build is not subject to regulations such as WRC or WRC 2, but is more like a “fantasy car”. . There’s no real support for triple monitors yet, but Codemasters promises to have it live by the end of the year. The biggest, and perhaps the only real negative I found in this game is the damage to the cars, which is worse and less realistic than in Dirt Rally 2.0, which is disappointing. I’m pretty sure it has something to do with the WRC license and the car manufacturers complaining, but it doesn’t put me off. It’s too hard to get a puncture in this race, and it’s too hard to crash. Driving into a Finnish fir trunk at 170km/h with the True Damage setting activated, of course means the car will turn into a sprinkler, and while it appears to be launching, that’s not the case. Instead, it’s not uncommon for cars to be barely damaged by such collisions, something Codemasters will have to fix after the game’s release. It needs to happen. Codemasters and EA plan to release a new WRC game every year for five years. With EA Sports WRC, Codemasters has surpassed all WRC games developed by Kylotonn, which is certainly impressive. The driving itself is excellent, the staging is brilliant, the amount of content is incredible, and the audio-visual presentation is impressive. The menu system is nothing to shout about, and the damage to the cars needs to be repaired, but other than that, this is a great rally game that I’ll put a thousand hours into. I can already guarantee that.
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