STACK June 2017 Issue 152

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DiRT is a rally
racing
franchise. It’s all about
going hard into the corners,
praying it’ll stick, and hoping
you’ll come out the other end
in one piece. The game’s story mode
has always been a franchise focus, and
according to CGD Paul Coleman, DiRT 4’s
campaign is the series’ most in-depth yet.
“You start off after leaving the Academy
in some local events in Michigan, before
spreading your wings and heading to other
rally locations around the world. You’ll then
get invited to Landrush, Rallycross and
Historic Rally championships.” He says it’s
up to you how you tackle the campaign.
“You can play through the whole game
as a driver for hire, taking on team offers
and earning cash and reputation along the
way, but you can also start your own team.
This opens up a whole suite of additional
elements. You can design your own livery,
choose your team name, hire (and fire)
staff. You can buy facilities that improve
your team’s chemistry, and allow you to
take on bigger challenges, and of course
you can buy vehicles.”
One of the biggest changes headed to
the series is DiRT 4’s newYour Stage. Your
Stage is a mode that allows procedural
generation of tracks for you to cruise
around on, and the idea’s been floating
around since the days of DiRT 3.
“We were becoming increasingly
frustrated with how many
unique stage miles we were
putting in our games as it was
never enough for our fans.
With the new hardware, we
wanted to think differently about
how we built our stages.” Your Stage
will be all about player preferences. “It
really is an amazing piece of technology.
We wanted it to be as immediate for
players as possible, so you choose your
stage length and then set the complexity
and hit ‘Generate’. It’s practically instant,
and you get a preview of the stage you are
about to run. If you don’t like the look of
it just keep hitting generate until you are -
it's as simple as that.”
Additionally, there’s a new handling
mode that Coleman hopes will help ease
newcomers into the game. “With DiRT 4
we’ve developed a new ‘Gamer’
handling model which helps
new players get to grips with the cars. This
isn’t us just throwing a load of assists on
the sim model and driving the car for you.
We’ve actually done a lot of work to make
sure that the cars are as fun and rewarding
to play as possible while using Gamer
handling.”
Landrush also makes a welcome return.
“Landrush is based on Shortcourse racing
seen mostly out in America. We’ve
built our own tracks, but they take
features seen in all of the best tracks
out there, and combine them into a
heady mix of jumps, banked corners
and mogul style washboard sections.”
“All of these elements mean that
whatever skill level or experience players
have, they should be able to find their feet
and get competitive within DiRT 4 without
any barriers to entry. We have found
that players who start by using Gamer
Handling get familiar with the game and
eventually switch over to Simulation
handling to experience the deeper, more
challenging vehicle dynamics.”
Paul Coleman
What do the pros
think of DiRT 4?
Kris Meeke
Oliver and Petter Solberg
For DiRT 4we have worked with
Kris Meeke (current Citroen WRC
driver), and Petter Solberg and his son
Oliver, who also races rally and rallycross.
Petter was 2003 World Rally Champion
and 2014 and 2015 World Rallycross
Champion. Getting their insight on the
tweaks we have made to our simulation
and making sure that we have dialled in
the setup of the cars as tightly as possible
has been a vital part of the
development process.”
• DiRT 4
is out June 9
If you don't like the
look of [the track] just
keep hitting generate
until you are - it's as
simple as that