DiRT Rally Road Book – 08/01/16

Hi everyone, and welcome to the first DiRT Rally Road Book of 2016! We hope you all had awesome Christmases and New Years – preferably with a fair amount of playing your favourite rally game. Also, hello to the new players who’ve joined us over the Christmas period – welcome to the club, and we hope you enjoy your new ‘brilliant looking and incredible sounding racing sim’ (IGN’s words, not ours).

It looks like you guys have been getting busy on DiRT Rally over the festive period – before Christmas, you’d clocked up an impressive 113,925,757km driven, and today the total stands at 126,033,443km! To put the distance in perspective, between Christmas and today, you’ve clocked up enough virtual miles between you to cover around 302 round-the-world trips. Not bad, eh? However, we’ve gone from a total of 2,990,048 barrel rolls to 3,389,294 barrel rolls – so looks like you guys have been pushing it to the limit (and sometimes over!) over the past couple of weeks too.

With a new year, also comes a new Social Media Manager – so it’s about time I introduced myself, after lurking in the shadows for a couple of weeks. You might’ve noticed Facebook and Twitter becoming a little more active, and a new name popping up on the forums and on Steam – and that name is mine. So hello all – my name’s Christina, and I’ll be your new community person over the weeks and months to come. I’m a huge gamer, particular when it comes to racers (Colin McRae Rally 2.0 is the game of my youth), so I’m super-pumped to get to know you and DiRT all a little better. Please feel free to swing by and say hello!

Anyway, it’s back down to business after the Christmas break here at Codies – so I’ll hand you over to Paul Coleman for an update on what’s been going on in the studio:

Firstly let me wish you all a very happy and prosperous 2016. Despite everyone coming back into the studio having consumed their own body weight in Christmas treats we have had to hit the ground running this week. It was great to get some time to reflect on how awesome 2015 was however we have got our work cut out to make sure that 2016 is going to be even better.

The first priority has been to get the console version ready for its first round of submissions. As this is the first time we have gone through this process with the current consoles we are starting the process a bit earlier than we normally would so that we can get used to it. Throughout this process we are fixing plenty of bugs and issues and anything that affects the PC version is being incorporated into a new build for the PC. We’ll be able to talk about that more in the coming months.

Screenshot of the week

This week’s shot comes from Steam user B. Costa, who appears to be absolutely nailing this hairpin in the Focus.

Video of the week

The video of the week comes from real life rally driver, Jon Armstrong, as he rags it around Sweet Lamb in the Hyundai i20. The Northern Irish 21-year-old won the Vatanen Touch Award last month – an accolade just a fraction less prestigious than getting a nod in the DiRT Rally Road Book, of course. Congrats to Jon for winning the award – we look forward to seeing a lot more of you on track.

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