DiRT Rally Road Book – 27/05/15

DiRT

Lee Williams

May 27, 2015

Here it is, the first Road Book following the launch of DiRT Rally V.0.4, more commonly known as the Pikes Peak Update.

Here’s a rundown of everything we added in yesterday’s pack.

The world famous Pikes Peak – Built from the ground up in its full-fat modern tarmac state (the first time in a video game) and the mixed surface variant we all grew up loving. We’ve also included a variety of weather conditions and three iconic Hillclimb cars to add to your garage.

You’ll find that we’ve rolled Hillclimb into our Championship mode; it will crop up from time to time in our Online Events and you’ll now be able to select it in Custom Events and add it to your Leagues.

That’s not all though, we’ve also made some improvements and additions to the rest of the game including:

Some of our AI drivers have got fed up with watching you driving so well so expect some of them to start trying to rival your performances and giving you more of a run for your money.

A few changes in the UI where we’ve labelled the stages in custom events ‘Long’ and ‘Sprint’; new players will see little pop up tutorials on first visit to each game mode (don’t worry they aren’t unskippable videos). We’ve also added some new messages in other areas of the game so you know what’s going on.

We’ve changed how your engineer slots unlock so that they now pop based on distance driven rather than cold, in-game cash. If you’ve already blown a load of cash on those slots… sorry!

Custom Events will now use the fully upgraded versions of a car rather than the poor man’s version and we’ve made sure that your favourite livery will be stored for the next event.

We’ve also added in some new liveries including the Rallysport Development wrap for the Fiat 131 Abarth, the Peugeot Sport livery for the Peugeot 205 T16 Evo 2 and the Phil Collins Rally livery for the Ford Escort Mk II. Teams like these were kind enough to give us access to their awesome machines during development and without these guys and the rest of the rally scene here in the UK, DiRT Rally wouldn’t be the game it is.

For the full list of everything we’ve changed, added and fixed click here.

Kick it with @Kick_Up

Seeing as it’s becoming a regular feature I’m going to give Rally Co-Driver and DiRT Chief Game Designer Paul Coleman his very own section. Here’s what he has to say this week.

“We’ve had a pretty hectic week getting everything ready for our first content update. While it wasn’t as terrifying as pushing the button on the launch pack it was still pretty exciting to see the buzz around the studio.

Again, the initial feedback has been great but I know that a few of you we’re disappointed that we didn’t put the FFB update into v.0.4. There were a number of reasons for this but the main one is that we need to get all the configuration and options screens in place and that takes time.

While this is early access we didn’t want to be rushing through changes and causing more problems than we are fixing. I plan on giving you all more info on this and the changes we’re making next week.”

DiRT Weekly Bug

So we got a little carried away in the v.0.4 update and in our excitement to push the button on giving you six stages we didn’t anticipate that it would cause an issue for everybody who completed the weekly before the update.

The short version is that if you took part in the weekly before the update you won’t be able to do the two new stages (unless you reset the event from the details screen,) if you have started the weekly since the update then you won’t have a hope in hell of beating the players who did the older four stage version.

Now we could have wiped all the four stagers from the leaderboard but that wouldn’t be fair on those who already finished it so what we’re going to do is base this week’s rewards on only the first four stages (if you started after the update you’ll still need to complete all six to register a result).

Next week everybody will run the new and improved six stage event.

DiRT Show

If you missed yesterday’s DiRT Show you now watch it again below. In this month’s episode we talk a about Pikes Peak, Rallycross, Germany and so much more (we even let a few upcoming cars slip).

Over to you

We had our very first bit of fan art this week! It’s called “Left five over jump” by /u/Shinojii and we love it! We love it so much in fact that we’re going to send you over some DiRT Swag!