DiRT Rally Road Book – 06/11/15

DiRT

Paul Coleman

November 6, 2015

Hello again and welcome to another Road Book. This week finally saw the release of the Modern Masters update and I hope you guys are enjoying it so far. We know that some of you are suffering from issues and we are working hard to get to the bottom of them.

Let it snow

Despite the fact that we only released Modern Masters on Monday the team have already been hard at work on the Winter Wonderland pack. As has become customary, I’m going to hold off telling you what cars are going to be in the pack so that the gossipers have something to discuss over the coming month. It’s always fun reading the theories behind the car list speculation and I have to say that there have been some great guesses out there already.

Softly sideways

With the Sweden stages we’ve followed pretty much the same formula that we have done with our other locations and chosen some of the most iconic sections of road for you to tackle. The stages are narrow, so picking your line is vitally important. We’ve managed to get our snow banks feeling soft so that you have a bit more margin for error but you aren’t going to be able to take liberties with them. On the inside of the corner if you take too much of a cut at speed you are in danger of getting spun out. On the outside you can lean on the banks but lean too heavily on them and you’ll still end up in the deeper rougher stuff on the outside of the corner. This isn’t the tessellated stuff that we had in DiRT3 that made no impact on the way the car drove, this is much more about the simulation than the visual look and I hope you like the way it feels.

I know that many of you have been frustrated with those rally ending moments in Monte Carlo stages where you ramp off a snow bank and plunge into the ravine. The positive results from Sweden have led us to look into tweaking these stages too. It’s a slightly different problem as for the most part in Monte Carlo the snow is piled up against a more solid object but the initial results look positive and I hope to be able to talk more about that in the near future.

Colin McRae – Tribute to a Legend

This year marks the 20th anniversary of Colin McRae becoming the first British driver to be crowned World Rally Champion. To mark this anniversary there is going to be a huge stand at Wales Rally GB in the Deeside service park that will be displaying a selection of his cars and other memorabilia. To help out with this display we have agreed to lend them our D-Box set up so @Hatward and I will be loading up a transit van and heading to Wales on Monday morning (hopefully the road trip will be less dramatic than our trip to Barcelona). If you are going along be sure to check it out and set a time on the leaderboard.

V0.9 Modern Masters recap

Just in case you missed it here are some of the highlights from the Modern Masters pack:
• New R4 class with 2 cars (Subaru Impreza WRX STI & Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution X)
• 2 new cars added to 2000s class (Ford Focus RS Rally & Citroën C4 Rally)
• v2 Car Handling on Group B 4WD and Group A
• Stage distance and elevation is now shown in stage information screen
• Steering rotation in cockpit now matches actions of player when the driver arms are not shown.
• Manual control for headlights and wipers
• New liveries featured on some cars including the Repsol livery on the Lancia Delta
• Grid Order and Assists added to session options in PVP

Screenshot of the week

To celebrate the release of the Modern Masters pack here is Fantastic Potato running the Evo X through Greece.

Video of the week

One of the lesser known features of DiRT Rally are the occasional rocks that appear on the stage to catch you out. Well this video from Quejki captures one of these moments perfectly (be warned, there is some bad language in this video)