DiRT Rally Road Book – 27/11/2015

DiRT

Darren Hayward

November 27, 2015

Hi! Welcome to this week’s Road Book. We’re mixing things up a little this week, with Paul out of the office until the middle of December I’ll be your new host on a Friday afternoon.

DON’T PANIC

Our press commitments are out of the way for the foreseeable future so it’s all hands on deck to get DiRT Rally out of Early Access. The journey to launch is continuing at rapid pace in the studio, with the team hard at work polishing up their respective areas of the game. @jamielowesdev has been tracking individual changes and integrating them into our release candidate, to make sure that one change here doesn’t break something else over there. It’s a bit like Buckaroo but with 1s and 0s. And he’s brilliant at it. The candidate is currently with our QA team, headed up by the brilliant scotch lunacy of @fish_balloon. Everyone in the studio will be “playing” the game, as you all would at home, but the QA team have a more formal set of hoops for it to jump through.

In other news, a story cropped up on Videogamer this week, with the story that box art for a physical release had been leaked by Amazon.de.

DiRT Rally may be getting a physical PC release next month https://t.co/sS9nN691TC pic.twitter.com/t7dFIyxH44

— VideoGamer.com (@VideoGamerCom) November 24, 2015

We’re playing our cards close to our chest but you can head over to the gossip thread on the forums for the full analysis. Those guys are generally on the money ;)

Kick it with @Kick_Up

It wasn’t meant to be like this. Six months ago when I booked flights to take my family on holiday, DiRT Rally was meant to be released. However as we have found a few times during our Early Access programme things haven’t always gone completely to plan and this has been no exception. I couldn’t change the flights (I’m more scared of my wife than I am of the DiRTy Gossipers) so I’m heading off for a couple of weeks and leaving the keys with @Hatward . You are in safe hands. If all has gone according to plan, when I land back in the UK you will all have an early Christmas present.

Richard Burns

On Wednesday the rally community marked the 10th anniversary of Richard Burns losing his battle with cancer. It also marked the 14th Anniversary of him being crowned the only English World Rally Champion. While we often talk about how important Colin McRae was to us here at Codemasters Richard Burns was also a hero of that time. He was often seen to be the polar opposite of Colin and you could argue that those differences carried over into the games that carried their names.

It was extremely important to us to get Richard Burns’ championship winning Subaru Impreza included in DiRT Rally and I am delighted that we did so. He is still an inspiration to us and I’m sure he holds a special place in many of your hearts too. The charity set up in his honour does amazing work so if you can spare the time please pay a visit to their website and see what you can do to help out: http://www.richardburnsfoundation.com/

That’s all from me this week. I have no idea if I’ll have any internet connection where I am going so I may be off the grid. My apologies in advance if I’m not responding to you on Twitter or the forums. I’ll try and catch up on my return.

Thanks Paul. Bring us back something nice yeah?