DiRT 4's claim to fame was done better in 1999

  • Thread starter die996
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Did you know about DiRT4's lack of innovation BEFORE reading this?

  • Yes

    Votes: 1 25.0%
  • No

    Votes: 2 50.0%
  • Sorry, too young to have played a PSX game

    Votes: 1 25.0%

  • Total voters
    4
  • Poll closed .

die996

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I was talking about racing games with some friends and the DiRT games showed up. I told them something and everyone was very surprised. I checked out news and nobody mentioned it, nothing either in GTPlanet's forums so, here it goes, DiRT 4's claim to fame was done better in 1999.

The year is 1999 and the French team that made the simple yet successful V-Rally game are releasing V-Rally 2. The game is way deeper, with more countries and cars, better physics and a somewhat more serious approach to rallying, this time including half-decent tuning capabilities, non-circular stages and even a realistic rallying mode with time trials and a damage system. Eden Studios knew that Codemasters could be beaten and they tried their best.

One of the places where they really surpassed CMR was the amount of stages, then they decided to blow the competition to pieces with a level editor where you could create stages and circuits and the co-driver would still give you the right notes. How did they achieve those 2 things? Well, it's somehow easy to have a large amount of mileage in a game where the scenery is actually incredibly generic, that also helps making that level editor a reality.

The scenery in V-Rally 2 is not done piece-by-piece, it's just a generic background and not a very varied one. Each country has TWO backgrounds for both stages and circuits that follow the route from beginning to end plus an extra one for the superspecial stage (if the country has it). Although it feels repetitive once you've played like 4 stages/races in the same country, it's still a whole lot less repetitive than in DiRT4, where you can see the exact same piece of scenery several times in the same stage. Also, V-Rally 2 was a CD/cartridge game, not a lot of room available.

"But DiRT4 also had the capability of creating almost-infinite stages" I hear you say... and that is also stolen and done worse than in V-Rally 2. The 1999 rallying game's level editor allowed the player to handcraft infinite stages but the player could also set a bunch of sliders and auto-generate them! There is a total of SEVEN sliders, each with 7 positions, plus an extra option. Users could auto-generate stages depending on length (short/long), types of corners (tight/wide), average speed (slow/fast), elevations (size of crests), bump frequency, bump altitude, overall elevation (uphill/downhill) and whether they wanted a point-to-point stage or a loop. Also, you can use the exact same combination in the sliders, hit auto-generate once more and the game will create something new every time. You can't race AI drivers on your created levels but you can drive them and the co-driver will give you mostly the right notes.

HOW DID NOBODY NOTICE IT!? WHY DID NOBODY MENTION IT!? WHAT IS WRONG WITH GAME JOURNALISM!? DID Y'ALL START PLAYING GAMES IN THE PS3 ERA OR WHAT!? DiRT4 must be one of the least innovative games ever made. :banghead:

I don't remember V-Rally 2 using the "rockface with flag" object 6 times in a 3-minute stage.

 
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HOW DID NOBODY NOTICE IT!? WHY DID NOBODY MENTION IT!? WHAT IS WRONG WITH GAME JOURNALISM!? DID Y'ALL START PLAYING GAMES IN THE PS3 ERA OR WHAT!? DiRT4 must be one of the least innovative games ever made. :banghead:

They probably didn't mention it because it's really not that big of a deal. Just because someone has done something in the past doesn't mean nobody else can do it. And just because something has existed doesn't mean there can't be innovations regarding that feature.
 
Of course V-Rally would do it better. We're dealing with a modern game that is more or less handicapped by a game that still has elements of PS2-era components within it's engine, and maybe most importantly, the people that bought D4 after DR1 wouldn't have accepted anything but real stages (Which in the time honored Codies tradition, is just one long stage cut up into smaller and smaller chunks) so yeah.

My Stage would have been quite good if Codies had actually put some work into it beyond what they did in D4. But, like so many other things, it's just another foot note.
 
People noticed. There’s 18 years between the games. Codemasters never claimed to be innovating a brand new feature, just a new way of doing it.

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