I've recently been playing DR pretty frequently again on a daily basis and it reminded why I loath Monte Carlo so much. The lower tarmac based stages are just fine but when it starts to mix ice, snow and tarmac surfaces on the higher parts of Monte, it's (in my opinion) a mess. I think that it exposes DR's weakness in its tire model fairly well.
It requires a different kind of driving. Whereas the rest of the game is about keeping your average speed up, on the icy sections you need to be incredibly precise with the throttle and steering inputs. Even if you're travelling at half the speed you would on other stage, you can still get a reasonably quick time by being fastidious with the inputs.
Because there are no tropical rallies.
As has been said, it appears to be a small game made very well to gauge interest for future titles.
Not really. Each location has two areas, and while each area has six stages, there's only really one "major" stage for each area which can be run forwards or backwards, or split in half, with each half run forwards or backwards.
Necessary, really. Codemasters is a small studio, and while they made their name with the Colin McRae Rally titles and had a stranglehold on the sub-genre for nearly twenty years, other developers are stepping forward and providing serious competition. The introduction of modes like rallycross, trailblazer and gymkhana were attempts to revitalise the franchise, but nothing really took hold. Codemasters had to find a way to recapture the series' appeal whilst being mindful of budgetary and size constraints.
The one hurdle they really need to overcome is the recycling of stages. It's not as bad as it was in Dirt 3, but it's a far cry from the days of Colin McRae Rally 2.0.
Because somebody has to make the DLC. That means time and resources have to be spent on it - time and resources that could be better-spent working on Dirt Rally 2.
That may be true, but I can't help but feel that they're cutting corners a little bit. I'm mostly thinking of Dirt 3 here, and I suspect that it was a by-product of including gymkhana, rallycross and trailblazer. Codemasters are now working with eighth-generation hardware, so at the very least, there should be more space available to include content. Hopefully any sequel to Dirt Rally will realise this.
Codies is not a small company but they are not PD/T10 either. Even if they only include rally without all that gymkhana stuff it will still be a stretch to see them go back to PS2 number of stages.
I think they at least need to aim for it if they want to be the standout developer for rally games. Especially since other studios have the official licences and they're trying to recover from the gymkhana hangover.
I'm just replying to your previous post where you somewhat compared DR to the content in Dirt 3. The latter had simplified physics. The new version takes car sounds a step ahead and keeps the game running at 60 fps with highly complex physics calculations. Somewhere down the line, content takes a hit.
Assetto Corsa is a typical example of the developer choosing to deliver a pure physics-based simulation rather than the Forza approach of introducing a generous amount of cars and tracks and then see a lot of stuff being shared or copied/pasted across different cars. I think you get the idea.
), which is an even bigger limitation on content-making ability. Again, they only have 1 physics guy - Aristotelis Vasilakos.
Fewer locations with more unique stages - provided that the locations were chosen because they contributed something to the game. One of the major criticisms that was directed at the Rallye de France when it was in Alsace was that it was very similar to Rallye Deutschland. The whole thing was organised so that Sebastian Loeb could win his titles in his home town, of course, but the roads were practically identical. So I wouldn't want to see the game include locations for the sake of it.
Both CMR and V-Rally 2 had Indonesia on the PS1, but it has fallen off developers radar since.
