Dirt 4 - good, bad and indifferent?

[leonidas]

Anyone dipped into Dirt 4 yet? Any views?

I only really picked it up for the World Rallycross, which is really good - S1600, Supercars and Group B. The handing seems reasonably authentic and taming the rear end on a 6R4 is rewardingly difficult.

For me the rallying section is more mixed. The stage generator tool allows for rallies of 12 stages and around 100 stage miles which is a big plus. There are some great detail touches - cars stopped on stage, animals in road, insects on windscreen etc. The fwd and 4wd cars seem to have very accurate physics - challenging but fun to drive. Stick to these and it is an outstanding game - perhaps as good as Richard Burns Rally.

Just don't mention the rear wheel drive cars ... hopelessly modelled, with far too much rear end grip...

[BertMk2]

I'm tempted - but I'd need to get a PS4 and I can't justify it for the amount of time I have available for gaming at the moment.

[Akrapovic]

I'm finding it frustrating due to the amount of rear grip all the cars have. FWD cars require no corrections at all, the rear has so much grip that if you break traction it'll find it again. 4WD cars understeer like a pig, and RWD cars can't break traction.

It's disappointing because the RX cars drive brilliantly. But there's something clearly wrong with the rally cars.

Stage generator is good, but there is repetitions which can be quite obvious. Australia and Wales are fun, Spain is terrible. The AI are so slow at AI that you can roll your car and still win by 20 seconds. A bit odd that one.

If they sorted the rear traction issues and did a little more work on the stages, it'd be great.

[ExplodeTheApex]

Been playing it almost non-stop for a week now! Definitely some weird physics going on, and the base in-game settings for my Thrustmaster T150 wheel was undriveably heavy, but on the whole I'm really enjoying it! Not perfect by any means, but a great way to kick-start what is shaping up to be a tantalising summer/autumn for racing games.

[chunder]

Being a massive fan of Dirt Rally

I would not touch this with a bargepole

It is a console friendly arcade game, with poor handling of the cars, the stages all look samey and the physics are nothing like as awesome as they were on Dirt Rally.

You can adjust things apparently, but everyone I know who has tried it prefers Dirt Rally.

Agreed some parts of it are great, rallycross is improved, tarmac feel is too, and other things.

But overall a step backwards from DR, to appease the masses.

Wait for the bargain bin, plus by then it will hopefully have been improved and you will get DLC cheap too.

[leonidas]

Well finally had chance to put in some time and...

If you are a Rallycross or Off-Road fan it is worth buying for the 5 WRX tracks and the 3 Landrush / TORC tracks. The physics are good here and its a fun product

The rallying is a very mixed bag. The Group A 4wd cars and the R5 are fairly convincing. Stick with these and you'll probably enjoy it. But the rest? It is like they botched the other cars to get the product out of the door in time. It is not even that the physics are dumbed down - the Lancia Fulvia has impossible snap oversteer on dry tarmac, whereas the Escort has understeer. Seriously, have these guys ever watched rallying?

[leonidas]

Not sure if anyone is still interested in this but it is very revealing (from about 30:15):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wT7g5fqh8Ec

Basically the devs are saying the modern cars were finished but we didn't have time to fix the historics properly... claiming they didn't have drivers who could offer real feedback. A weird excuse - I suspect there are a dozen people on this rally forum who could have provided real-world feedback. Seems like they just added a feeling of weight without sorting out the implications of that for the overall handling model.

Didn't have time to fix it doesn't really wash. I'm glad these guys are doing computer games and not working in my local garage...

[chunder]

I would imagine they were hampered by a delivery time.

The game by all accounts is not very good, it's a console game, like most are these days.

And all the extras are in there to make multiplayer more interesting for console players, as they are not really are they.

I would not touch it with a barge pole and it will very quickly fall from grace.

I never understand why developers release games that are wrong, unfinished, faulty. Why do they do it?

Because people are idiots and will pay for anything these days, developers do not do demos anymore and you cant try before you buy, all you can do is take it back, or do you few hours Steam refund.

[Akrapovic]

But DiRT Rally was also a console game. I played it a lot on the X1 and it was great. DiRT 4 isn't a console game - it's just bad. It commits the worst crime possible...it's boring.

The game isn't unfinished or faulty. It works just fine. It's just not what they said it would be. The "sim" side of it, is not based on DiRT Rally, that is for certain. The cars drive absolutely nothing like DiRT Rally, despite what they said. That isn't a bug, that isn't unfinished - that's just how they made it. They just blatantly told lies about what the sim side would be like, despite proving they can do it with DiRT Rally.

Unless DiRT 4 gets a patch to fix ALL the cars, not just historics, I'm pretty done with the series. I skipped D2 and D3 (got them free in a humble bundle later though) because it wasn't what I was after. DR was absolutely brilliant and won me back. They said D4 would take the best of both worlds, and they just ignored the DR side of it.

[leonidas]

We were so infuriated with this, we had another look at it this weekend.

Oddly enough if you do the following things it starts to seem to handle very much like Dirt Rally (we swapped between the two while playing):

1. Only use the Wales and Australia tracks

2. Only use the Group A Impreza, Delta, R5s or Group B.

3. Set the weather to rain.

4. Set the car up with plenty of toe-in (front and rear) and move the brake balance and torque mapping towards the rear.

You will then get turn in oversteer (and some power on oversteer) and plenty of lateral sliding, much of which feels quite realistic.

So it seems to me that it just wasn't finished - not that the physics engine is comprehensively broken.

[chunder]

Akra

DR was mainly a PC game, it was released on console because we all said how great it was on PC, and they only released it after they had some online content to put in it.

But it was developed and accessed solely on PC.

They would say anything to get you to buy Dirt 4, and there are areas of it that are good, but the reviews I have seen have said it is not worth buying, so I wont touch it.

I understand their reasons, but they made DR unmoddable pretty much and that is where it needs to go now to allow it to flourish like RBR did.

But they wont do that as I expect in time they might release another DR.

Hopefully by then the WRC licence is up for grabs and they can do a proper job rather than the half baked effort DR was in terms of content.

[crossfades]

I actually thought of buying a Xbox or PS4 just for this game, I was so excited when they announced it. But after seeing some gameplay and comments I feel disappointed, it seems to be nothing of what I had hoped.

It is weird though that the game turned out like this when both Solberg and Meeke apparently worked on the handling. They are both very skilled drivers and I know Solberg is an avid Dirt gamer himself so I expected it to be quite realistic.