WRC9 Codemasters Secure Official WRC Licence

[Paul Jeffrey]

Big news for fans of the FIA World Rally Championship - Codemasters have today announced they have secured the rights to bring the official WRC games to console and PC.

Reportedly beginning from 2023 in a five year exclusive deal, the studio have captured the rights to represent the FIA World Rally Championship for current licence holds Kylotonn Games, with the new IP expected to slot in alongside the current and highly popular DiRT Rally franchise.

The news was broken earlier today by gamesindustry.biz, and further details aside from a potential 2024 release date have yet to be made public by Codemasters or the WRC.

With DiRT Rally 1 & 2 having firmly laid the foundations of a solid claim to Codemasters off road credentials, it looks like the future of the official World Rally Championship in digital form is in very good hands indeed....


Original Source: gameindustry.biz

Codemasters F1 and DiRT Rally series of games are available now.

Want to chat about the various official rally games currently available? No worries, head over to the WRC 9 sub forum and let us know your thoughts today!

 

[shimon.ifraimov]

oh great another exclusive deal

 

[RufGTI]

I don't know... the current WRC cars are great but by 2023 the cars will be either much more standardized or even electric. Doing a virtual representation of the series will also imply that the amount of other/classic content will decrease significantly compared to Dirt Rally 2.0.

 

[Thomas Lambaerts]

To be fair if it's sim based, they just need to build good assists to keep the attention of the casual racers. They only need to be aware to not make the assists faster than without

 

[Slapped]

I really hope that Codemasters realise that this needs to be Dirt Rally WRC and not Dirt WRC.

 

[zi99y]

Could be interesting to see what they come up with, evolution of dirt rally might be worth having. Though not having any competition in that area could be an issue.

 

[cteters]

Speechless.

 

[Tim Meuris]

Awesome, not much into rally anyways. I feared codies would have the license to that future btcc game. I hope chances for a decent developper for the btcc license have become bigger now.

 

[David Jessat]

Official WRC cars and stages with Dirt Rally quality.

Sounds great to me!

I take it you are referring to image quality stagewise? Because WRC 8 stages are way more interesting and realistic imho, Codies stages bore the pants off me...hopefully they take a few steps in the right direction there, improve tarmac physics and lay off this horrible DLC policy, then I'll be as hyped as you^^

 

[Ole Marius Myrvold]

I see many users here talking about catering the game to a big audience but I think that won't be the case. Rally is way smaller than F1 so it has less of the casual fans/drivers as a target group. Therefore Codemasters can make a game aimed more towards the sim group which follows many racing categories anyways while many F1 fans are just interested in Ferrari go vrrrrrroom

Seeing how popular DiRT Rally 1 was, you might actually have a good point here!

I take it you are referring to image quality stagewise? Because WRC 8 stages are way more interesting and realistic imho, Codies stages bore the pants off me...hopefully they take a few steps in the right direction there, improve tarmac physics and lay off this horrible DLC policy, then I'll be as hyped as you^^

Codemasters stages are based on real stages though. While WRC stages are semi-based IIRC?

Also, DLC policy. I guess they will do like F1 games, sell liveries etc as DLC (and probably things like Legends edition etc). But not cars and stages like DR2.0.

 

[Eckhart von Glan]

Basically good news, but let's hope the tarmac WRC rallys in real life die out first. Just kidding. I totally love Dirt 2 on gravel and snow and feel sort of undecided about the tarmac stages. But, overall, probably a good thing for playing racing games.

 

[jcarrasco]

I'm actually really hyped about this even though i love WRC8, please have vr.

 

[jcarrasco]

I see many users here talking about catering the game to a big audience but I think that won't be the case. Rally is way smaller than F1 so it has less of the casual fans/drivers as a target group. Therefore Codemasters can make a game aimed more towards the sim group which follows many racing categories anyways while many F1 fans are just interested in Ferrari go vrrrrrroom

This does make sense just by looking at the sales difference between DR and D4

 

[Vadara]

Finally. Now the license is free from that clowncar Kylotonn that took FIVE games to make a not-terrible one.

 

[Dave Thayer]

Excuse my ignorance to Rally games(since I am not a big follower of this kind of racing), but what is going to be the difference between these FIA WRC games, and the Dirt Rally 1 and 2 games that I currently have. Just curious.

 

[Vadara]

Excuse my ignorance to Rally games(since I am not a big follower of this kind of racing), but what is going to be the difference between these FIA WRC games, and the Dirt Rally 1 and 2 games that I currently have. Just curious.

Codies will be able to make stages in the official WRC events without the FIA throwing a bitchfit, for one. Also they can now have the official up to date cars.

 

[Case_]

I always love when people say WRC series stages are so much more realistic than those in Dirt Rally, where the DR stages are a very close recreation of real stages and roads, while the WRC stages are vaguely inspired by them at best, and sometimes with a fair bit of artistic license too.

A great example of the "reality is unrealistic" trope I guess.

 

[David Jessat]

Codemasters stages are based on real stages though. While WRC stages are semi-based IIRC?

Also, DLC policy. I guess they will do like F1 games, sell liveries etc as DLC (and probably things like Legends edition etc). But not cars and stages like DR2.0.

I can't really put my finger on it but it is not about the path the stages take, it is more about how they look, how narrow the track is and what assets like vegetation and stuff on the side of the road looks like. In WRC 8 you don't have to tell me that I am driving a german stage, it does look like Germany, in DIRT 2 I actually do recognize the the way it goes but road surface, wideness and things like roadsigns look wrong. On top of it DIRT stages have always looked assembled from finished parts to me. And while the graphics engine in DIRT is certainly superior it just looks less realistic - apart from cars, oviously

 

[Julo26]

Even though it’s really popular to hate on whatever Codemasters do, just ask yourselfes: Who in your opinion, would’ve done the official WRC game better? Kunos? Well they’ve done well with ACC with Blancpain licence, but have zero experience with an actual rally content. Same goes for Reiza, or SMS, no to mention S397. Like it or not they are the best studio out there to do an official WRC title. At least that’s what I thought. And then I open this thread, and the very first comment says that it will take them five years to get it right. Come on, who the hell says stuff like this? There is no other existing company, that has that much experience in rally titles, and if you know WRC games history, you know that giving the license to small studio is a big mistake. Because ironically it’s Kylotton who needed four years to sort their game out. And yes, Codemasters aren’t perfect, and they make a lot of plainly stupid decision, wnich I could’ve made a full list of. But that’s not the point. The point is that even though they make plenty of mistakes, they still deliver the best rally experience currently out there. Whetver you like it or not

 

[M D Gourley]

Personally I really don't care too much for the dirt series any more....although I am some what interested in the use of the madness engine with it's loose surface physics as I think it will really enhance the experience.

Too bad codemaster and SMS struggle in the ffb area, hopefully during the next 3 yrs Reiza will give them some tips in that area.

Absolutely agree.....I feel Reiza are the magic Sim dust for Codies FFB / Physics (personal opinion only}...and I think the Madness Engine loose surface physics is quite good....interesting times ahead.

 

[Patrik Marek]

they did decent job with Dirt Rally , so why not I'm excited