Setting The Stage: How Dirt 4 Continues Codemasters’ Revival

With the announcement of Dirt 4 yesterday, it feels like Codemasters are firing on all cylinders once more. This has been a long-awaited announcement, after years of patiently waiting, and it’s quite a bit more than just revisiting familiar territory.

Where Dirt Rally gradually built itself up around the narrowed focus of hardcore, simulation style rallying, Dirt 4 is a much broader game in the vein of previous numbered entries. The tone has changed, though. It’s obviously not as excessive as Showdown was, but that game was an odd tangent from the more over the top aspects of Dirt 2 and 3. Though it’s got things like Rallycross and buggy racing, Dirt 4 immediately feels more sensible.

It’s difficult to tell how true that will be come June, but the noises Codemasters are making certainly suggest that will be the case. One thing that will no doubt please the more hardcore racer fans is the inclusion of the simulation handling model from Dirt Rally across the board. However, this is a game to cater to as many people as possible, so you can always pick the casual handling and lower difficulty if you’re just after some fun in Joyride’s Lap Time and Smash the Blocks modes, and complete novices are to be welcomed with open arms in the new Dirt Academy training mode.

That sim handling rings as true in Dirt 4 as it did in Dirt Rally. Taking on a stage can be a truly fearful experience, as you take in each successive co-pilot instruction and grapple with the slippery conditions. I brake cautiously, I feather the accelerator, and I just about make my way through.

Though we didn’t get to try Rallycross on the limited pre-alpha builds, the simulation handling also quite effortlessly suits the Landrush buggy racing mode. Eight buggies line up to fight and battle around wretchedly bumpy circuits, and it’s ever so easy to skid and slide across the sand, or lose the back end when turning and find yourself pointing the wrong way. It’s just as exacting in buggies as it is in rally cars.

What’s nice throughout all of this is seeing a fallibility to the AI. They can mess up a corner just as well as you can, and I was rather surprised to see a chap stood waving his arms frantically on the side of a rally course, only to realise he was warning me about the broken down car with steam billowing from under its bonnet just a few moments later.

There’s also these little tickles of authenticity through the rest of the game. You can have manual starts, where you hold the brakes and can be punished for a false start, and at the other end, you’re asked to stop next to the marshal (though not doing so isn’t punished). In Landrush, you’ve got your race engineer warning you of when other racers are alongside you, in lieu of having mirrors.

Perhaps my favourite tweak is with the fences that line parts of the course. Seriously overcook it, and you can obviously barrel your way through them, but they can also give just enough resistance to keep you on course if you’ve only slightly misjudged it. There’s a light satisfaction to having to force your way through them to get back onto the road, as well.

I do have to wonder where Codemasters can really take the game after Dirt 4, because of one simple addition: Your Stage. It’s not the best feature name, granted, but this is an automated stage generator, giving potentially unlimited rally stages to play, set times on and then share with your friends.

While you have no direct control over the stage’s layout, you can alter the length and complexity, as well as pick from the game’s five locations, the time of day and weather conditions. Then just hit the generate button a few times until you like the look of what you see, and you’re away. It works really well, piecing together the building blocks of a route effortlessly. It’s still due a little tweaking though, as my first effort had three noticeably similar 2 right turns when coming over a crest. For a pre-alpha build, though, it’s an excellent indicator of what the final game can offer.

You can set up your own championships within this, as you put together a series of conjured up stages, but speaking to Chief Game Designer Paul Coleman, it sounds like this stage generator is also being used to form the basis of the career as well. That’s not to say that the career will be generated as you play, but rather that they’re using the same building blocks rather than a series of curated stages to form the rallies.

It’s odd to think that it’s been over half a decade since Dirt 3 released on the last generation of consoles. Frankly, Codemasters went in some rather odd directions in the years that followed, and took a long time to get to grips with the current generation of hardware. However, it feels like they’re back on track now. F1 2016 was a fine racer, while Dirt Rally took them back to their purist rallying roots, something that’s being brought into the fold for Dirt 4. Now all we need is a nice new touring cars game…