There’s always a bittersweet feeling as you come to the end of an era. Whether it’s your final year of school before heading off to University, leaving a job for new opportunities elsewhere or, in the case of WRC Generations and KT Racing, leaving behind a yearly rally sim franchise with a big open world racer in development for the future. Having presided over the WRC franchise since 2015’s WRC 5, KT Racing are aiming to go out on a real high point for their time with the license.
Leading the charge for WRC Generations are the new era of Group Rally1 hybrid WRC cars. In many ways, players of WRC 10 are going to be able to jump right in and feel pretty much at home with these new cars, but there are certain differences. For one thing, the hefty battery means that the cars weigh a fair bit more, adding 84kg that’s roughly equivalent to an extra passenger, but then delivering up to 100kw (roughly 134bhp) of energy deployment to more than compensate for the difference, jumping from 380bhp to around 500bhp.
In the moment to moment, you’ll notice that the Rally1 cars now have a 5-speed gearbox, but before you even take to a stage you’ll have to choose from three energy power maps that automatically feed in electric energy to your driving. Map 1 is all about maximum energy deployment out of corners, but that makes it particularly wild when on lower-grip surfaces like snow. Map 3 is on the other end of the spectrum, giving a lower but longer boost that could be preferable if you know a stage has long straights where you want a higher top speed. Naturally, Map 2 sits somewhere between the two.
Unless you directly compare WRC Generations with WRC 10, it might be easy to just pick the suggested deployment and get on with it. The biggest difference will really be felt when you deliberately pick the wrong power map, putting so much extra power through the tyres and challenging you to control the wheelspin. It will also be fascinating to see how this can affect charges up the leaderboard as the game’s best players get to grips with the potential strategies.
The Rally1 cars are a great way for WRC Generations to leave us with something fresh and new, but they sit at the summit of a wealth of content through the rest of the game. There is about as comprehensive a collection of stages and cars within this game as KT Racing could have possibly conjured up.
Since WRC 8, KT Racing has gradually added to a garage of classic cars from the history of the sport, and WRC Generations takes this to a logical conclusion point, featuring every WRC Championship-winning car from the 50 years of the sport. There’s the Alpine-Renault A110 that won the first championship, the two eras of dominant Lancias, the iconic 90s Subaru Imprezas and Mitsubishi Evolution V, all the way up to last year’s winning Toyota Yaris WRC.
Alongside this array of cars, WRC Generations naturally features all the 13 locations from this year’s championship – including a brand new Rally Sweden, as this transformed into a snow rally – but also 9 other rallies drawn from previous games in the series. That adds up to a whopping 165 stages in the game. Of course, as has been KT Racing’s habit throughout their time with the series, this reuse and revived content does mean there’s a lot of stages that will be familiar to players of previous entries. However, where it’s something like a returning stage from Tour de Corsica that was last seen in WRC 8, they’ve sought to go back and revive this location, updating the visuals for the newer game engine, and tweaking the course, down to modifying bumps and corner cambers.
They’ll set the foundations for the game’s established career mode, give plenty to play and see when diving into a quick stage, but WRC Generations also looks to the future with the Leagues mode, aiming to give fans something to engage with and play for years to come. This is a seasonal asynchronous multiplayer game mode, filtering players of similar ability into divisions and having them compete with one another. Each day will provide new stages to play, and you’ll be able to move up and down divisions over time depending on points earnt. One area that does sound a little odd, though, is that there won’t be any compensation for time played, so people that race a lot could earn more points.
Another aspect that fans will be sure to toy with for quite some time is the expanded livery editor. Debuting in WRC 10, this allowed you craft your own looks and styles for the latest and greatest WRC cars, but they could only ever be seen on your own machine. WRC Generations allows for sharing, upvoting and downloading liveries. This, apparently, has required a fair bit of convincing over the last few years to get the WRC on board, as well as the individual teams, and it’s great to have, even if it’s only for the final game.
KT Racing could have simply let their time play out with the WRC license, but ever since the shift was announced, they’ve shown a real ambition to keep building, keep growing and adding to their take on rallying. Building on the foundations of WRC 10, but with the new hybrid cars, more locations and stages than ever before, and the innovative Leagues mode, WRC Generations looks to set a new high water mark that the next rally game will have to try and match.
WRC Generations is out on 3rd November for PS5, Xbox Series X|S, PS4, Xbox One and PC, with a Nintendo Switch version due by the end of 2022. This coverage was in part thanks to a studio visit to KT Racing in Paris, with travel provided by publisher Nacon.
