DiRT Rally was codenamed DiRT Delta, and could have been a live service game

We recently looked back on the genesis of DiRT Rally, and the major role it played in turning Codemasters’ fortunes around. Thanks to input from Game Director Paul Coleman, we heard how the Southam-based team operated on a shoestring budget to produce one of the most popular rally titles in recent memory. 

And perhaps more surprisingly, DR was a racing game that strived for authenticity over arcadey thrills, with the developers going to great lengths to capture realistic ambient audio effects and exhaust notes.

What many fans don’t know, however, is that the project began under a different name and that discussions had taken place to make it a live-service game.

DiRT Delta

“Internally, it was called DiRT Delta,” Coleman begins. “Partly because I’m a huge Lancia Delta fan, but it just felt like a fun kind of title for it,” he continued.

“The business at the time was looking at lots of new business models. So, you know, loot box mechanics, free-to-play was right up there with monetisation,” he explains. 

“So a lot of our time was actually spent thrashing out ideas of how we could take rally and motorsport content into a more kind of World of Tanks-like economy system.

“I remember for almost a year we designed out this full manufacturer/nationality-based tech tree where you could work your way from a Lancia Fulvia all the way through to Group B rally,” he continues, describing how a live service version of DiRT Rally could’ve worked.

Progression

“You could take the forward path and go all the way from a Mk1 Escort all the way through to modern WRC, essentially by earning XP in the cars and, you know, obviously spending money,” he continued. But would fans have accepted paying for a live-service rally title? 

“If you wanted to accelerate progression, would fans have engaged with it? I don’t know,” answers Coleman.

“I mean, we know what the sim audience is like when it comes to spending money,” he said, pointing out the hypocrisy of some sim racers who spend thousands on their rig but baulk at paying a few pounds for DLC. Live service games can live or die based on their pricing structure, so Coleman acknowledges that releasing DR as a live service offering came with risks.

“If you make a game fun and you keep players playing, then the money will come over time, either through sales or because you’ve added in a gentle monetisation model that actually makes sense. 

“And the fans are looking at the value proposition, going: ‘You know what? I’ll quite happily continue to spend X amount on tracks and cars because I know that the service is outstanding and I can trust that every experience I’m going to have in there is going to be a good one,’” he hypothesises, perhaps highlighting iRacing’s USP.

Regrets

Although the game reviewed well and sold enough copies to put Codemasters on an even keel financially, Coleman regrets that the DR franchise wasn’t condensed into a long-term live-service platform.

“One of the conversations that was happening was what to do after DIRT 4. And the conversations about DIRT 5 quickly changed to ‘let’s make DiRT Rally 2.0’. And I just wish that we’d not had DIRT 4 in the middle of it. I feel like DiRT Rally, continued into a service, would have been a much stronger offering.

“I just wish we’d been able to sort of join those two things together [DIRT’s arcade experience and DiRT Rally’s authenticity] into DiRT Rally: The Service, and maybe that would have still been operating today,” speculates Coleman.

“Hindsight being a wonderful thing, but the WRC licence could have been included in that and then removed from it without it needing to stop as a product,” he lamented, referencing DR 2.0’s officially licensed successor, EA SPORTS WRC, which arrived after Codemasters was purchased by global publishing giant, Electronic Arts.

“Choices were made around [EA SPORTS] WRC that has ultimately led to it being a non-viable product for EA, and there was no appetite to continue building a rally game at what used to be Codemasters anymore, which I think is a real shame,” he concluded.

The reality is that we’ll never know whether ‘DiRT Delta’ would have been a successful live-service offering, or whether this would’ve been enough to save the franchise beyond WRC. What we do know is that Codemasters no longer makes rally games. And that’s a terrible shame.