Although its recent ‘EA SPORTS WRC 24 Locations & Cars Content Pack’ has shown that EA SPORTS WRC is heading in the right direction, I still feel the game could do with a few key features and content.
With further ‘Le Maestros Content Pack’ and ‘Hard Chargers Content Pack’ DLC arriving in late 2024/2025 the identities of four new stages coming to EA and Codemasters’ rally sim (including Fafe, hooray!) are already known, but we’ve yet to receive any information on which vehicles are in the works.
I run through our most wanted EA SPORTS WRC features below, for this current platform or if a sequel is in the works.
Pacenote tweaks
After recently playing Rallysimfans’ Richard Burns Rally mod to celebrate the game’s 20th anniversary, I was immensely frustrated by WRC’s rigid pacenotes system.
In RBR, you can modify pacenotes to your liking. So, depending on the car you’re using, the stage’s condition, tyre wear, or the weather, you can create a bespoke set of notes to help you navigate all the mud, blind crests and inflatable arches (sorry Ott).
In EA SPORTS WRC, however, the notes are the same for every car and condition, with some completely incorrect. I often find myself taking ‘four lefts’ flat-out in fifth gear in a Rally2 machine, for example, or taking ‘one lefts’ in third gear for a whole stage until I arrive at an actual ‘one left’ and drive straight into a tree.
I find the notes are too inconsistent to be reliable, meaning you must rely on memory to judge your speed effectively. This is fine for shorter stages, where you can learn every corner after a couple of passes, but on WRC’s 30 km+ tests, it’s a hard task.
Rewind
This brings me to suggest the ability to hit the rewind button mid-stage would be a good addition to EA SPORTS WRC.
There’s nothing more frustrating than getting through a 32 km-long ribbon of gravel only to bin it on the final corner because your co-driver is apparently reading the wrong page (see above). Over ten minutes’ worth of effort for nothing.
So, why not implement a rewind facility?
Rally sim diehards will scoff at this idea, and as a former pro sim racer I do too, but this feature (which you could always switch off) could help the title become more accessible to those who don’t share the same nerdy fetishism for rally realism. Crucially, this avoids fundamentally watering down the driving experience.
Roll the action back a few seconds before disaster, learn from your mistake and keep going. It’s the best way to prevent a bout of wheel-snapping frustration. It’s supposed to be fun after all, innit?
Enhanced replays
This seems astonishing, but the weird replays you found all the way back in DiRT Rally still haven’t been fixed. What am I talking about? Well, the automatic replay jumps between camera angles at an alarming rate, like the virtual director has drunk several espressos the morning after an all-nighter with Colin Clark.
Setting up the camera positions in a more measured way will help make the replays more watchable, but being able to save them for posterity would be far more useful.
There’s nothing worse than driving a stage to perfection only to accidentally click back through to the main menu without watching your Alen-esque display. This has also been missing since the DR days so is due a fix.
Super special stages
Super special stages are sadly absent in EA SPORTS WRC, as they were in DiRT Rally 2.0. These are shorter, snappier stages designed for spectators to get a feel for the excitement of rally cars up close.
Examples include Rally Portugal’s Lousada, which is a rallycross track set up for head-to-head running; Rally Finland’s Harju, set in Toyota’s home city of Jyväskylä and Oulton Park, site of Rally GB’s 2019 event-opening stage (and where I got stuck in a muddy car park afterwards).
Super special stages would be ideal for learning new cars or working on set-ups, as they can be learnt and completed quickly.
Kylotonn’s former WRC games had SSSs. Anecdotally, Traxion was informed by that team that it went through all the effort of creating long stages, only for the statistics to show that the short blasts were the most replayed.
The thrill of racing against another rally car in WRC, as they do at Lousada, would be truly epic.
Dynamic weather
Picture the scene: you’re leading the rally by a minute on the final stage of Rally Portugal. You’re 21 km through Caminha, with 10 km to go. Nice and steady, no risks.
It starts raining heavily, the road is flooded and your car is now a functional boat. Oh bums.
You get to the time control having lost your lead and the rally, including all Power Stage points, the weather having affected your opponents much less due to their earlier road position.
That’s the potential power of dynamic weather. Your tyre selection would be influenced by a pre-stage weather forecast supplied by specialist staff. When will it rain? You can choose to trust their judgement or take a punt. It could work out well, or end in disaster like the scenario above.
Stages where day turns into night would also be welcomed, ensuring players look after their light pods as darkness descends.
Unexpected moments
What do I mean by ‘unexpected moments’? Well, hobbled cars driving slowly through the stages, wildlife running across the road, inflatable arches lying across the racing line (come on now, that one’s just too far-fetched).
Flying through a stage only to see your biggest rival parked up with an engine problem – or worse – would bring a new level of realism to the game, forcing players to have a new mindset for the remainder of the rally. A system analogous of this theory was in 2005’s WRC: Rally Evolved.
For example, Richard Burns almost threw away the world championship in 2001 after passing Colin McRae’s battered Ford Focus on Rally GB. The Englishman lost focus (ironically) and slid into a ditch soon after, but luckily continued.
New stages and cars
This is an obvious one, but I’m sure most EA SPORTS WRC players would agree they’d like to have more stages and cars.
For me, the missing Hyundai i20 and Toyota Yaris from the WRC Plus-spec category are huge losses, alongside many Group A and early WRC-era cars like the Mitsubishi Lancer Evolutions II, III, IV and V; the Toyota Celica GT-Four ST205, the Hyundai Coupe Evo and Evo 2 and the Škoda Octavia WRC.
The upcoming ‘Le Maestros Content Pack’ could be a tribute to French superstars Sébastien Loeb and Sébastien Ogier, so perhaps famous cars from their career could make an appearance? For example, the Citroën DS3 WRC Loeb piloted to the 2012 world championship, or maybe Ogier’s Citroën C3 WRC?
Iconic rally stages like Ouninpohja, Sweet Lamb, El Condor and Panzerplatte would be welcome additions too, as would environments from DR 2.0 such as Wales, Germany and Scotland.
Get rid of Unreal Engine
Now this is quite controversial, but many WRC fans wouldn’t mind seeing the back of Unreal Engine.
When WRC was released last year, the game was beset by graphical issues including share caching, apparently caused by the switch from Codemasters’ proprietary Ego game engine to Unreal.
DR 2.0 looked good and ran well on lower-spec PCs, so to see WRC struggling to maintain consistent frame rates on even high-end machines was immensely frustrating. In motion, WRC also looks a bit washed-out and blurry: it’s all a bit disappointing.
As I found recently, the situation has improved over time but after much consideration, I’d have to say DR 2.0 looks much sharper and cleaner than WRC (although lacking a photo mode), something that carries over into their respective VR modes.
According to the developer, the engine switch allowed for longer stages. Which is great, but should that have been at the expense of graphical fidelity? I happen to think not.
What would you like to see added to EA SPORTS WRC in future? Let us know in the comments below.
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