When EA SPORTS and Codemasters announced they’d be eschewing their proprietary Ego game engine in favour of Unreal Engine 4 for the upcoming EA SPORTS WRC, the question was why.
Apparently, the main reason for the switch was to allow for longer stage lengths, with DiRT Rally 2.0’s seemingly capped at 13 Km. Thanks to Unreal Engine, stage lengths can now surpass 30 Km, with Rally Chile’s Arauco test reaching 34.79 Km.
For a rally simulation – and WRC was carefully marketed as a sim – realistically long rally stages are simply a must. With this in mind, surely Unreal Engine 4 was the correct choice?
In my opinion, it was a mistake.
EA SPORTS WRC’s launch issues
Upon release, WRC was beset by numerous performance and graphical issues. Stutters, shader caching and poor frame rates were real problems, mostly for PC gamers (the hardest community to please in many respects).
There were noticeably fewer graphics issues with WRC’s console versions, interestingly, hinting more optimisation was required on PC (which is understandable, given the millions of possible hardware combinations the developers had to cover).
Still, after months of development, the same issues keep cropping up. In my recent experience, while sampling the game’s ‘WRC 24 Locations & Cars Content Pack’, I encountered shader caching, especially in replay mode, but the biggest let-down for me was the game’s lack of visual clarity.
While in motion, textures look messy and indistinct, producing a washed-out look to the visuals no matter what graphics settings you choose. It’s less pretty than DR 2.0 to my eyes, and more resource-intensive. A double-whammy of disappointment.
VR functionality has improved significantly, however, as I can now play WRC with high graphics settings while wearing a headset, so kudos to the developers for bringing this up to scratch even if VR is still in beta. It’s not perfect by any means, with the occasional freeze stalling the action, but it works.
Unreal Engine exodus
This year, Kunos Simulazioni and Straight4 Studios have both backpedalled away from UE. Kunos used UE for Assetto Corsa Competizione and although ACC has been a huge success for Kunos the Italian studio is reverting to its proprietary game engine for Asetto Corsa EVO, releasing into Early Access in January 2025.
I experienced many race-ending game crashes in ACC using modest graphics settings on my mid-range PC back in 2020-21, mainly caused by CPU overload. Despite never experiencing these problems with other sims I elected to upgrade my CPU and motherboard at great expense.
It worked, but even then ACC featured graphics ‘ghosting’ in replay mode and would struggle to offer visual clarity in VR, which seemed to put off many serious sim racers.
Ian Bell, CEO of Straight4, waxed lyrical about the possibilities of using Unreal Engine 5 for Project Motor Racing (nee GTRevival). However, in May it was announced the game would instead use GIANTS Software’s game engine, best known as the basis for the Farm Simulator series of games.
“Foremost is how to align our state-of-the-art physics engine alongside the graphic fidelity that our fans demand from us.
“In the GIANTS Engine, we have found the solution: a game engine that allows us to build a beautiful simulator while ensuring framerates do not suffer as a result,” stated Bell at the time, indicating his team struggled to get the best out of UE5.
The key takeaway for me is that both Kunos and Straight4 are intrinsically linked to their ‘new’ game engines. Kunos has developed a bespoke platform while Straight4 is allied closely to GIANTS through a publishing deal.
This way, both studios have complete control over game development. If something isn’t working, they can tweak their engines at will. Industry insiders often complain about the difficulty of working with UE, so it would make perfect sense to use something more flexible.
Looking to the future
In fairness, many of WRC’s graphical issues have improved (although there’s still no ‘proper’ triple-screen support), so I’m hopeful that with this rate of progress EA SPORTS and Codemasters’ next WRC game will look incredible and run smoothly at some point in the future. I mean, just check out how the current game looks in photo mode: it’s astonishingly beautiful.
With Kunos and Straight4 electing not to use UE, perhaps EA and Codemasters should do the same. However, in terms of resources, if EA can’t get on top of the game’s graphics issues then no one can. Perhaps the engine just isn’t suitable for racing games.
EA and Codemasters’ F1 series of games still use the Ego engine, and will likely continue to do so right up until their Formula 1 licence expires in 2025 (with an option for a further two years). But beyond this, and if EA holds onto the F1 licence, will the UE form the basis of the next generation of F1 games?
Is WRC’s use of UE a toe-dipping exercise to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the engine compared to Ego and EA’s other game engines, Frostbite and Ignite? Would upgrading one of these or developing an entirely new platform be the way forward?
Looking at its various tech demos it seems like Unreal Engine can produce incredibly realistic results, but can this generation of consoles make the most of it?
EA SPORTS WRC should be better than its predecessor in every department; that’s how progress works. But for me, in terms of stability, visual clarity and VR performance EA SPORTS WRC is a downgrade on DiRT Rally 2.0.
I hope this is still not the case this time next year.
