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DiRT Rally interview: Making the best rally-sim
DiRT Rally is one of the most immersive rally games ever made – find out how Codemasters did it.
DiRT Rally
© Codemasters
One of the most immersive racing games ever made, DiRT Rallyrepresents a dramatic shift in gear for veteran sim studio Codemasters. After the showy, arcade-like experience of the popular but unrealistic DiRT series, DiRT Rally returns to the gritty side of rallying that made the first Colin McRae game so legendary.
So, how did Codemasters turn things around and produce one of the best rallying games ever made? And why did it feel the need for such a dramatic U-Turn? Red Bull Games spoke to chief games designer Paul Coleman to find out.
“I've always wanted to make the best rally game ever made,” says Coleman matter of factly. “I've been here since 2003 trying to do that – and I'm not going to say that the games I've worked on in the past weren't great rally games – but I always felt like I could improve on that.”
For Codemasters, DiRT Rally was about returning to its gaming roots. For its next title, Codemasters would create a hyper-realistic representation of the sport, first portrayed in Colin McRae Rally. Despite a gap of around 20 years, both DiRT Rally and the original game still bear a striking number of similarities. Both games heavily feature the endurance element of rallying, and both titles seek to make rallying a flurry of quick reactions, nervous acceleration and all out attack. “The original high level design document for DiRT Rally is almost a carbon copy of the original high level design document for Colin McRae Rally,” he reveals.
How did Codemasters set about transforming the Hollywood-esque DiRT series to the hardcore rally-sim that DiRT Rally now represents? Much of the direction for the project came from active rallying-fan Coleman. Amateur co-driving gave him a unique insight into the essence of the sport, and meant he knew exactly what the DiRT series was lacking. “[Co-driving] really opened my eyes to some of the stuff that would have been quite easy for us to do but we hadn't represented in the past,” he says.
“In the past, to put a rally stage together we'd go to the location, where we knew it was a good location for rallying. We’d take pictures of all the trees and the buildings and then we'd sort of make a Walt Disney version of that track.”
Although great for racing and short-term adrenaline, the neutralised, arcade-feel of DiRT proved less able at capturing the demands of rallying. By attempting to make stages more driver friendly and “enjoyable” Codemasters lost the feel of negotiating your car through the elements – and neglected the interaction with the stage that made the first game so unique.
DiRT Rally
© Codemasters
“We'd make the trees a safe distance away, and the experience felt very distant from the car. But then as a result you had to make the car drive faster to make the experience feel more like rally again,” Coleman admits. “By making a decision at the beginning, we then ended up having to make five decisions to try and bring it closer to the experience we were trying to represent."
For DiRT Rally, Codemasters realised that the undrivable tricky nature of stages is what makes the sport so addictive – and Coleman agrees: “By taking that step back and getting our level designers to look at the road and then embrace its fallibility a bit, that's where we actually realised that it was more exciting that way,” he says. “Everything sort of falls into place and feels more natural.”
Rather than sanitising the rough and ready nature of stages, in DiRT Rally, Codemasters has faithfully preserved a key element of the rallying genre – and made it the star of the show. Drivers are invited to attack stages and find time, but negotiating the car through crevices, potholes and tree-lined trails forces players to respect the elements – and rely on quick reactions. For Coleman, Codemasters’ new ethos is about things like “trees feeling like they were actually causing a threat rather than being part of the environment,” and it’s forcing players to up their game.
DiRT Rally
© Codemasters
DiRT’s new, challenging stages were everything their designers hoped, but Codemasters soon realised the driving machinery was lacking. Although great for the idealised ‘Walt Disney’ stages of the DiRT series, Codemasters' existing physics model couldn’t cope with the new, perfectly imperfect stages. “We found that people were really struggling to drive the way that our cars used to drive down those narrower roads. So we took the next step which was to revamp our simulation engine and essentially get it to a point where those cars could drive down the stages.”
Cars now handled more truthfully than ever, but with increased physics came a need for improved realism – and Codemasters was more than up to the task. Fully realised in and out, DiRT Rally features the most advanced car models in the franchise’s history – and Codemasters’ commitment to detail can be heard as well as seen.
“The guys have set up listeners in various places around the car” explains Coleman. “They might put a microphone next to the exhaust, they'd put a microphone next to the inlet, and the engine and then something inside the interior – so they know where the sounds are coming from. If you're behind the car they'll give you more of the recording that was done from a boom mic behind it. The same logic was applied to inside the cabin.”
As you'd expect from a team determined to go the extra mile, the resultant sounds aren’t simply played back in the game; the team also modelled the reverb in each stage. In the new game, the sound of cars echoes for miles around, and the interaction between car and stage is even more true to life.
DiRT Rally
© Codemasters
With graphics and gameplay tuned to perfection, Codemasters next focused on the most important – but often forgotten – element of rallying; endurance. Something captured perfectly in Colin McRae Rally, the idea of your car constantly being eroded by the elements was dropped for the DiRT games – but it’s back in DiRT Rally. “That sense of getting to a service area and patching your car up and going back out again,” says Coleman. “They're all things we kind of left behind along the way that we've repackaged into the experience. I think all of those choices speak directly to what rally is and therefore make the experience feel more coherent as a result.”
With each aspect of the game now firing on all cylinders, DiRT Rally is still accelerating forward, and it’s using a community of the most obsessive, hardcore fans to do it. By using Steam Early Access, Codemasters has gained rally-sim enthusiasts as co-drivers, and their feedback is making the game even better.
“We're reacting to the feedback we're getting from the fans, the things people are asking for, so we had a list of things of that we hadn't got into the game by the end of April, that we wanted to put in as designers and developers, that has now been completely superseded by a list of things that our community have asked us for.” Fundamental aspects of the game have been tweaked too. After input from fans, Codemasters has completely rewritten the force feedback code for steering wheels – and the result is a more poised, connected feel.
DiRT Rally
© Codemasters
What’s more, the ability to add content as and when has even allowed Codemasters to cherry pick the best bits from the outgoing DiRT series, and incorporate them into the new game’s pinsharp physics engine. Germany has entered the DiRT Rally calendar, and a recent partnership with the FIA World Rallycross Championship means players will be able to access rally cross stages, and race each other on the same dirt tracks – just like the DiRT series. “It’s the three things we know players loved about DiRT, the rally, the rally cross and the hillclimb – so we've brought the best of all the worlds together.”
Codemasters looks well on track to creating the best rally game ever made, but after improving content and gameplay, what’s next? Coleman seems to think the future could partly lie with VR solutions like Oculus Rift.
DiRT Rally is already compatible with the Oculus Rift, but Codemasters is already working on optimising the technology, and Coleman thinks it could add another groundbreaking layer to the rallying experience. “With rally, obviously, you spend a lot of time going sideways, and being able to look at the direction of the road you're going in does really help with that. But probably, the biggest change that you notice when you switch to VR is when the car goes up a hill,“ he explains. “Our tracks have a lot of gradient in them, but we don't necessary reflect that as well as we could do, so VR really highlights that. So the car moves with your head remaining still, and you have to kind of adjust yourself.”
