Frankly, Codemasters went in some rather odd directions in the years that followed, and took a long time to get to grips with the current generation of hardware. It’s odd to think that it’s been over half a decade since Dirt 3 released on the last generation of consoles.
That’s not to say that the career will be generated as you play, but rather that they’re using the same building blocks rather than a series of curated stages to form the rallies.
You can set up your own championships within this, as you put together a series of conjured up stages, but speaking to Chief Game Designer Paul Coleman, it sounds like this stage generator is also being used to form the basis of the career as well. For a pre-alpha build, though, it’s an excellent indicator of what the final game can offer. It’s still due a little tweaking though, as my first effort had three noticeably similar 2 right turns when coming over a crest. It works really well, piecing together the building blocks of a route effortlessly. Then just hit the generate button a few times until you like the look of what you see, and you’re away. While you have no direct control over the stage’s layout, you can alter the length and complexity, as well as pick from the game’s five locations, the time of day and weather conditions.
It’s not the best feature name, granted, but this is an automated stage generator, giving potentially unlimited rally stages to play, set times on and then share with your friends. I do have to wonder where Codemasters can really take the game after Dirt 4, because of one simple addition: Your Stage. There’s a light satisfaction to having to force your way through them to get back onto the road, as well. Seriously overcook it, and you can obviously barrel your way through them, but they can also give just enough resistance to keep you on course if you’ve only slightly misjudged it. Perhaps my favourite tweak is with the fences that line parts of the course. In Landrush, you’ve got your race engineer warning you of when other racers are alongside you, in lieu of having mirrors.
You can have manual starts, where you hold the brakes and can be punished for a false start, and at the other end, you’re asked to stop next to the marshal (though not doing so isn’t punished). There’s also these little tickles of authenticity through the rest of the game. They can mess up a corner just as well as you can, and I was rather surprised to see a chap stood waving his arms frantically on the side of a rally course, only to realise he was warning me about the broken down car with steam billowing from under its bonnet just a few moments later. What’s nice throughout all of this is seeing a fallibility to the AI. It’s just as exacting in buggies as it is in rally cars. Eight buggies line up to fight and battle around wretchedly bumpy circuits, and it’s ever so easy to skid and slide across the sand, or lose the back end when turning and find yourself pointing the wrong way. Though we didn’t get to try Rallycross on the limited pre-alpha builds, the simulation handling also quite effortlessly suits the Landrush buggy racing mode.