No rush, I’ll hopefully pick it up on sale.
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Some thoughts. I’m only 5 hours in, so I guess this is first impressions.
I spent about an hour of that, configuring the game, the visuals, and the sim racing hardware. Based on the EA SPORTS WRC discord, I thought it a good idea, to spend a good amount of time setting up the game. Moza support needed me to drop an XML file from the Moza discord, into a folder, and a restart. The only thing I couldn’t map was a button box. So, instead, I mapped car controls to a stream deck.
I’ve read and watched videos about the “poor performance” of the game, with stutters. So from the start, I dropped graphics down to high, and turned on DLSS, turned off motion blur, mirrors down to low, crowd low, reflections low. The game engine seems to peg, one CPU core. This leads to a CPU bound game, most of the time. Keep this in mind when you are trying to tweak graphics settings. You can confirm this by checking CPU vs GPU usage/utilisation. If your GPU is under 60%, it’s wait for frames to process, and your CPU can’t keep up. The in-game stutters on a stage, are related to unreal engine 4 doing the shader compilation when you start the stage. Which means, subsequent runs of the same stage, won’t have stutters. Supposedly, this will be fixed in the next week. If you don’t want to deal with these once-off-stutters, wait a week.
Rally school was fine. The bar is very low. Seems aimed at those that know nothing of rally related driving techniques. Career is career. Very similar to Kiloton’s WRC Generations. So, it’s about more than just driving. It’s team management, finance management, repairs, engineer skills, all the stuff I couldn’t care less about. This isn’t a knock. This is a preference. Car builder, seems great, till you notice, that most cars online, look samey. 
Again, I don’t care much for this. Seems nice enough.
But enough about the all this other fluff. How does it drive? The cars handle like the drivetrain layouts, they are. Every car has distinctive feel. The force feedback is excellent, communicative, weighty, and doing all the right things, as you dance your cars over crests, jumps, bumps, harsh road shoulders, through ruts, ditches, and the like. That same moment to moment tiny corrections, that you need to take a corner well, is here too, just like Dirt Rally 2.0. It’s said, smooth is fast. What they don’t tell you is, it’s the car’s line through the corner that needs to be smooth, and to do that, your wheel handling on a dodgy surface, is anything but smooth. To make these corrections, you need good force feedback, good enough to convey what the car is dealing with. And it does that, in spades. The caveat is, spend a good amount of time, testing FFB settings. As it stands, it looks like the default setting, has FFB dialed up to 11/10. So perhaps, if you had good FFB settings in Dirt Rally 2.0, know that they translate fairly well to this game. I just ported my settings over, and it was like coming home. The time you put in here, will most likely determine how much the driving will blow your mind. The thrill of driving without knowing the stage is phenomenal. Gravel and lose surfaces, have a good progressive break away for the tyres. It is what this game is good at. The feeling of throwing a 4WD car hard into the a left, to load up the tyres, so that you can use the added grip and car’s inertia for the follow-up hairpin, is superb. Game on the whole is more grippy than Dirt Rally 2.0. Although, I would describe it more akin to having a planted car, than being on rails. Tarmac is improved. I’d call it it an upgrade over Dirt Rally. You mostly know what’s going on. The way the tyres let go, is more abrupt than gravel. Snow, seems fine too. While I did drive in those conditions, I mean, what does a South African know about snow? It does feel like there’s more grip than gravel. Which tracks about right, considering snow tyres have spikes. Snowbanks I still need to test. I didn’t manage to have a close shave, with the “powdery snowbanks”. So I don’t know if it sucks you in, like Dirt Rally 1 or it’s more forgiving, like Dirt Rally 2.0.
Pace notes have improved. There are more to describe what is coming up. But you can also change the type of notes, to simplify things for yourself, if you want less complicated detail to fry your brain, while trying to control a car trying to murder you. This is way too early, to conclusively say, but so far, the pace notes haven’t had any glaring errors.
Camera options seem about the same, though FOV seems a tad more detailed. I think I also saw some more mappable controls for for camera related things, than the bare minimum. You can definitely find camera configuration with the options available, that work for you. They still don’t have lock to horizon though.
I was going to do all the career stuff, until I found the clubs again. This time around though, we have the website analysis tool to elevate your community club experience to levels, no other rally game can match. You can rewatch your run from a club, against a competitor, and even switch camera angles 
YOU CAN WATCH SOMEONE IN COCKPIT VIEW!! 
I chatted for a solid half hour with someone about a run last night. Also, all the sector split times are available this time, in the leaderboards, so the stats nerds can deep dive. Heck, you can even export the csv file.
The tuning menu’s seem similar, just ported from Dirt Rally 2.0, to the new game’s UI. The same things I change in the old game, seem to have a similar effect, in the new game. :shrug: Speaking of UI. I’m not a fan. The menu is often bottom centred. I hate it. And sometimes, you are in a submenu, but it doesn’t look like you’re in a submenu, so you sit there thinking, wtf where is the options button prompt. Button mapping options are, too many to list. You can map the world of shit. It extends all the way to weird and wonderful replay controls, and even individual camera location options.
Now, 5 hours in, isn’t enough to give a definitive review. So let’s look at it like this: having driven almost a 1000 hours in DR2.0, jumping into this game, you will feel at home, everything will translate in your brain, and you will notice the driving improvements. In this scenario, you’ll be smiling from ear to ear, like you’re 13 and your crush just walked up to you and started chatting with you.
Whoopsiedaisy, that’s a wall of text.
TL;DR EA WRC with wheel, good. Time spent optimising game and setup, is well worth it. Easy left, caution rock inside
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Did you try the cockpit view?
Was it MEW club that I wrecked in? I can’t remember. Terminal Damage is a tad more brutal and abrupt in this game.
Side note: web analysis is liberating. A lot of the time, I record the rallies, for err… the record. I post 1% of them. Now I can just drive, not record, and if someone asks what happened, they can go check it on the website. Fantastic rice!!
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I did. Dont think you wrecked in the MEW event. There’s only the first two stages done, and the second one seems to end fairly normally:
DNF doesn’t show your name on the stage that you wrecked on. It’s a bug. I think it’s been reported already.
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Hopefully it’ll help resolve some of the stutters and shader loading issues.
EA have put the new game and DR2 into a Steam Complete Your Collection type bundle at 30% off. That means if you own DR2 on Steam you can now pick up EA WRC for R560.
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Bladdy PCMR elitists.
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EA Has entered the building
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Damn, again! Codemasters just can’t catch a break.
It’s R400 on Steam right now, second time it’s been this low iirc.
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So did any of ya’ll end up getting it, if so, how is it?
Aldyr posted a good writeup close to launch. I also got it then but haven’t spent too much time on it. It seems like a good update of Dirt 2.0. I don’t care much for the seasonal events or career mode, but it simulates cars in a fun way.
Performance is better after a few patches and it generally looks and plays well!
I know you asked about gamepad controls before. They’re fine. It’s hard for me after getting used to a wheel, but it seems no worse than Dirt 2.0’s at least. You aren’t going to get complete feedback like you would with a wheel, but it’s still enough to drive precisely.
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Thanks for the deefback.
As with most things @Beo , anything done with friends, is better. If you can find a club, with some people, that like to spit nonsense on a discord channel somewhere, the online clubs are truly fantastic. I humbly recommend Barrelrollers and World Rally Family communities. Barrelrollers are twitch streamers mostly with online clubs, and WRF does online rally lobbies every Sunday, for 4 to 6 hours. Usually start in the afternoon our time, and run to 8’ish, so that 'mericans can join as they wake up. Also, it’s not all aliens. Massive skill range, so don’t be put off, by the fast okes (and ladies) either.
I would however temper my expectations with the career. The experience varies wildly, because the AI isn’t dialed in nicely, presumably, because the scope of event/car/class/driver difficulty/location/weather/surface can change so much. Add in a less than stellar calendar scheduling for career coupled with confusing UI choices, and I’d say it can go from, this is great, to I’m so confused, what is happening.
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Appreciate the response and feedback, thanks.
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The game sees Patch 1.7 and Season 4 out over the next few days.
Included in the S4 trailer is a teaser for the soon to arrive addition of VR (coming at the end of April) and the availability of eSport WRC (no indication of when specifically, but the patch does include UI elements for eSport, so, soon?)
ZA is included on the list of eligible eSport nations, so I expect to see our resident alien @Aldyr and others heading any regional qualifiers and going on to the international rounds.
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