izigame.me

No.
The game is marvelous to drive on but the AI will leave it with no substance. No game, no fun, no rally. Bugged, messy. *not even into the software performance yet*

AI:

Since day 1 the AI drivers are bugging out mid event or after a couple of events in championship having you in front by MINUTES on a small to medium stage length. Imagine the 20+ km ones...
90%AI
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3087422427
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3087422357
Not damage related.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3087422311
When they work, they put a good fight. I was 7 Stages in a championship, 3rd stage at Mexico on WRC1 cars at 90% AI. First event was good, after the 2nd Stage in mexico I was down in 9th. 3rd Stage, the AI performance went down the hill and I was able to go 2 + min ahead of second and leading the event by more than 1 minute...
The point of a RALLY game is to drive on many different conditions being weather, road degradation and damage management. It is NOT a rally game to drive just on Time Trial, and having no AI do drive against absolute wrecks this title into the mud for me.
Funny that it needed much more than 2h to figure the problem out after testing and tweaking options in game while settling down.
The developers have already made 2 MAJOR patches in the game and this issue isn't fixed.

PERFORMANCE:

I was not even talking about the stutters and why the GPUs are forced into max clock even when the fps is locked at 61 or vsync'd bellow 70% usage.... WHY???
The frame times are ALL over the place. Even without the shader compilation stutters, it is NEVER smooth. For a racing game, massive flat tire on that side...
...shader compilating mid.... race??? Who's bright idea was to code a game to let shaders compile mid race? Racing were objects are passing by your car less than 1 meter at 60+kph on a bumpy gravel road. A stuttering mess at every driver update because, guess what: the shaders are trashed after a new GPU driver installation and it will have it compile again.
Shader pre-compiler were introduced with minor benefits. I'd never think we would need to wait for major patches to get shaders pre-compilers. These things were something SOOO under the hood, we never had to worry about it 7 years ago. But now, it is something the developers: 'whoops, forgot. sorrey :|'
No, man... This is some new level of developing that's adjusting down peoples expectations of a working product.
This needed another 1 year to bake....but that's for ' EA SPORTS WRC 2024' or 'EA SPORTS WRC 2', right?
Will they advertise brand new shader compiler on its features as being something extra we need to celebrate to have???
Inexcusable. Codemasters new publisher has numbers on bank accounts even some whole countries would be envious of.
Licensing is part to blame. They needed the game out before the season ended in Japan.
Rushed. Crumbling. Unfinished. Missing parts.

Design:

The single player structure on this title is far better than any competition. This is among or the best racing game/simcade by its single player features alone. Seasons, custom championships, deep career team/resource management, deep livery editor in the likes of Milestone bike games (because it is on the same engine perhaps).
I was waiting for 1.3 patch to drop and expecting the AI to be fixed to give this a thumbs up by how much it brings to the table for rally games. A few days went by and the AI was solid, but today when I had some more free time, it went off rails....AGAIN.... Why I'd make a championship with these? 2+ minutes in front when I was 9th overall.... I was starting to actually play this, getting more focused, trying to mess with the setups and wait to fix my car at next service area, just for the competition to actually fall off a cliff.
There is no point.
Time Trial is not a valid game mode either. There will be cheaters soon or they already are there on the top of leaderboard with minus impossible times like it was in DR2. I'm not talking about actual fast drivers. There were stages on DR2 completed in 5 seconds... they will be here. Not even mentioning it is always blinding eyes NOON.
Stale, laboratory like, infinite retries, low level damage model. Not rally. No thanks.
This wasn't meant to be DiRT Rally 3.0 either. It is missing the grittiness, the suspension physics are by FAR the most forgiving that ever was, the damage model is MUCH more difficult to terminal damage the car, although is easier to damage small parts by driving hard.
MAYBE the devs will fix the AI at the pace of consoles patching that needs WEEKS for them to be approved and released. From now, November, next patch will come mid December in the hopes of fixing the broken AI. That is not a guarantee either.
Maybe 2024?? ....or
PRE-ORDER NOW
EA SPORTS WRC 2024 !!!
Bought this one for DiRT Rally (1) work this team have put out.
Trust is hard to recover.
3/10
Peace. Have fun.
Will update if things change.