EA Sports WRC Is Dead—And With It, the Legacy of Dirt and Colin McRae Rally
EA Sports WRC will receive no further updates or new content, and Codemasters has no sequel in the works for the 2023 rally sim. The post EA Sports WRC Is Dead—And With It, the Legacy of Dirt and Colin McRae Rally appeared first on The Drive.
What was once viewed as a match made in heaven for rallying fans and gamers has officially run its course. EA Sports WRC, developed by the same team at Codemasters responsible for the Dirt series, has ended support. The Hard Chargers content pack, which was released in late March with new vehicles and stages, will serve as the game’s final expansion.
“For now, we are pausing development plans on future rally titles,” a message shared Wednesday on the game’s official website reads. “Rest assured, EA SPORTS WRC will continue to be available for existing and new players. We hope it remains a source of joy, excitement, and the thrill of rally racing. We’ve poured our hearts into making it for fans, and we know you’ll keep the passion alive.”
EA Sports WRC was released in October 2023 and marked Codemasters’ first rallying title following the British racing game studio’s acquisition by Electronic Arts in 2021. It was also the first time that the former Dirt Rally team had the full backing of the official World Rally Championship license. At launch, it was a polarizing title; the developers switched from the familiar Ego engine, the technology that served as the backbone for all of Codies’ rally experiences dating back to the original Dirt in 2007, to Unreal Engine, and this caused some problems.
This decision was supposedly made to allow for longer stages and larger environments, but it came with a marked visual downgrade, as well as game-breaking performance flaws, at least at launch. PC games built with Unreal Engine often suffer from a phenomenon gamers have come to know as “stuttering,” for various technical reasons we won’t get into here, and EA WRC was simply a poor experience on day one, no matter how beefy your machine was.
Codemasters addressed those issues in time, and have continued to support the title up until last month with new content, supplementing the massive roster of tracks and cars it already had. Late last year, a very sizable expansion, titled EA Sports WRC 24, was released, with the World Rally Championship’s newest cars, teams, drivers, and rallies.
Still, it’s safe to say that the minds behind Colin McRae Rally and Dirt, lavishing their decades of experience making rally games on an official WRC title, never quite made the splash you would’ve expected, say, 10 years ago. Codies acquired the exclusive WRC license in 2020, right before EA took ’em over. A planned sequel to Dirt Rally 2.0 evolved into what eventually became EA WRC. EA’s exclusivity deal with the FIA supposedly runs through 2027; given that today’s announcement explicitly says “we are pausing development plans on future rally titles,” it seems that both parties will either have to strike an agreement for EA to release the license, or we shouldn’t expect any new WRC games for the next two-and-a-half years.
Interestingly, the official WRC Instagram account put out a message of its own in tandem with today’s news, saying that “our WRC gaming franchise is going in an ambitious new direction with more news coming in the near future.” Perhaps the license will change hands before 2027, and the sport has some kind of contingency plan in place for its digital product. We’ll just have to wait and see.
Long Live Codemasters Rallying
What is clear is that, for the foreseeable future, the long legacy of Codemasters rally games is finished. It started with Colin McRae Rally for the original PlayStation in 1998. Colin McRae Rally 2.0 was perfection for its time, with top-tier physics, visuals, and artistry that truly pushed Sony’s machine to its limits. The series debuted on the PlayStation 2 and Xbox with Colin McRae Rally 3—my personal introduction to the franchise—and saw iterations every year until Colin McRae Rally 2005, a game that many longtime fans still consider to be the series’ zenith.
When the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 hit, Colin McRae Rally transformed into Dirt, an off-road racing game that traded a singular focus on rallying for multidisciplinary variety. It was certainly less realistic than its predecessors, but it was a bona fide showcase for the new generation of hardware, with gorgeous motion blur, lighting, and extensive damage modeling. Dirt 2 tapped into rallying’s burgeoning appeal as an extreme sport, particularly in North America, with the full endorsement and participation of legends like Ken Block and Travis Pastrana, following McRae’s sudden, tragic death in 2007. Dirt 3 upped the ante, and in the decade since, the brand was reinvented into Dirt Rally, with a renewed focus on simulation.
This news will certainly be hard for longtime fans of the developer to accept, but it’s regrettably not at all surprising. EA bought Codies four years ago for its ownership of the Formula 1 license; in the years since, it’s slashed away at every group at the racing game house working on anything that isn’t F1. The teams responsible for Dirt 5, Grid Legends, and now EA Sports WRC have all either been gutted or their personnel rerouted to different projects, like the upcoming Battlefield game. Need for Speed is also in limbo, with its developer, Criterion Games, now once again assisting with the massive multiplayer shooter. And it’s not like the strategy of throwing everyone into microtransaction-laden war and battle-royale-type software is working for the publishing behemoth. Just yesterday, EA announced a total of 300 layoffs, a third of which impacted Respawn Entertainment, the folks behind Apex Legends.
It’s been said many times before, by many people more plugged into this industry than I am, but it always bears repeating: Modern, triple-A game development is unsustainable. We’re going to see a lot of talented people continue to lose their jobs, and many beloved franchises fade away until something changes.
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The post EA Sports WRC Is Dead—And With It, the Legacy of Dirt and Colin McRae Rally appeared first on The Drive.
