DiRT Rally Leaves Early Access

By Rebecca Smith,

DiRT Rally has left Early Access and is 15% off! The offer ends December 14th at 6AM Pacific Time. After that point, the game will continue to be available at the Early Access price until the end of December, at which point it will go back to its full price.

Built by Codemasters and road tested over 60 million miles by the DiRT community, DiRT Rally is the ultimate rally experience. It captures the essence of what makes rally unique like no other game – that sense of trying to remain in control of your emotions, as you hurtle along dangerous, undulating roads at breakneck speed, aiming to squeeze everything out of your car whilst knowing that one crash could irreparably harm your stage time.

Every stage tests you differently, as you race on the edge of control across varying surfaces in a range of environments such as snow, ice, tarmac and dirt and as you tackle a variety of weather types. As the car suffers attrition, you need to account for mechanical damage whilst your dedicated rally team tries to keep you competitive with time-limited repairs. Stages string together and each rally becomes a marathon-like test of concentration and skill as you trust in your co-driver, chasing that ever-elusive perfect run.

DiRT Rally also includes officially licensed World Rallycross content, allowing you to experience the breathless, high-speed thrills of some of the world’s fastest off-road cars as you trade paint with other drivers at some of the series best-loved circuits, in both singleplayer and high-intensity multiplayer races.The full Steam launch brought with it the Winter Wonderland update, which offers a new rally set in the Varmland region of Sweden, soft-edge tech allowing players to lean on snowbanks, two noew cars (Hyundai Rally and Volkswagen Polo) and a string of refinements and improvements:

• The Group B RWD, Hillclimb and Kit Cars have been upgraded to v2 handling.
• Now that all cars are up to v2 spec, the Self Aligning Torque has been re-balanced to support the new handling
• We found the spanners and wrenches that adjust the seats in all of your cars. Mind your head!
• The Logitech G920 is now fully supported.
• We also changed the mapping for Gears, Look Back, Clutch and Replay on the Logitech G29.
• The Clutch, Look Up and Seat Adjustment keys have been remapped on QWERTY / AZERTY keyboards to save your fingers and thumbs
• The SimXperience AccuForce Pro Steering System is now fully supported.
• You can now tune your immersion levels by customising your OSD options, choosing between On, Countdowns Only and Off.
• The Logitech G29 wheel is now correctly listed in the controller preset menu.
• Custom Championships now reward you with the correct number of credits.
• There’s a new EULA to sign when you boot the game, which asks you to kindly behave yourself when you’re playing with others.
• Your favourite pet mouse has learnt a new trick, and can now change the livery on your car.
• If you own an Owner’s Club event, you will now correctly own the Owned achievement.
• If you pledge a wedge to an online Wager Event and the event ends while you’re on stage, we’ll give you your CR back.
• Your Oculus Rift can now be toggled to lock the horizontal orientation. Look for a flag in the hardware configuration file.
• Sliders on the Advanced Racing Wheel Options screen now increment at the same rate as the Steering and Pedal calibration screen.
• Your Service Crews are back from their training course and will now correctly setup your car for multi-location events.
• Stopped one set of Rallycross results from appearing on a Rally leaderboard.
• You no longer need to hold the headlight control to activate your lights. You can now just tap that.
• Windows accounts with accented and non-latin characters will now correctly save game settings.
• Fixed a weird bug where the camera would briefly flick back to the default position at the start of a stage after customising the seat position.
• @Kick_Up will now politely and calmly inform you if your wheels fall off, and if you’re going the wrong way.

Windows Game Patch

Written by Rebecca Smith

Rebecca is the Newshound Manager at TrueSteamAchievements, TrueAchievements and TrueTrophies. She has been contributing articles since 2010, especially those that involve intimidatingly long lists. When not writing news, she can usually be found sharpening her very, VERY, pointy grammar stick in anticipation of its imminent use. Outside of TSA, TA and TT, she works in an independent game shop so that she can spend all day talking about games too. At home, with a variety of PCs and consoles on hand from which to choose, starting with a ZX Spectrum, games are never far away there either. However, as you're not supposed to have an unhealthy obsession with just a single subject, she also likes to read and dream about owning her own tribe of minions. She'll occasionally go outside.