So Dirt Rally 2.0 has just been announced with an initial release date of February 26th 2019.
You can find the original tweet here which includes a minute long trailer for the upcoming title from Codemasters.
They’ve done a pretty good job of springing this one out of nowhere. It all started a few days ago with a tweet that simply read ‘2.0’.
What do we know so far?
In the trailer we see various groups of cars from basic grass roots cars (basically stock 90s VW Golf), Rally Cross (Polo, Fiesta and Audi A1) and a Group B Quattro and not much else.
As of writing, the current website for the game (dirtrally2.com) merely directs you to the various social media platforms and the trailer, but we expect more information to surface in the coming months.
There’s a blog post up on the Codemasters website with a little more detail on their plans for the game and it’s not all sunshine and rainbows.
What to expect
If there’s anything to take note of it’s that the series is going back to the ‘Rally’ titled lineage which means that gone are the generated stages of Dirt 4 and back are the meticulously crafted works of art we find in Dirt Rally.
The game has picked up a licensing deal with the FIA World Rallycross Championship and is the official game of the series, so expect a lot more RX content than before.
From the blog post we can see that on launch we’ll have 6 locations (New Zealand, Argentina, Spain, Poland, Australia and the USA), which on paper is great but note that the most popular rallies from Dirt Rally (Wales, Sweden for example) are missing from this list.
What bothers me about that is that the blog post also states that the game will have season pass DLC content, which means we’ll likely be seeing the better rallies coming at a later date, at an additional cost mixed in with other Rallycross content that you may or may not want, but will get regardless.
All in all we’re pretty excited to get another installment of the Dirt Rally series announced, even if we’re not over the moon with the initial plans for how they will be releasing content for the game post launch.