I had another thought today after a full six hour session of WRC3 career mostly, plus training and the daily challenge. Edit: The actual game was WRC10, catagory 3 career.
A game has to be good to make six hours fly by. I think that the devs of WRC 10 really nailed the controls with that game. I should say I played 890 hours of DR2 a couple of years ago, and It's really hard to say which sim is the most "sim like."
If I had to choose I'd go with K- team (sorry forgot the name). A bit harder, but really does nail it.
Balance that against the fact that DR2 is a 2019 release. Even an incremental improvement of the Sim feel of the latest game, which I haven't played yet would make it impossible for me to really say who did the sim part (the most important to Rally fans best.) So there are 2 great Rally sim devs currently.
I'm not posting as a dev vs dev thing. They are both great. The two things that occured to me:
2. This is the only somewhat negative thing I will say about WRC10, and you have heard it before. It's the whole menu system which isn't intuitive at first. But that's picked up after a couple of sessions.
What baffeled and actually irritated me was the lack of any explanation for the advanced vehicle setups.
So many people have said this. I even went back to WRC8 for a couple of hours to read the explaination notes that pop up with each setting (springs, diffs, gear ratios etc). But when I had that mostly memorized it didn't translate well, or help much with WRC 10. The setting are either differenent or something. That's not bad. It's innovation. But if there is ever a reboot of the WRC games (I can't help but be optimistic about it.) please add popup explainations in a similar fashion or better then in WRC8.
It may seem like a small thing because I believe everything else is top notch. But as I put a lot of time into my favourite genre, and each game is slightly different in layout of adv. settings (not a bad thing - racing tech always improves, every year almost.) I do get frustrated when I could easily understand, and usually feel the differences with just a "sensible," amount of testing on test tracks and practicing, throughout WRC8 (I haven't played 9 yet.)
But in WRC10. Although I know the principles of real rally set up it didn't help too much when presented with just numbers, no reference, and defaults which are often the same. While "safe," they soon become too too beginner friendly. What I mean is I want to max out every bit of performance, although of course it is the actual driving/controls which are the biggest factor in setting good times. To be clear, player skill is the biggest factor by far, but getting a couple of extra seconds by finding an excellent set up can make all the difference.
I bet a lot of players just give up with the whole adv. tunning aspect of the game, but I would like to do that part, fully, but with explanations of approx what each setting does (like WRC 8, that was enough.) Then if I mess up I only have myself to blame and will practice some more.
Apologies for going on about just one aspect, the only negative aspect, and probably mostly for people like me who put 100s of hours into each release are the ones who are genuinly disappointed with that.
Okay, enough said about that.
Finally the games are great, and I sincerly hope that EA, together with the devs, reconsider reviving WRC games, say, in two years or so time. No major rush, plenty of content, but I would be great if in say 2027 or 2028, there was at first rumors, which quickly became true by an announcement that EA together with either dev team have decided to release EA Sports Rally 2028!
Thank you. Again, apologies for the text wall and dwelling on the one negative thing, when pretty much everything else it great.
It's just that I take the WRC games (and both Dirt Rally games, original, and DR2) in an enthusiastic time absorbing kind of way. It's a hobby, speciafically Rally Sim games.
