After four years since the last Codemasters rally sim, all eyes are on the studio’s first officially licensed WRC game.
Things have been eerily quiet on the rally racing game front for months now. KT Racing, formerly the developer of the official World Rally Championship titles, concluded its stewardship of the license this year before handing it over to Codemasters and EA. We haven’t seen a new off-road racing game from Codies since Dirt 5 way back in 2020, while the studio’s last sim was 2019’s Dirt Rally 2.0. It’s for those reasons that there’s plenty of hype surrounding what the racing experts are cooking up next, and we finally received official confirmation of it on Friday.
The Dirt name has been dropped, in favor of a fresh start: EA Sports WRC. The game will be revealed on September 5, and in the lead-up, its social channels dropped a short teaser of modern Rally1-class machines sending up clouds of dust on a dirt stage.
We’ve been waiting a long while for official acknowledgment of EA’s first WRC title. Last fall, Tom Henderson of Insider Gaming, who’s had a solid track record of leaks, particularly around EA’s racing games, reported that the title would include a car-building component.
In the months following it seemed that the game would see release earlier this spring or summer, but those supposed targets passed with radio silence from EA. At the time, Henderson also reported that the upcoming WRC product was built upon work initially carried out for a Dirt sequel that never materialized.
Codemasters’ WRC license deal—which was actually secured before the company was acquired by EA—was said to last five years when GameIndustry.biz reported it in 2020. The Dirt series, as well as Colin McRae Rally before it, has maintained a longstanding reputation of quality among motorsport and gaming fans, so news that the British developer was taking over the reins for WRC’s official game was met largely with enthusiasm. Present rumors suggest release before the holidays, but we won’t have to wait long to know for sure—and to see for ourselves if Codemasters has met the hype.
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