Dirt Rally Interview With Codemasters Chief Games Designer Paul Coleman

Written by Brandon Hofer on March 10, 2016

News: Dirt Rally is coming out in a few weeks on consoles and we recently had the opportunity to talk about it with the lead game designer.

Dirt Rally is currently out on PC and will become available on Xbox One and PS4 beginning on April 5. I was recently invited to take an advance look at the console version and while doing so I spent some time with Paul Coleman, the Chief Games Designer for the Codemasters Racing Team and the Lead Game Designer for Dirt Rally. During my time I was able to ask ten questions that were submitted by the community and Mr. Coleman was gracious enough to spend some extra time with me and answer all of them.

Gaming Target: Dirt Rally was released for PC a little while ago. With it being released on consoles on April 5, was there anything special added to the console version or is it in line with the PC version?

Paul Coleman: We’ve got the four rally cross cars , we have Sebastien Loeb’s Pike’s Peak car and then we have two more rally cars. On top of that we have tutorial videos and a full gravel version of Pike’s Peak. They are the key components that we have added to it in addition to some refinements we have added in over the past three months.

Gaming Target: There is rally, hill climb and rally cross in the game. Is there any chance of adding further off road disciplines such as trophy trucks or buggies?

Paul Coleman: So it’s definitely been something that we have talked about within the studio. It is something that we have done before. I think right now it is not the right thing for this game. It is something that we do always consider. I personally think that trophy trucks when done properly, kind of like when we did them in the original Dirt game actually, are a fantastic form of motorsport. I love the sound, the sheer brutality of the courses that they race on but I want to do them justice in the same way that we have done everything as best as we possibly could. To kind of do the authentic angle if we were going to do trophy trucks we would do that as well.

Gaming Target: How have the vehicle physics been changed or improved from the Dirt series that we saw on last gen consoles?

Paul Coleman: The physics changed a lot but that probably would have carried over into the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 if we made those changes when we made them because the fundamental engine is very similar. The positives from this new hardware (the Xbox One and PS4) is that we have been able to put a game out there that has been more intense than we have ever done before and these consoles just soaked it up, they are really good for that. So the conversion from high end PC to console has been a lot less challenging than we would have had before so that additional hardware has really helped us, the extra CPUs have really helped us on Xbox to get the 1080p but yeah I’m looking forward to working on these consoles again and pushing things even further.

Gaming Target: Are there any stages from New Zealand?

Paul Coleman: No, New Zealand has some of the best rally stages in the world and it didn’t quite make the cut for this but I’m desperately keen to get New Zealand in there at some stage.

Gaming Target: Will there be a demo for Dirt Rally?

Paul Coleman: I don’t know about a traditional demo but there is some pretty cool stuff you can do now with some kind of like weekend offers where players can just get ahold of the game and try it out so I think we are going to look at how things go and maybe do some of that stuff. Trouble with making a demo is like making a whole little game within itself and we really couldn’t afford that for this title. If we can perhaps give the game a free unlock for a weekend and let players experience it and get their hands on it, then hopefully that will open the door to more players playing it. (Please note this is not an official announcement of any type of weekend offering for Dirt Rally. It was just a potential idea Mr. Coleman was throwing around.)

Gaming Target: You utilized the early access program on Steam for Dirt Rally to try and get it in front of fans to see what was working and what wasn’t. Was there ever any discussion in doing something similar with the Xbox One early access program?

Paul Coleman: We would consider doing it in the future I think. One of the things that was so important for us with early access was actually finding out whether people had an appetite for this type of game and I think if we were to do it in the future, it perhaps wouldn’t have as quite the impact it had with this in terms of the direction we took with the game and the confidence it gave us going forward. So I think early access has been incredibly useful for that sort of perfect storm that we had and whether that is something that we should just do formulaically from this point on, I don’t know. I think it was the right thing to do for this game at that time. Now there are certain things that I think we should be trying and testing but whether that is early access or whether that is more of a traditional beta I don’t know at this stage. I don’t want to say that we’ll never do early access again because that is absolutely not the case. It is more it needs to be for the right reasons and with Dirt Rally we did early access because it enabled us to find out a) whether there was the appetite and b) whether the players enjoyed how the game played. We didn’t give them a buggy game and asked them for their quality assurance. We gave them a game that was pretty well polished and asked them what they felt it felt like.

Gaming Target: Traction is obviously an important factor in racing and rally in general. Forza really nailed using the rumble triggers on the Xbox One controller as a way to communicate how much grip you are getting while racing. Will Dirt Rally be taking advantage of the Xbox One’s rumble triggers?

Paul Coleman: Yeah, so, it was one of the cool extra features that is actually what you asked me before that I didn’t call out. On all pads, on all controls we have tried to give the player as much feedback as possible through the device and through haptics and when the car loses grip either at the front end or the back end, we use the motors within the pad itself to try and inform you so it kind of becomes this intuitive sense of the front end is losing grip or the back end is losing grip.

Now with the Xbox we have actually been able to incorporate you are locking your wheels up so we will vibrate the right trigger, you are spinning your rear wheels or all your wheels so we are vibrating the gas pedal. So yeah, basically because when you’re in a real car you get all of these forces acting on you that tell you what the car is doing. When you sit in front of a computer screen you are trying to drive one of these cars down one of these stages and you need more information then we are able to give you just through that two dimensional screen so anything we can give you through your hands we try and do. I genuinely think this is one of the best feeling racing games in the hands and I’m really proud with what the guys have done.

Gaming Target: Is there driving wheel support?

Paul Coleman: Yep, absolutely. If it is a wheel that has been built for these consoles then we’ll be supporting it. Now all of the stuff that we have learned about wheels that we didn’t previously have knowledge about, we’ve brought that in from the PC community and we are now giving that to the console community. Now I think the game feels pretty good on pad but I will say that if you have a wheel or you are thinking about getting a wheel, it does add to the experience in this game. That is not to say this is like all of the other sims out there where playing on a pad is quite an unpleasant experience. We have a lot of experience making games feel great on console and playing the game on console means playing it on pad so we have taken all of that experience, all of that stuff we have learned from the PC audience about their wheels and we have brought them together on what I believe is one of the strongest racing game packages out there.

Gaming Target: Is the game more simulation, arcade or a hybrid?

Paul Coleman: Yeah, I hear the term “Simcade” and it does get used in a lot of games, probably more than anywhere else. We always try to aim at perhaps something that is a bit more arcade than we would want but it always ends up being quite hard anyways. This is as close as we can get this to being the real thing but bear in mind that we are using the processing power of home PCs and consoles. This is not like you would get at a simulation at a car manufacturer where they have a server farm full of CPUs that can generate tire data and stuff like that. In terms of the overall spectrum of simulation, it is probably not doing the crazy stuff that the high end industrial companies can do but I’d say it is the best Rally simulation out there.

Gaming Target: Are there multiple editions of Dirty Rally on Xbox One and PS4?

Paul Coleman: There is the Legend Edition you can get day one. You get two bonus cars and the engineer to go along with them to get you going a little quicker.

Dirt Rally is set to be released on April 5 for the Xbox One and PS4. We should have a review up for Dirt Rally closer to release date. Will you be picking it up? Tell us what you think below.