I was so sure I had pre-ordered a copy for my wife… I guess not. At least I didn’t see it on my gifts management panel or on her account.
I ended up buying it for her this morning and it’s downloading on my HTPC for her.
She’s actually really excited to play. I think we’re going to have a full house tonight though, so she might play single player tonight and join us on the weekend.
I’m going pwn you guys!
Specially beef.
Hmm, apparently the game supports split screen on PC. That means I can have 4 people total playing it in my living room!
Gonna see if I can invite some peeps over later this week.
I don’t like the gymkhana events, at all. They’re so boring, and impossible to play from the cockpit view, and the game forces you to play them. And I hate the gymkhana announcer that keeps calling me amigo.
I do anticipate we’ll be overbooked during the first week, we’re looking at like 13 potential players and 8 slots in the game. I’ll try to be fair about it and book first come first serve and rotate in the people who’ve been waiting the longest. Contact me if you’re interested in playing tonight, I figure we’ll get started around 7-8 eastern.
What the heck are the gymkhana events?
I must of missed this in the coverage.
Gymkhana is this. I’m surprised you missed it, they were pimping it pretty hard in the promos.
Edit: Haven’t played the single player yet but I’m told you can go through your career and never play any gymkhana besides the tutorial if you don’t want to.
Alright, so, initial impressions. Keep in mind I love dirt 2 and have very high expectations for this game, so this will be mostly negative - I expected all the awesomes, so I’m focusing on the stuff keeping it from being the greatest thing that ever happened to humanity.
I’m only a few hours in so these thoughts are provisional. The driving physics with all the assists off are more challenging by a bit and probably better than dirt 2. The track design is different - they do a lot more to force you to stay on the path, with drainage ditches on the side of gravel roads or roads cut out of rock or dirt that make for embankments on either side. I guess they were trying to prevent people from winning by cutting the tracks going too far offroad too often - and dirt 2 did punish going offroad too little - but I think they may have gone too far, making it too punishing to drift off the path a bit.
Otherwise the driving feels pretty good. There’s definitely a different feel for different cars - the current super twitchy compact hatchbacks feel much different from the old 70s rally cars. Group B cars maybe aren’t quite as wild as I expected - I thought they’d be like the RS200 in dirt 2 where you felt like you were trying to ride a bull and were always barely in control.
The weather effects are aesthetically awesome but don’t impact gameplay enough. Rain pools up on your window and then gets wiped away, but the effect is too subtle. It’s more like a drizzle than a storm. I was hoping there would be some pretty severe weather effects so that you could put yourself in cockpit view and struggle to see the road in front of you, adding a lot of challenge. As it is, it changes the aesthetic more than it adds to the challenge, although the wet tracks do make for a handling challenge. Speaking of which - snow isn’t that hard to handle on, it isn’t that much worse than gravel. I’ve only really done the snow tracks on super modern compact cars though - maybe in those cars, with the advanced traction control systems and snow tires, it really isn’t that hard to drive in snow… when they did the snow rally on Top Gear it seemed like they were pretty nimble. Hopefully some of the older, less advanced cars have a harder time on snow.
Night mode is dissapointing. The ambient light is way too high, you could get around on the tracks without headlights which is way too much. You can turn down your own gamma to make the experience better, but that doesn’t help for multiplayer when you’d just be handicapping yourself. I was hoping it would be dark enough that wrecking your headlights would end up almost guaranteeing death, and for you never to really know what’s coming around the next corner until your lights hit it - but as it is it isn’t that challenging. Similar to the weather effects, I wonder if they were too worried about making the game too hard. You can set night and weather effects on any track, which is cool - one problem though is that night is considered a type of weather, so your options are morning, day, night, rain - you couldn’t have rain at night.
Biggest dissapointment: There are no raid tracks like Kasbah Run and Rwang Trail in dirt 2. Those are the ones that feel mostly like rally tracks but offer simultaneous start with multiple paths throughout the map - violent, but more like rally tracks than closed in stadium type tracks. We had most of our best games on those tracks and for them to be gone is pretty hugely dissapointing.
Second biggest dissapointment: There’s no longer any way to mix car type and event type. Dirt 2 allowed you to use custom combos - you could race stadium trucks on rally tracks or trailblazer cars on landrush - but in dirt 3 you can only use the appropriate car type. This means land rush tracks will only ever feature trucks and buggies. You can’t play the party mode games with trailblazer cars. etc. This also means you can’t mix event types in one event - we used to do a mix of like a rally race, rallycross, raid, domination, rally - but now all the races in an event have to be of the same type. Dissapointing and a pretty big oversight - it would be trivially easy to enable it in the game. I started a thread on the official forums to plead with them to re-enable this.
The party modes - definitely a cool change up. Capture the flag is going to be the best one - it’s crazy and violent and a lot of fun. Flags spawn randomly on the map, and capture points spawn randomly too - you race to the flag, and everyone else tries to ram you to steal the flag for themselves. You get a point every time you return a flag to the capture points.
Invasion is sort of the new gatecrasher but not too good - I’d rather have gatecrasher back. Cardboard robots randomly spawn around the map and you try to beat other races to crushing them.
Infection I haven’t played yet - but it’s a zombie type - one guy starts out infected and tries to hit other people, who then become infected and try to infect the others. Not sure how it’s scored.
The rally stages so far are very good - they’ve got some good track design. There are too many short tracks under the 2 minute mark, and not nearly enough over 3 minutes. People tell me a lot of parts of stages get re-used in other parts, but I haven’t played enough to get a feel for it yet.
There’s a new team game mode that may prove very interesting called cat and mouse. It’s a mode with two teams, red and blue. One person from each team is that team’s mouse - they get a minicooper and start a few hundred yards ahead of everyone else. Everyone else is a cat, in a group B car, which is more powerful than the minicooper. The goal is to get your mouse to beat the opponent mouse to the finish line - the 3 cats can hunt down the enemy mouse and continually wreck and disrupt him to let your mouse get ahead, or defend your mouse on the other cats. It’s actually really fun and makes for a real teamplay component. The frustrating thing about this is that while it doesn’t work on rally tracks, there are probably 8-10 rally tracks it does work on. That means those 8-10 rally tracks have a set up for a simultaneous start raid style race. Which means they could very easily enable those tracks to support raid races, but just don’t. Just like the mixing car types/events feature, they could just flip a switch and have the game be so much better.
Anyway - like I said, I’m mostly listing the dissapointments. Otherwise this game has been pretty awesome and we’ll have a lot of fun with it.
Oh, forgot to mention - go to My Dirt, live marketplace, and download the free car pack. It’s stupid that they make you do that, but it’s a leftover from the used sale thing with the console version where you don’t get online play and those cars unless you buy a second voucher code. Anyway just downloading that for free gives you 5 extra cars.
Also, I created another thread on the codemasters forums asking them to turn those cat and mouse compatable tracks into raid tracks too.
Gah. So I saw on the official forums that there was a live chat with one of the lead devs of the game so I got a question in.
I don’t understand why not. It’s almost no extra development effort and increases the replayability of the game drastically.
So multiplayer is still awesome. They never even mentioned the Cat and Mouse game type in their previews but it’s probably going to become one of the favorites.
I’m going to try to get another game going tonight around the same time. I’ve got 14 people on my friends list with the game now so we should be able to fill it again no problem.
Edit: Torus rented us a dedicated ventrilo server so we can start using that for games. That’ll allow us to have some overflow for people waiting to get in the game - as it is my vent server only holds 8, so occasionally I have to tell people to get off to make room for other players. But this way we can have our people playing and other people on talking to us while they wait to get in. Cool, I’ll send the info around later.
We’ve had full games going for 3 nights for quite a long time each night, it has been a lot of fun. The inability to mix car modes and track types, and different race types in events is a big downer since dirt 3, but the new modes (the party modes and especially cat and mouse) add a lot of fun anyway.
Is it me, or does it seem like this game’s ghosting system seem overly conservative? In dirt 2 you’d ghost if someone was obviously griefing like driving backwards on a track to take people out, or sometimes if someone was backing out of being stuck on some rocks off to the side of the road and someone else was passing them … but in this game it seems like even in events like rallycross it ghosts you a lot instead of making hits in normal circumstances. I’m not quite sure what they’re going for.
The Gymkhana stuff is more fun than I expected. The tricks themselves individually aren’t very fun, but stringing them together tony hawk style can be challenging. I’d recommend everyone get far enough into the game to do the gymkhana tutorials at the end of season 1 so that we can play them online sometime.
I am liking the game but finding it a bit too arcade-like for my tastes. The twitch factor is high. The cars, rather than feeling solid and heavy, feel more like RC-racers. Zipping to-and-fro and slipping and sliding at the slightest provocation.
I especially noticed this in cat and mouse. I felt like my car was on ice and even coming at someone head-on a little twitch from them at the last possible moment and it was a complete miss.
Mostly probably cuz I suck but still…
With my new CPU I can record 1080p fraps videos without lagging while we dirt, so I’m going to start making more highlight reels of our antics.
We’re all going to have to get together again and do some 8 man cat and mouse to get some awesome videos. I’m busy this weekend but I’m thinking maybe wednesday.
In the meantime, I give you the epic cat and mouse finish from our game tonight.
I scheduled a game for Wednesday. Let’s try to fill the game so we can create some good videos.
Made a few videos. A pretty good transporter (capture the flag) game. A Cat and Mouse game through a narrow, snowy Norwegian track, and 2 minutes of me owning the hell out of Torus.
I have a long video with a bunch of highlights from various cat and mouse games but I need to work out an encoding issue tomorrow.
Sorry I missed it (RL got in the way). Hopefully I’ll be able to make the next one.
Yeah I missed it too. My tonsil was swollen to twice normal size. Feeling a little better now after some ABs so hopefully I can make the game tonight.
Oh, Whack a Mole: Thanks so much for frozen synapse, heard really good stuff about it and I’m enjoying being belittled by the tutorial 
My stupid video encoder did a double pass with lossy encoding on this clip which makes it look slow and jerky, and I wasn’t able to get it fixed, so I’ll just post it as is:
These were clips from various cat and mouse races which weren’t worth posting the entirety of the race but still had their moments. Lots of violence.
I’d like to join your Dirt 3 games but I’m waiting for a sale.
Posted new videos:
4 team cat and mouse on Casino Square
Transporter in the parking lot
So they released the Monte Carlo DLC. It’s a seperate rally area as big as any of the main 4 (finland, norway, michigan, kenya) with 8 tracks. But it has no trailblazer or rallycross or any other sort of track, which means it would be of limited use to us online. For some arbitrary reason, cat and mouse can only be run on trailblazer tracks. It’s also overpriced at $10. I’ll probably end up getting it, but I can’t really ask everyone else to get it at that price so we can play it online.
What sucks too is that it’s GFWL-provided dlc, which means it’s never going to go on sale. If you could buy it on steam, then we’d know eventually we could get the dlc for under $5 and it’d be worth it - but no, gfwl will always be full price. Lame.