There’s a real sense of history at Codemasters’ Southam studio – a sprawling campus that’s commandeered a slab of soggy English countryside a short cab ride out of Leamington Spa, about an hour or so north-west of London. The lobby itself is a modest museum of the publisher’s most highly-regarded games. Framed and familiar box art adorns the walls on all sides. I haven’t just played all these games; I still own most of them. Brian Lara Cricket. The TOCA series and the Race Driver series that followed. Micro Machines. The legendary Colin McRae games. Hell, even Prisoner of War is up there. It’s a reminder not of just how much Codemasters’ general output resonates with me, but for how many decades it’s done so.
Codemasters really has been doing what it does for a long time, and it’s been making rally games for a significant portion of that.
The feeling is amplified further inside the studio itself where I’m playing the upcoming Dirt 4 for the first time, tucked into a simple racing seat in a walled-off section of the office. On the one hand it’s like gaming spaces the world over – a loosely-tamed land of consoles, cords, and general clutter. But on the other it’s a uniquely Codemasters zone. The rear wall is a mosaic of assorted screenshots and key art from the Dirt and Grid games. A surprisingly bulky ‘Best of 2011’ trophy for Dirt 3 is perched randomly atop a nearby cupboard, nestled between a pile of magazines and some mugs. A brilliant vintage poster for the original Colin McRae Rally rests against another cabinet, partially obscured by an ancient PS2 ‘Test’ machine that’s either been dug up for reasons unknown or has spent the last decade refusing to be buried.
It all tells a story: Codemasters really has been doing what it does for a long time, and it’s been making rally games for a significant portion of that.
But it’s never made a rally game like Dirt 4 before because, in a way, Dirt 4 is actually making itself.
Codemasters gets a lot right in its rally games; hardly surprising, considering it’s been making them for the better part of 20 years. They look fantastic, they feel fantastic, and they most certainly sound fantastic. Over the previous decade, however, the Dirt team’s Achilles Heel has emerged as the rally stages themselves. Not their design, but rather the limited number of them. It’d become one of the Dirt series’ few key weaknesses; the stages would often share entire segments with each other to boost the overall number of courses. This sort of repetition could lead to a rapid and strange sense of déjà vu between events.
To tackle this problem head-on, the Dirt 4 team engineered an ambitious solution. With finite time and resources they couldn’t just build more tracks, so they built a tool that would do it for them. That tool is called ‘Your Stage’ and it’s set to change Codemasters’ rally games forever.
“[Your Stage] is a piece of tech which we’ve been prototyping and thinking about for many, many years,” explains senior producer Clive Moody. “Actually, when we came off the back of Dirt 3 – which was 2011, a long time ago – we were already starting to think about how we could do something that would solve this content problem.”
Chief game designer Paul Coleman remains very happy with the stages in Dirt Rally: “They were so detailed that it took a long time to arrive at that point where you knew the track and you knew what was coming,” he says.
However, there were big challenges when it came time to build a proper career mode for Dirt Rally; challenges that the new Your Stage system basically negates.
"I’d go to our environment artists and say, ‘How many stages can we have?’ and they’d tell me, ‘18’ – to make an entire career,” recalls Coleman. “That’s bread-and-fishes miracle stuff at the best of times and it always felt like such a compromise.”
Your Stage gives us the opportunity to curate an individual track for every single stage and every single event.
“Your Stage gives us the opportunity to curate an individual track for every single stage and every single event, throughout the whole career, and then give that to the player and say, ‘You know what? When you’re done with the career you can keep generating tracks and keep getting that new experience.’
“I genuinely think this is a gamechanger, and for us it’s just the start of something here.”
Your Stage is an incredibly simple tool to use. There are two sliders – one for length and one for complexity – and once you’ve settled on a position for both all you need to do is generate a stage. The process is virtually instant, so if you don’t like the track you can keep hitting the button until you get one you do like the look of. Time-of-day and weather can be adjusted for any stage you create.
The comparison many made immediately upon hearing that Dirt 4 would feature a custom stage builder was Eden’s elderly V-Rally 2, though some have dialled the clock further back to Distinctive Software’s 1990 cult-favourite Stunts. In reality it’s not especially like either; V-Rally 2 and Stunts were more like virtual Scalextric sets, where you’d piece together rudimentary courses manually from a fairly narrow selection of straights and bends. Dirt 4’s Your Stage tool doesn’t allow players to have that kind of granular control over upcoming corners and such but, to be fair, part of the very point to Your Stage is never quite knowing what’s ahead.
“We’re trying to emulate as close as possible the experience of driving down those roads,” explains Coleman. “What you gain from Your Stage is almost infinite possibilities of stage length and variation.”
For Coleman, who has competed in several real-life rally events as a co-driver (including the Scottish and Malcolm Wilson rallies), Your Stage can deliver a true-to-life rally experience like no limited, pre-baked set of stages ever could.
“What is it to actually be a rally driver?” poses Coleman. “Well, I have to listen to my co-driver and tackle this stage based on my wits and a little bit of pre-information.”
“And what you get in every rally game that’s ever been made up to this point is, ‘I learn this stage after I’ve driven it two or three times.’ And then it stops being rally and starts just becoming a time trial exercise.”
Coleman notes the brief set for the team regarding Your Stage was an extremely challenging one.
“We’ve been making tracks in the same old way for the best part of 15 years,” he says. “We need to completely turn everything on its head, but we need it to look as good as the tracks that we’ve been building for 15 years.”
“This was a huge ask for the team, and they’ve delivered on it, massively.”
This was a huge ask for the team, and they’ve delivered on it, massively.
Moody wholeheartedly agrees.
“Even though I know how it works I still can’t quite get my head around some of the tech and what it does, and how it does it,” laughs Moody. “And I think it’s a testimony to the level designers and the artists and the tech guys that have banged their heads together saying, ‘How can we make these tracks feel and play as good as something we’ve sat down and crafted over a six- or nine-month period, as a bespoke end-to-end stage?’”
Here Moody touches on what I think is perhaps the most impressive part of Your Stage, at least from my brief exposure to it. That is, despite the fact the game is assembling these tracks itself (presumably from a deep, digital sack of assets and textures and whatnot) you can’t see the seams. If you’re concerned the stages will look like a series of straights and cut-and-pasted corners bolted one after the other, don’t be. Every stage I created felt nuanced and authentic; if I didn’t know they were procedurally generated I certainly wouldn’t have suspected they were.
“I don’t think at any point I’ve got bored with what’s coming out of [Your Stage],” says Moody. “You just get these regular moments of wonder and you just think, ‘We’d never have done that if we were making a bespoke track.’ But because it’s organic and we’re generating these things you just get things you wouldn’t normally get within the game. It’s really exciting to see those things coming through.”
“A really good example of those moments are just straights,” adds Coleman. “A straight, to me, was burning budget before – because it cost us pretty much the same amount to make a kilometre whether it’s going around a lot of corners or not.”
“So to burn that on allowing the player to pin the throttle and therefore, experientially, giving the player a very short period of gameplay – compared to what a couple of hairpins and a few tight bends would’ve given them – meant that our stages invariably got quite twisty.
“So for this, just having that ability to have straights in there – and that can play out into a couple of kilometres of just pinning the throttle at the horizon, really going for it – it’s a sense that we haven’t had in our rally games for a while because we’ve been compromised by that up-front content decision. Now the lid’s off, and we’re letting the system run away with itself.
“I’m sure if we had infinite resources we would’ve crafted them eventually, but the system’s kind of doing it for us. And that in itself speaks again to what rallying is; these roads that you’re driving on are not racetrack roads. They haven’t been crafted for that purpose. Generally they’re a way for a farmer to get some heavy machinery from one field to another. That’s where you do most of your rallying. So to have the system take that over and deliver that is phenomenal.”
Dirt 4 will come with five different rally locations, each of which supports the Your Stage tool: Fitzroy in Australia, Michigan in the United States, Tarragona in Spain, Värmland in Sweden, and Powys in Wales. Moody and Coleman understand that some long-time Dirt players are confused as to why several existing Dirt Rally locations haven’t made the cut but explain it’s not quite as easy as dragging them across to Dirt 4 and cramming their content into the Your Stage system.
“If only it was that simple!” laughs Moody.
“I think there are things we can share,” says Coleman. “So with the stages like Wales and Sweden you will see some trees being brought over, although we have made big improvement to the trees… [They have] needed work to be able to reflect the new lighting system, and make sure that they still look like trees after we apply that lighting to them.”
“It’s something that’s come across in the feedback we’ve been getting since the news of the announcement, that fans are a little bit bemused as to why we didn’t just take the countries and the tracks that we had already and used those as the starting point and then build on them. Some of that has actually come from a licensing situation, so we’ve had to be quite careful about how we represent the countries that we represented before.
“That’s where Your Stage actually affords us this great possibility of taking some of those assets and building new styles of environments with them. So Wales is still set very much in that part of Wales, but what we’re not doing is translating verbatim the rally stage that exists in real life. Because, while that’s not owned by anyone in particular – other than the landowner – using it in a rally game for the same purpose that it’s used for in a licensed championship has become a bit of a legal sticking point. So we have to be quite careful with it.”
The way the team would have skirted around this issue in the past would be to change the stage so much it was basically unrecognisable. According to Coleman this was big part of what ultimately swayed the team to double-down on Your Stage.
“Then it just becomes a case of you’ve always got a new stage to race, because we’re not trying to emulate that real-world stage anymore,” says Coleman.
So was there much hand-wringing deciding on which five locations to focus on for Dirt 4?
“There always is!” admits Moody.
“Yeah, and you know what,” continues Coleman. “That list always starts with a number bigger than five. It’s where you eventually come down to.”
We have built the technology to be very, very extendable.
“We set out to make this game with very lofty ambitions but until we’d actually made that first location and understood what that undertaking entailed, we didn’t know how many of those we were going to be able to make. We needed it to be at least four, I think, and we really wanted six. But we ended up with five, just by the very nature of the beast; it has thrown quite a few curveballs in along the way.”
“We have built the technology to be very, very extendable,” adds Moody. “I should caveat that by saying I’m not confirming DLC at all for this title, but it’s certainly not a throwaway piece of tech that we’ve been developing here.”
“We expect to continue to develop it further and maximise it to its full potential. You see five locations right now but what we could do with it in the future; it’s exponential. We’re really excited about where else we can take it, as well as what else it can do.”
Continues
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