Hi all, and welcome back to the DiRT Rally 2.0 Road Book! It’s been a busy few weeks here; we’ve been working around the clock to bring you Season One’s new content, as well as working through your feedback and working on our first patch for DiRT Rally 2.0. We hope you’ve been loving playing the game so far, and we’re excited to bring you the first wave of fixes and changes!

Today, v1.2 releases at 11am – at which point, RaceNet will go down for maintenance – so please make sure you’re not playing the game when 11am comes around as it could compromise your event times uploading to the server. We’re expecting to be back up and running by 12pm, so don’t worry – it’ll be a maximum of an hour’s down time before you can get back to being DiRTy!

For those of you keen to know what today’s update will bring, the full list of notes is below:

• Stability improvements across all modes

• Prevented negative times from posting to leaderboards

• OSD Dial can now be enabled in headcam

• New engine audio for Citroen C3 R5 and Ford Mustang GT4

• ‘Upgraded’ trophy/achievement will now unlock

• Darkness issue resolved when using interior cameras

• Softlock will no longer occur if user owns too many vehicles

• Proximity indicators are now available for rallycross

• Prevented exploit for claiming rewards multiple times

• Podium counter will now correctly update in My Team

• Prevented audio cut outs

• Joker Lap cut-scene is now skippable

• Custom online will no longer disconnect users in specific conditions

• Improvements and corrections to text (all languages)

• Improvements to subtitle content

• Accented characters will be entered correctly in user text fields

Please let us know if you’ve seen anything slip through the cracks on the official bug report threads for v1.2, which can be found in the usual places on Steam and on our forums. We’re always listening on our social media channels too, so if there’s anything you’re concerned about – you know where to find us.

Server-side, we’ve also tuned frequency of night stages and bad weather stages. We know a lot of you were reporting that the occurrence of dark/wet stages was a little too frequent, so we’ve done some tweaking to ensure a few more dry and day stages.

For those of you who are questioning the size of the patch: some good news! Even if you’re not a Deluxe Edition user, you will be able to access the new environments in multiplayer. So, for example: if one of your friends has set up a rally lobby with Monte Carlo – you too will be able to enjoy Monte Carlo, even if you haven’t bought Monte Carlo! We can’t promise you’ll be any better at it than your pals – after all, you’ll have slightly less practice – but we wanted to make sure we weren’t restricting multiplayer lobbies by cutting people off to this content.

Once our new locations are out, we’re also planning on running some taster Community Events – so stay tuned for when they’ll start to happen too.

Finally: as we’ve mentioned on our forums, we’re continuing to investigate the concerns some of you have raised with FFB. We’re taking your feedback incredibly seriously, and we are giving this the time and investigation it deserves. We know we need to strike a fine balance between the large number of players who are happy with the FFB, and those of you who want an experience closer to the original DiRT Rally. We’ll continue to keep you informed of our progress – and once we’re happy with the update, we’re hoping to announce plans which will enable some of you to playtest it before we roll it out to everyone.