Hello and welcome to the very first DiRT Rally Road Book.

What is a Road Book? Well in terms of rally it’s one of the many documents a co driver carries around with them; it’s not the pace notes but it basically contains all of the information he or she needs for an event to get the car and team where they are going.

That’s what this blog series is going to become, everything you need to know about what we’re doing with DiRT Rally (and just as importantly, what you are doing).

So I hope you were all surprised last week at the announcement of DiRT Rally. It’s safe to say we were all nervous about what you’d think of our hard work just like we are for any game but there was something different about is this time; there was an uncertainty to it all. Usually when we put a game out there we know roughly how well it will sell, what the media might say and how the fans will react. DiRT Rally took us out of our comfort zone and pushed us to be better developers. So far I like to think we’re doing well and I hope you all agree too.

DiRT Rally – Out now on Steam

The most important thing for us at the moment is reading your feedback, watching your videos and putting together a list of what you’d like improving and adding to DiRT Rally over the next few months. To give you a better idea of how we’re using that feedback and what we’re working on next I’ll hand you over to Chief Game Designer, Paul Coleman

“This last week has been incredibly exciting. The positive response DiRT Rally has received has been amazing and we are delighted that you have appreciated the direction we have taken. For many of us in the studio this is the first time we have put a game out in Early Access so getting your feedback together and working out how to act on it has been our key priority. We are still taking stock of the situation but it is already clear that there are some key areas of DiRT Rally that we’d like to improve based on your feedback. Some stuff is pretty easy to tweak but other areas are going to take a bit more work to ensure that we get them right for you.

One of the key areas we are focussing on at this early stage is how our Wheel Settings and Force Feedback are working in DiRT Rally. I’ll be honest, while we had poured a lot of effort into our new physics engine we hadn’t gotten round to unravelling our wheel settings and FFB and many of you have quite rightly noticed that the settings the game have shipped with are more suited to a console racer than a PC Sim. We want to get this right for you but to do it right we need to get under the hood and change the way that we do things. We’ve been reading your feedback, speaking to the fans directly (big thanks to Betta Lines for his time) and we have a decent handle on how to improve things.

Our simulation team are now hard at work removing legacy stuff and adding in elements that you have been asking for. We hope to have more info on how this is progressing in the coming weeks but rest assured the early results are looking extremely positive. This isn’t all we are looking at though. There are plenty of refinements and updates that we are making based on stuff you have been calling out as well as working through any bugs that have crept into the game.”

DiRT Rally Online Events

If you’ve been doing the DiRT Daily events you may have seen the name Kevin Abbring at the top of the leaderboard a lot.

Well, Kevin is a WRC driver for Hyundai and got talking to us just after launch on Twitter. A few people were calling hacks on his times which made us chuckle… This guy does this for a living; the fact he’s beating you all furthers our belief that we’ve built the perfect foundation for DiRT Rally. We won’t lie, he puts in a bit of a cheeky corner cut four minutes in but you can’t deny this is some impressive driving.

To learn more about DiRT Rally’s Online Events take a read of our handy guide.

Suggestion Box

Your feedback and ideas are always welcome so we’ve set up two suggestion boxes to help gather them up, one on the Codemasters Forums and another on the Steam Forums. If you’ve got an idea we’d love to hear it but don’t worry, you don’t need to post in both, just use whichever forum you feel most comfortable with.

Early Access Bug Tracker

We’re still catching up with your feedback and reports from last week and as we go along we’re going to be updating our bug tracker. This is a list of all the known issues in DiRT Rally at the moment and what we’re doing about them.

Over To You

Watching what you guys are doing with our game this week has been without doubt the best part of this whole thing, from the memes posted on our subreddit to the videos, livestreams and leagues we’ve seen cropping up.

I could bombard you with a massive list of links (but I won’t). For now here’s a handy list of stuff that’s worth checking out this week.

That’s it for this week, be sure to follow us on Twitter and Facebook to keep up with the latest DiRTy Gossip, We’ll be back next week but for now I’ll leave you with our favourite video from the last seven days.