A year on from general release, the World Rally Championship’s official video game – EA Sports WRC – has been updated with its new 2024 season expansion.
Promising new stages, rallies, cars and liveries mirroring the current season of WRC, today (October 8) is the day players can get their hands on the new content.
But what exactly is new? How much will it cost, and what else is to come?
With the help of EA Sports WRC game designer, and current European Rally Championship driver, Jon Armstrong, that’s exactly what we’ve found out.
New locations
As was the case for the real-life 2024 season, Rally Poland and Rally Latvia have been added to the game to offer the full roster of events held in 2024.
Both are high-speed gravel rallies, but do have some differences in character.
Latvia's reputation for fast, flat-out gravel tracks bares true in its EA Sports WRC recreation
“I would say Poland is a more bumpy track in terms of undulations, like you’ve got bumps, you’ve got smaller crests and probably more jumps as well actually than what you have in Latvia,” Armstrong told DirtFish.
“There’s more variation in the road types in Poland, so you have some wider sections, some narrow places through the forest with banks, and then you actually have quite a few Tarmac sections, which is always quite interesting when you’re on the gravel setup and gravel tires. So you have to be switched on, react to the different changes in surface and really just get through with a good rhythm.”
So what about Latvia?
“It’s probably even faster,” Armstrong smiled, “slightly more smooth in terms of less bumps, there’s a couple of jumps but then you’re sort of cutting your way through lakes and there’s quite a few chicanes as well to keep the average speed down. They’re always quite interesting.
“But they’re both fantastic looking locations. The fast stages are always the most fun – you kind of take your brain out and you can just go throttle everywhere, and it’s all about your courage to try and get a good stage time.”
Latvian roads are brand-new for a Codemasters rallying game, but Polish stages have featured before in the previous Dirt Rally 2.0 title. There is however no crossover from the old to the new game.
“No, there’s actually no crossover,” Armstrong confirmed. “So the stages are completely different than the ones that were in Dirt Rally 2.0, although they used real stages as well.
“One of them is Świętajno, which I’ve actually done a few times in ERC because Rally Poland’s made the step up from ERC this year. It’s a really nice flowing stage. The other hero stage is one that’s closer to Mikołajki and it’s got more crests, more jumps, a bit more narrow in places.
“They’re both real stages that have been used in the past of Rally Poland and they’re different than the ones we used previously. You see that in the real-life format for Rally Poland, in that they’ve made a change to their format in more recent years in terms of the stages they’re using.”
New cars
The 2024 season expansion boasts five new cars, but realistically only one is genuinely brand-new: the Toyota GR Yaris Rally2, which was homologated at the start of 2024.
The GR Yaris Rally2's three-cylinder engine is unique in its category – the different sound and driving dynamics has been freshly captured in-game
“It’s obviously been doing really well this year in the WRC and it’s got quite a different character to the rest of the WRC2 cars in terms of it’s a three-cylinder engine, so the way that engine works is quite different with the torque and how that comes in,” Armstrong said.
“You’ll find you’ll need to use a higher gear to really utilize that. The gearing is quite precise too to be in the correct one and you’re up and down the box a lot but then the chassis, it’s got a lot of travel and also it’s very nimble because of its wheelbase being quite short, which means it’s a very agile car to drive.
“I think it’s a really nice experience in-game. You can really just chuck it around and especially in like a very narrow technical stage where you have to be precise and you’re on the handbrake and you really want to rotate the car fast, it’s a really fun experience for that.
“And that’s had the audio captured as well so it’s quite a unique three-cylinder soundtrack and the anti-lag system is really cool as well, it’s very aggressive on the overrun so I’m sure we’ll see plenty of people turning to that in the WRC2 class.”
The other new cars include the Ford Fiesta Rally3 Evo – the updated version of the car that’s exclusively used in Junior WRC – and 2024 versions of the Toyota GR Yaris, Hyundai i20 N and Ford Puma Rally1 cars.
They're not straight copy and paste. The vehicle art team have done a lot of work to understand what small changes have been made to the visual aspect of the car. So that's inside and outside.Jon Armstrong
They obviously come with updated 2024 liveries for all the Rally1 drivers (save for Sami Pajari and Mārtiņš Sesks) and subtle tweaks in line with homologation changes from 2023 to 2024.
But Amstrong explained that updates to the cars are more than just visual.
“They’re not straight copy and paste,” he said. “The vehicle art team have done a lot of work to understand what small changes have been made to the visual aspect of the car. So that’s inside and outside.
“For example, the Hyundai has a few different changes to the inside of the car in terms of the dash and just a few different elements and the wing mirrors are in a different place. The Puma has a different rear spoiler so if you hop into one in-game, so the ’23 version versus the ’24, you will notice a difference in their layout slightly. There’s a couple of little tweaks.
“And the actual handling models are slightly different. Obviously the regulations stay the same from ’23 to ’24 but they have been given a fresh pass so the character of each car is quite close to before. We’ve given them a slightly different flavor so that there will be a noticeable difference in character for each car, but they still same real-world character that you would perceive. We’ve done research as much as we can and got feedback from the WRC drivers who have been more hands-on.
M-Sport's new-for-2024 livery will now be playable in-game – but it's not a mere reskin of the existing '23 Puma model
“And then on the audio side, the Puma has had a fresh recording, so the anti-lag system sounds really, really nice on that now. And then the Toyota and the Hyundai have had a rebalance of their audio as well. When you hop in these cars versus ’23, they do feel fresh, they feel different.
“It’ll be really interesting to see the performance between the two online and who’s trying to make the ’23 cars go as fast as the ’24 because technically they’re still in the same class. But they should still be comparable.”
What else is new?
Beyond the events and the cars, 52 new liveries have been added to the game across the Rally1, WRC2 and Junior WRC classes to mirror driver moves and design tweaks in the real-life season.
The front-end of the game has had a “refresh” too, including the service area which Armstrong said has “a bit more of a vibe going on” now. He also promised “a noticeable difference” with graphics and lightning.
But the change that will affect gameplay most is found in career and championship mode.
“We have the new points system,” Armstrong said, “which is obviously new for the ’24 season and it’s quite different than the previous year. So the players will be able to experience that in-game.
“They’ll have to balance their driving to try and score points on the first, what we call the primary leg so that encapsulates the Friday and Saturday. And then the final leg, essentially Super Sunday in real life, that’s when you get those extra bonus points, it’s almost like starting a fresh mini rally on that final leg.
Thierry Neuville's real-world apporach to the 2024 title race of biding his time on the opening days and then smashing Sundays to maximize his points tally can now be recreated in-game
“I think that’s a really cool experience in-game. It’s a different way to play and it also recreates what’s brand-new in the current season. So yeah, it’s nice to have that in there.”
Extra DLC
Although the 2024 season expansion is the only extra content that’s playable for now, two new DLC packs are coming: the Le Maestros and Hard Chargers content packs.
Le Maestros will be downloadable in the winter and hard chargers in the spring, with both offering new cars and new stages.
Cars for those packs are yet to be revealed, although Armstrong did let slip to DirtFish that Le Maestros will be French themed. What has been revealed is the stages.
Le Maestros introduces Monte Carlo’s Briançonnet test as well as the world-famous Fafe stage in Portugal. Hard Chargers includes the Umeå (and Umeå Sprint) stages from Rally Sweden, as well as Greece’s Harvati test.
“I think that the DLC packs outside of the ’24 expansion will be really cool and also we plan to have moments based around those, so whenever you purchase the ’24 expansion and then the DLC 1 & 2 there’ll be moments built using our moment system,” Armstrong added.
Oliver Solberg's 2024 livery is already part of the first batch of 2024 updates – but there's more to come later
“There’s also some liveries coming for existing [older] cars so you’ve essentially got new locations, new cars and new liveries for cars that are already in the base game. So as a whole, they should be really, really nice.
“It’s a refresh to the game.”
How much does it cost?
There are various purchase options available, depending on if you already have the game and if you want all of the new content or just some of it.
If you currently already have the base game, the WRC ’24 locations and car pack costs $19.99 (£17.99), with the two additional content packs coming in at $9.99 (£8.99) each.
However, all three can be bought as a bundle for $29.99 (£24.99).
Anybody buying the game for the first time will automatically have the new content included in their purchase, and that will cost $49.99 (£44.99).
The WRC 2024 season expansion is available to play from 4pm UTC, Tuesday October 8.
