DIRT 5 | PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, PC | November 2020

Hey there! It’s Chris Groves here, the lead Social and Community Manager for DIRT 5, launching later this year.

The entire team here at Codemasters is proud to have created a legacy of racing games that handle like a dream and recreate the thrill of motorsport. We don’t need to tell you that DIRT 5 is going to deliver big on exhilarating off-road racing gameplay, just like each game in the series has, all the way back to Colin McRae Rally in 1998. So, instead, let’s focus on something a little… different.

Surrounding that core gameplay in DIRT 5 will be a culture, a style, an approach, that makes it bigger than the sum of its parts. From how it looks, to how it sounds, to what you can be a part of, DIRT 5 is a vibe that, just maybe, you’ve never seen before from the franchise.

Let’s take you on a whistle-stop tour and reveal what you can expect when you roll into a bold new world of racing in DIRT 5.

1. The vibe of DIRT 5

Regardless of the mode you’re playing in, the location you’re at, or the car you’re behind the wheel of, the DIRT 5 experience is held together by something bigger than all of that. Booting up DIRT 5 feels like you’re stepping into a brand new culture, surrounded by style and encouraging you to express yourself, whatever it is you’re doing.

DIRT 5 is an off-road racing game at its core, so we’re still pretty big on the spirit of competition and that thirst for success. But here, winning is just the beginning. We want to see how you win; what you’re going to do on that road to success that leaves an unforgettable mark, and embraces the vibe of DIRT 5. That’s the kind of stuff that’ll get people to take notice.



2. Style it out

It’s all good and well telling you that we want to see your style, but what about the style of DIRT 5? Well, around every corner you’ll find features, both significant and subtle, that show this game as much about style as it is substance.

Our official announcement trailer certainly sets the tone. The bold colour schemes, in-your-face graphics and rhythmic transitions? Yeah, prepare for plenty more of that. The song featured – ‘Time To Dance (Sebastian Remix)’ by The Shoes – kicks off a dynamic soundtrack that we can’t wait to share more about. Then there are the cars: GT heroes, rough-and-ready buggies, classic rally legends and so much more kicking off a stylish roster. Some are even dripped in incredible one-off liveries, designed by world-renowned digital artists who we brought into the fold. Even the locations revealed in the trailer (New York, China, Norway) are flexing with extreme weather, stunning vistas and dynamic time of day options.

TL;DR – every aspect of DIRT 5 is crafted with style in mind. You get the picture.



3. The DIRT 5 Career – own the spotlight

Clearly then, DIRT 5 is about being part of something big – and that theme rings no truer than in Career mode.

It’s one thing to want to be at the centre of DIRT 5’s vibe of style and expression. It’s another to earn that place. Our Career mode drops you into a deep narrative-driven experience, with a star-studded voice cast led by the legendary Troy Baker and Nolan North, partnered by icons of the automotive and car culture world.

In a journey filled with famous names, big personalities and major obstacles, the focus is on you to make sure nobody ever forgets your name, through fearless racing and extreme skill. Baker, North and others will set the scene for you to rise from obscurity to infamy, but not everyone you meet is willing to share the spotlight. The world of DIRT 5 is yours for the taking. All you have to do is prove you fit the bill.

4. Let’s get playful

At the core of DIRT 5’s vibe is a desire to be expressive, creative and playful – online or offline, racing solo or with friends.

Fill the couch and play offline modes in split screen for up to four players, creating epic action-packed events. Online, throw down against the globe in race events, as well as more innovative modes we’ll reveal more on very soon. Express your playfulness off the track, too, with a dedicated Photo Mode and a nuanced livery editor, to flex your creative flair.

Share all those moments with your friends and the world, and prove you’re very much at home in DIRT 5’s playground of style. Oh, and stick around for more news on another way to get playful – something you’ve never seen before from DIRT.

5. Everything, amplified

Bold and brave, loud and lavish, get ready for an amplified world of off-road racing that you can’t help but want to be a part of. We’re big on giving you the ability to let loose and express your unique style, as loudly as you want, and we’ll be amplifying your achievements, your creations, your vibe, on all of DIRT 5’s community hangout spaces.

From the roaring atmosphere and cultural style, to the license to drift and hoon around to your heart’s content, to the ability to conquer any terrain put in front of you, the vibe of DIRT 5 turns everything up to 11. So… are you ready to do the same?

Join the conversation and engage with the DIRT 5 team right now through the game’s official Discord server. Of course, follow the DiRT channels on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, where we’ll be showing you so much more of the game in the coming weeks and months – from feature deep dives, to art concepts, to peeling back the curtain on DIRT 5’s creation.

Inside Xbox Series X Optimized: Dirt 5

When it launches this holiday, Xbox Series X will be the most powerful console the world has ever seen. One of the biggest benefits of all that power is giving developers the ability to make games that are Xbox Series X Optimized. This means that they’ve taken full advantage of the unique capabilities of Xbox Series X, both for new titles built natively using the Xbox Series X development environment as well as previously released titles that have been rebuilt specifically for the console. In our Inside Xbox Series X Optimized series, these creators will share the behind-the-scenes accounts of how they’re optimizing their titles for Xbox Series X and what that means for the future of gaming. Today, we’ll be chatting with Technical Director at Codemasters David Springate about optimizing Dirt 5 for Xbox Series X. For an even deeper dive into Dirt 5 and its Xbox Series X enhancements, watch the interview above featuring David Springate as well.

Q: “What excites you most about developing and bringing Dirt 5 to life on next-generation hardware?”

A: Xbox Series X has a whole host of exciting new features, so it’s hard to choose from them all!

Dirt 5 is a beautiful, fast, action-packed amplified off-road racing game and so being able to play it with options for 120fps on Xbox Series X is incredible.

But Dirt 5 is also a very social experience. I can’t wait to see the beautiful screenshots users are going to post on Xbox and social media, using the new share button on the Series X controller, captured using our fantastic Photo Mode – I’m really looking forward to all the pictures people will take of lightning! These shots are going to look incredible on Series X, its RDNA 2 GPU is going to enable us to turn all the features up to 11 – and there are some extremely talented game photographers out there, I’ll be keeping an eye out!

Q: In addition to benefiting from the power and performance of Xbox Series X for quicker load times etc. what Xbox Series X features were you most excited to explore leveraging in the development of Dirt 5?

A: I love that features like the fast SSD and the ray-tracing capabilities of the GPU are some of the more talked about but I am very impressed with the power of the new Zen 2 based processor.

The CPU is very powerful – and its simultaneous multi-threading is very impressive![/b] We’re used to dealing with the concept of running multiple threads on PC CPU cores and sharing the resources of that processor across multiple threads but actually, the SMT in the Series X processor is far more capable than usual CPUs. We found that the Dirt 5 engine was able to easily make great use of this and sprang to life across the 16 hardware threads available to us on Series X.

Q: How will these enhancements impact a player’s experience with Dirt 5?

A: Some people have a misconception that frame times and performance are limited to just how fast your GPU is, but CPU performance is obviously critical too, it would be no good if you had a GPU that can render beautiful visuals at 4K at 120fps if you don’t have a CPU that can generate enough frame data to render that quickly on the GPU. A powerful GPU needs a powerful CPU to back it up and Xbox Series X delivers this. Being able to spread more work across all those cores, in a scalable engine like the one we have at Cheshire Studio means that we have more CPU time left to spend on improved physics, lower latency input, AI updates – we’re able to deliver more than we could before.

Q: Why did your development team choose to focus on 4k resolution and 120fps as enhancement areas for Dirt 5?

A: Framerate is obviously key in a racing game. You get a stronger sense of speed and responsiveness at higher frame rates. 120fps seemed crazy to me at first, when Xbox told me that Xbox Series X could support 120fps, I thought “Sure, for something a little more simple perhaps… Perhaps a simple arcade game or something…”

Firstly, I was very surprised at how quickly we were able to configure for 120fps and get it up and running. More importantly, I was shocked at how quickly we could hit 120fps! We hadn’t done any optimization for it at this stage but the game was frequently hitting 120fps.

We chose to support high frame rates because simply, the power of Series X meant we could. It’s such a great, smooth experience – I hadn’t experienced another racer like it.

Q: How do you expect fans of Dirt 5 will respond to playing it on Xbox Series X with these enhancements?

A: On launch day, I’ll be booting up my Series X (*cough* You’re sending me one, right, Xbox? *cough*) and jumping online to play Dirt 5 with the fans. I can’t wait to hear what they have to say.

As gamers, we’re at a place where players know that there is a significant difference between 30fps and 60fps.

Sometimes, this is a choice for players, a compromise of whether they want the game to feel great or look great.

For Dirt 5, the power of Series X means that the game looks incredible at 60fps – you’ve seen it, it looks fantastic – but we’re also able to offer amazingly smooth, responsive gameplay at 120fps while still looking gorgeous.

Q: What is it like developing on Xbox Series X?

A: Transitioning development to a new console platform, like Xbox Series X, is usually very painful. You have to deal with new tools, new workflows, new ways of thinking.

This time around the team at Xbox brought me a new toolset called the Game Development Kit, which they already had up and running on Xbox One.

This meant that we could make the transition much earlier. In fact, we started doing the groundwork for Xbox Series X development long before we even received the hardware. This kind of thinking from Xbox allowed us to get a real head-start on next-gen development, so after receiving our early Xbox Series X hardware, we were up and running really quickly.

For me, the most important thing in making a videogame is the relationships. Working with Xbox, is a partnership – the team at Xbox is committed to helping us make a great videogame and they’ve shown that to me again and again. That means being open and honest about our experiences; what we’ve loved and perhaps even what we’ve found difficult in development has had meaningful, visible impact on the updates that I get for the tools for Series X. (Shout out to our development partner at Xbox, Richard Hackett! Thanks Rich!)

I’ve never worked on a console launch where, while we’re still months away from release, the tools have been this mature, this stable, this easy to work with.

Q: Which enhancement were you most excited about to explore leveraging for Dirt 5 on Xbox Series X?

A: Obviously, that SSD drive is incredible. It’s not like a PC SSD, it’s more than that. Being able to load data so ridiculously fast is not only really impressive but as a developer, it’s very interesting.

For Dirt 5, we’re going to be able to get into races super fast. It means no loading screens getting in the way, no dawdling, no looking at my phone, it means that the action will be non-stop.

In the future, I’m really excited to see how this technology is going to change the face of videogames because I really believe it will.

Q: What does Xbox Series X/next-generation development enable in current or future projects that you could not have achieved with the current generation of consoles?

A: There are loads of things for us to still explore in the new hardware but I’m most intrigued to see what we can do with the new SSD drive and the hardware decompression capabilities in the Xbox Velocity Architecture.

The drive is so fast that I can load data mid-frame, use it, consume it, unload and replace it with something else in the middle of a frame, treating GPU memory like a virtual disk. How much texture data can I now load?

I’m looking forward to pushing this as far as I can to see what kind of beautiful experiences we can deliver.

I love exciting new hardware that changes the face of videogame development and that’s exactly what Series X is. I’m looking forward to where we’re all going to go from here!

Dirt 5 feels more like a new MotorStorm than a new Dirt - and that's okay

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2020 ... thats-okay

JT986M2 wrote:Is it just me, or have all these previews made it seem like they are getting further and further away from traditional rally stages? Either that or are they just advertising all the non-traditional rally stuff to get more exposure.

I mean Dirt 4 had a great balance. Dirt Rally 2.0 in comparison is hard as nails. If Dirt 5 takes out all the 'traditional' rally stuff then it means we are only going to be left with super-serious sims (Dirt Rally 2.0, WRC 8) for a rally fix which only really cater to the hardcore sim crowd.

Welcome to Playgrounds – Dirt 5’s all-new mode, where players design, edit, share and race on user-created racing arenas. Let loose your creativity and use a huge suite of objects, from drift zones and jumps to rings of fire and loop-de-loops, to invent all manner of dream racing maps, and search through the database of community of designs to compete on the most stunning creations.

We want everyone to create, share and discover in this all-new mode, but as it’s such a fresh addition for the franchise, I figured you could do with a few pointers to get you started. So, make a note of the five tips below when you dive into Dirt 5’s Playgrounds mode!

twitter.com/dirtgame/status/1302864202248454148