Looking ahead to EA Sports WRC 25

EA Sports WRC has recently been expanded with the Hard Chargers DLC pack. It adds 12 new stages, six of which are modelled after the real Rally Sweden stages in Umeå and six of which are taken from Greece and WRC 2001-2002. On top of this are new cars, including the very classic Colin McRae-Ford Focus 1999.

I've played Hard Chargers a lot. It's a good expansion, a sensible update that not only adds 12 new tracks, six new cars, and over 20 new liveries to an already well-stocked game, but also fixes a lot of the texture pop-in problems that the base game suffered from due to Unreal Engine 4's inability to render foliage and shadows in a timely manner. At the same time, now that the last major content update has been rolled out for EA Sports WRC 23/24, there's no getting away from the fact that the game needs a number of changes/improvements for the next numbered release in order to compete with the now six-year-old Dirt Rally 2.0. I have made a small list of what I'd like to see on this front.

EA Sports WRC 25 needs to be more challenging

There's a fine line to dance, of course, and trying to merge accessibility with simulator-based challenge is no easy feat. EA Sports WRC succeeded in many ways in both making the game relatively easy to play with a controller, on console, with assists switched on, and without penalising the player as mercilessly as, for example, Beam NG Rally or Richard Burns Rally. That said, Codemasters really needs to make EA Sports WRC 25 harder and more realistic.

I suggest that they ditch the pivot/centre physics they use in the game today and spend a couple of months emulating four real points of contact (tyre-to-surface), thus building up an even more realistic feel in the car. I want them to offer an even more realistic car behaviour system, and we know that the fans mostly want the same thing. I think today, after all these hundreds of hours, the basic car physics in Dirt Rally 2.0 (on gravel, not on snow/asphalt) is more realistic than the one in EA Sports WRC. There is less lateral grip in Dirt Rally 2.0, which means that you just can't go as fast through the corners and there is no emulation of downforce in the same way as in EA Sports WRC, which, minus in the WRC 1 cars, there shouldn't be in the first place.

One truth we know for sure today is that even casual fans want the most realistic experience possible. Otherwise, Assetto Corsa and Beam NG wouldn't be the two most-played racing titles month-after-month, and if that wasn't the case, Kuno's ruthlessly realistic debut simulator wouldn't have sold over 14 million copies either. EA Sports WRC has yet to reach one million copies sold, which should be seen as a failure in any case, and it becomes even more clear that Codemasters needs to be more uncompromising in how rally is portrayed in this series, as it has become clear that exactly twice as many people played Dirt Rally 2.0 than EA Sports WRC last month. I'd like Codemasters to please the rally sim fans and stop trying to "appease everyone". If the game becomes more challenging, if the game becomes more demanding, and if in the next version the game becomes more uncompromising in terms of difficulty, the hardcore fans will flock and the casual fans will follow. I feel absolutely convinced of this.

EA Sports WRC 25 needs to get a lot prettier

After over 20 years, jumping from your own in-house developed game engine, which has proven to be able to render the most beautiful racing experiences on the market, to someone else's already completed rendering technology, comes with its rather obvious challenges. This was and has always been evident in EA Sports WRC. Codemasters chose to move from Ego Engine to Unreal Engine because Epic's hyper-popular technology has the world's most extensive asset library. There are foliage systems that are several hundred times more advanced than what we see in, for example, Dirt Rally 2.0 (which is Ego-based), and above all, because they wanted to start building stages that are longer than 20 kilometres. Unreal Engine 4.4 allowed the team to create longer routes than ever before via Deferred Rendering, and that was something we wanted during all the active years with Dirt Rally 2.0. At the same time, perhaps Codemasters should have chosen Forward Rendering as the rendering system instead, to perhaps avoid the problem of texture pop-in in terms of shadows and vegetation that have been a disappointment and problem over the WRC experience since release. Changing the game engine itself also meant that the rally experience from a visual perspective became worse. Dirt Rally 2.0 is the better looking and more realistic game graphically despite being six years old while EA Sports WRC just turned 17 months old.

For the next game, EA Sports WRC 25, I hope that the team has jumped from Unreal Engine 4.4 to the current 5.5, which in itself will allow them to use lots and lots of new magical techniques to make the rally experience much more photorealistic. Nanites have had a major makeover since we last looked into Epic's rendering technology and the new system that assigns different values per Nanite is obviously something that would be needed in Codemasters' next game. The volumetric rendering has also been rebuilt starting with Unreal Engine 5.3, which is another aspect that the next WRC game really needs. More haze and dust in the air, more dirt on the windscreen, more fog, more volume in the light, and more gravel smoke and dust behind the car. The 5.5.4 version of the Unreal Engine also allows for Ray-Tracing with real-time light shadows, which I think will be needed, too, to get much closer to real rally in terms of graphics. Beyond that, the game needs to be better optimised, to flow better than it did especially in the first six months on the market. I know there are frame stuttering issues with how Unreal Engine renders graphics, which is noticeable in most Unreal-developed games, but if Kunos can make Assetto Corsa Competizione flow as well as it does with Unreal and if Milestone can do the same with Ride 5, then of course Codemasters can too.

EA Sports WRC 25 must feature more extensive damage

Wreckfest 2 and Beam NG Rally show with great, convincing clarity that it is now possible to offer players very realistic, comprehensive systems for real-time deformation of sheet metal/plastic/glass. EA Sports WRC contains far too limited damage because of an old damage model. Even if it is rumoured that Toyota, among others, refuses to let their cars break as they should do in a 2025 game focused on emulating real rally, this is something that is missing today in EA Sports WRC. If you as a player have activated "Hardcore Damage" and plunge into a ditch at 130 km/h, your rally should always be over. If the car would have broken down in real life then it must also start happening in the game. If you smash into a rock at the same speed, even more damage should occur, and the easiest thing to do here is to make a simple scaling ladder. No Damage, Light Damage, Hardcore Damage, where only the last category offers real damage, real deformation, which will make driving 300% more nerve-wracking and challenging.