Following several rumors, EA Sports WRC is now speeding toward its release date set for November 3rd on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series S|X.
This will be the first Codemasters game to be made with Unreal Engine 5. Ross Gowing, Senior Creative Director on EA Sports WRC at Codemasters, explained the reasons behind the switch in a recent interview with VG247.
EGO was a fantastic engine for us and we made a lot of incredibly good games on that, but it had reached a point where we wanted our stages to be longer and longer and our environments to be bigger and visually richer. EGO was not going to be able to do that in the time we had and the team size that we had. A big evaluation took place on which engine we should move to and it was actually pre-EA that we made the decision to change - hence Frostbite not really figuring at that point.
Our biggest hurdle to overcome was how to get the handling to be the “Codemasters handling” and that wasn’t something Unreal had out of the box, but it turned out we could work with them to bring our own handling across. Unreal enabled us to bring across all of our handling physics and essentially plug that into the engine. Unreal has been a great collaborator and so supportive of what we’re trying to do, putting us in touch with other professionals working in Epic to help us fold the engine to our own needs - that’s been a fantastic benefit to the project.
EA Sports WRC will feature more than 200 stages across 17 real-world WRC locations at launch. An 18th location (Central Europe Rally, a brand new one for the sport) will be added to the game with a post-release update.
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
Follow Wccftech on Google to get more of our news coverage in your feeds.
