Preview of 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 modeled after the real Rally Sweden stages in Umeå and six of which are taken from Greece and WRC 2001-2002. On top of that come new cars, including the very classic 1999 Colin McRae-Ford Focus.

I’ve been playing Hard Chargers a lot. It’s a good expansion, a sensible update that not only adds 12 new tracks, six new cars and more than 20 new color schemes to an already well-stocked game, but also fixes many of the texture pop-in problems 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 rolled out for EA Sports WRC 23/24, there is no denying that the game needs some changes/improvements for the next numbered release to compete with the now six-year-old Dirt Rally 2.0. I made a small list of what I would like to see on this front.

EA Sports WRC 25 needs to be more challenging

There is obviously a fine line to dance, and it is no easy feat to merge accessibility with simulator-based challenge. In many ways, EA Sports WRC has managed to make the game relatively easy to play with a controller, on console, with assists turned on, and without punishing the player as mercilessly as, say, Beam NG Rally or Richard Burns Rally. That said, Codemasters really needs to make EA Sports WRC 25 harder and more realistic.

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

One truth we know for sure today is that even casual fans want the most realistic experience. Otherwise, Assetto Corsa and Beam NG wouldn’t be the two most-played racing titles month after month, and if they weren’t, Kuno’s relentlessly realistic debut simulator wouldn’t have sold more than 14 million copies either. EA Sports WRC has yet to reach a million copies sold, which must be considered a failure in any case, and it becomes even more obvious that Codemasters needs to be more uncompromising in the way rally is portrayed in this series, as it has become clear that exactly twice as many people played Dirt Rally 2.0 than played EA Sports WRC last month. I would like Codemasters to please fans of rally sims and stop trying to “appease everyone.” If the game becomes more challenging, if the game becomes more demanding, and if the game becomes more uncompromising in terms of difficulty in the next version, the hardcore fans will flock and the casual fans will follow. I am absolutely convinced of that.

EA Sports WRC 25 should get a lot prettier

After more than 20 years, jumping from your own in-house developed game engine, which has proven itself capable of rendering some of the finest racing experiences on the market, to someone else’s already completed rendering technology brings rather obvious challenges. This was and has always been evident in EA Sports WRC. Codemasters chose to switch from Ego Engine to Unreal Engine because Epic’s hyper-popular technology has the world’s most extensive asset library. There are blading systems that are hundreds of times more advanced than what we see in, say, Dirt Rally 2.0 (which is based on Ego), and mostly because they wanted to start building stages longer than 20 kilometers. 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 its rendering system to perhaps avoid the problem of texture pop-in in terms of shadows and vegetation that have been a disappointment and problem for the WRC experience since its release. Changing the game engine itself also meant making the rally experience worse from a visual perspective. Dirt Rally 2.0 is graphically the more beautiful and realistic game, despite being six years old, while EA Sports WRC just turned 17 months old.

For the next game, EA Sports WRC 25, I hope the team has jumped from Unreal Engine 4.4 to the current 5.5, which in itself will use a lot of new magic techniques to make the rally experience much more photorealistic. Nanites have had a major makeover since we last looked at Epic’s rendering technology, and the new system that assigns different values per Nanite is clearly something that would be needed in Codemasters’ next game. 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 windshield, 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 enables Ray-Tracing with real-time light shadows, which I think will also be needed to get much closer to real rally in terms of graphics. In addition, the game needs better optimization to flow better than it did, especially in the first six months on the market. I know there are problems with stuttering frames with the way 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 did with Unreal, and if Milestone can do the same with Ride 5, then of course Codemasters can too.

EA Sports WRC 25 should include greater 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 due to an old damage model. Even if rumor has it that Toyota, among others, refuses to let their cars break as they should in a 2025 game aimed at mimicking real rally, this is something that is lacking in EA Sports WRC today. As a player, if you activated “Hardcore Damage” and crashed into a ditch at 130 mph, your rally should always be over. If the car would have broken down in real life, the same should happen in the game. If you crash into a rock at the same speed, even more damage should occur, and the easiest thing to do here is to make a simple scale ladder. No Damage, Light Damage, Hardcore Damage, with only the last category offering real damage, real distortion, which will make driving 300% more nerve-wracking and challenging.