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.
