Codemasters’ new entry into their long-running rally game series launches this week for Xbox One, PS4 and PC. Unlike its predecessor DiRT Rally, DiRT 4 currently features no VR support on PC or PSVR, but a future update is possible.

Today, retail copies of DiRT 4 are available for consoles in the US, while everyone else has to wait until June 9th. The title is the latest numbered entry in the series after 2011’s DiRT 3—a more accessible, ‘arcade’ offering compared to the more recent, simulation-style DiRT Rally. DiRT 4 aims to appeal to fans of both games, offering separate ‘gamer’ and ‘simulation’ handling modes, while adding some innovative features, most notably ‘Your Stage’, a procedural rally stage generator.

Unfortunately, DiRT 4 is missing the great VR support that eventually came to DiRT Rally on both PC and PSVR after the initial launch. Asked during a recent live stream from Codemasters HQ, Chief Game Designer Paul Coleman stated that “no decision has been made,” but didn’t rule out the possibility of a VR update arriving at a later date. At the game’s announcement in January, Codemasters responded to a Road to VR enquiry about VR support, saying “we will monitor how DiRT Rally performs on PSVR and then make decisions from there”.

SEE ALSO
Review: 'DiRT Rally' VR

Much like the missing Vive support on DiRT Rally, it is a matter of resources, as the development team is relatively small, while consistently delivering well-polished output; the management wouldn’t approve of throwing together a VR mode that didn’t live up to Codemasters’ high standards. We’re keeping our fingers crossed, as DiRT 4 appears to have dramatically improved the steering animation compared to DiRT Rally, which was one critique of its VR implementation for serious VR sim racers.

Newsletter graphic

This article may contain affiliate links. If you click an affiliate link and buy a product we may receive a small commission which helps support the publication. More information.


Dominic Brennan
The trial version of Microsoft’s Monster Truck Madness probably had something to do with it. And certainly the original Super Mario Kart and Gran Turismo. A car nut from an early age, Dominic was always drawn to racing games above all other genres. Now a seasoned driving simulation enthusiast, and former editor of Sim Racer magazine, Dominic has followed virtual reality developments with keen interest, as cockpit-based simulation is a perfect match for the technology. Conditions could hardly be more ideal, a scientist once said. Writing about simulators lead him to Road to VR, whose broad coverage of the industry revealed the bigger picture and limitless potential of the medium. Passionate about technology and a lifelong PC gamer, Dominic suffers from the ‘tweak for days’ PC gaming condition, where he plays the same section over and over at every possible combination of visual settings to find the right balance between fidelity and performance. Based within The Fens of Lincolnshire (it’s very flat), Dominic can sometimes be found marvelling at the real world’s ‘draw distance’, wishing virtual technologies would catch up.
  • Raphael

    A total lost cause. Adds vr to dirt rally. Never updates it for vive. Launches latest game with no vr support and only considers it as a remote possibility. Idiots.

    Will avoid any codemaster bollocks in future.

    • NooYawker

      Dirt Rally 4 had a free weekend on steam and I played in on my Vive. I didn’t even realize it said oculus only. Maybe that’s why I played it once and uninstalled it. didn’t run very smooth for me at all.

      • CombatSanta

        I think you mean Dirt Rally :) There is no Dirt Rally 4, only Dirt 4 which hasn’t been released yet.

        • NooYawker

          Oh right.. just plain ol Dirt Rally.

    • Pyronious

      I doubt they are idiots. They probably have information you don’t have, such as revenue and usage reports on the VR version of the game. This allows them to make informed decisions about whether it is logical to allocate company resources to the project to implement VR features. The initial Rift support was clearly an experiment to dip their toe in the water and see what the market is like. Unfortunately, the installed hardware base in VR just isn’t big enough to support AAA titles (and the expensive dev teams it requires to make them) yet. It will happen, but maybe not as soon as we all would like.

      • Raphael

        Yes, nevertheless there are AAA developers who don’t have that mentality and are supporting vr. And since support was already implemented for the previous game it doesn’t take massive resources to carry that over to the next game so that excuse doesn’t wash. It might be valid for a small dev with no previous vr support experience but not in this case.

        You will observe there are AAA devs supporting vr now who don’t have that mindset.

        Codemasters is a corporate non-risk taking entity that won’t commit to anything that’s not part of their established safe IP. Thankfully this kind of publisher is a dying breed.

        • Pyronious

          I agree that the VR support in Dirt Rally was awesome. And I know that it was a huge investment in art and engineering resources to implement it. What I don’t know is when the Dirt 4 team branched their codebase. If they started work on Dirt 4 prior to the addition of the VR work on Dirt Rally, then they don’t get that stuff for free, and it’s not trivial to migrate from one codebase to another once the products have diverged.

          I think it’s a pretty likely scenario that the Dirt 4 codebase diverged prior to the Oculus Rift port. That’s why VR didn’t come in at launch. They need to ship a product that meets 90% of their customer’s needs and start having the product generate revenue. I hope they follow up with a patch or additional product with VR support – I for one have not purchased Dirt 4 yet and won’t until VR support comes.

  • Adrian Meredith

    Probably a lost sale for me then

    • El_MUERkO

      Bought the last one ASAP. But DIRT 4, no sale till Vive support.

  • Ninjai71

    Dirt 4 without vr? No way! Will maybe be purchased for a cheap price in future sales, if it will have vr support.

  • Adam

    I’m sure they will add it soon. They would be stupid not to.

  • mbze430

    won’t be buying it till it does have VR, and if not…totally skipping

  • Raphael

    Codemasters vr roadmap is:

    27 boardroom meetings (one every 3 months) to determine whether anyone is buying vr.
    At the end of the 27 meetings if they decide to support vr they will have their team enable vr for octopus rift.
    There is no HTC Vive as far as codemasters are aware and stupid members of the public have not contacted them to tell them vive exists.

    • Darshan

      “Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.”
      – Yoda

      • Raphael

        I hate boardroom meetings.

        • Andrew McEvoy

          I used to work for Codies many years ago, before they decided to move everyone up to their compound in lemington spa. They were/are all about the boardroom meetings like you said, prone to ridiculous u turn decisions on projects (fueled by fat lines of charlie I heard)

          • Raphael

            Lol. That’s hilarious. I guess in this case “charlie” can’t decide.

  • J.C.

    Ridiculous. This game likely runs on the same engine Rally does, so most of the work has already been done. Unfortunately Codemasters decided to build for the Oculus SDK, so IF they enable VR for it, it still won’t work on the Vive.

    It’s pretty clear that they want to be able to say VR isn’t worth the effort due to lack of consumer interest.

    • Mucker2002

      Surely you’ve heard of Revive?

      • J.C.

        Sorry, I meant “it won’t work on the Vive without an unsupported third party hack”. I’m not about to purchase a game that doesn’t actually support my hardware.

        ReVive is, honestly, a mistake. Without it, Oculus might have already offered official support for the Vive. ReVive is not an answer, it’s a bandaid.

        • Alexisms

          Why is it a mistake? Does it compromise the experience? I’m genuinely interested why you’d be against a product that expands the library?

          • J.C.

            So you’d happily spend a couple hundred dollars on software on a store that refuses to support your hardware? ReVive works mostly fine, from what I’ve heard, but I’m not about to give money to a store that can’t be bothered to offer direct support. They want to be exclusive? Fine. I’ll spend my money at a store that supports EVERYONE’s hardware.

            If the dev of ReVive decided to stop working on it, and there was an update to the Oculus store that made it slightly incompatible, all the titles I’d purchased would be useless. Oculus has done it before, intentionally, and only backed down when the ReVive creator basically said he knew how to get around the store’s DRM and would release that in his next version.

            SO, I refuse to use ReVive for two reasons: One, Oculus wants to be THE vr store, but clearly doesn’t understand what that means. I’m not going to give them money, that only encourages their bad behavior. Two, I don’t want to risk losing access to anything I’ve purchased on their store due to an unforeseen third party issue.

          • Alexisms

            Some good points. OK I’ll let you off :-)

  • mrtexasfreedom

    The VR experience of Dirt Rally is terrific, btw. Especially with steering wheel controller. Well worth the purchase price.

  • Cristianfx

    No VR no buy…

  • Ian N Karen O

    Haha, the comments on a VR orientated website complaining that codemasters is stupid, lost cause etc, as they didnt invest in VR support… YET.

    The world is a big place and VR is still very very small. Knowing how many people I know that have a VR headset (Zero). I wouldn’t waste money coding in support (yet) until I could start getting some revenue in for my last few years of work and pay the boys for their efforts thus far.

    • Alexisms

      Catch 22. People hold off on VR until there are games that support it, devs don’t support it because no one has it.

    • Raphael

      Missing the point u fool They akready supportrd vr. Unsupporting it in later game isn’t very nice of them. So yes. Idiots there somewhere. Management probably.

      You wouldn’t code a vr game because you know zero people with vr. Are you a total mong? Firstly. What the fuck are you doing on a vr site and secondly… Are you not aware how many units have been sold? Dickhead.

      • Ian N Karen O

        Calm the Farm. Hope to never meet an angry arrogant person like you in VR. I suspect to “Code a VR” game takes significant investment, and just because a previous build supports it doesn’t automatically mean the new one does.

        You yourself said “they already supported it” so therefore, I also suspect they have a far better idea of who is using their games and how, and how much it costs to code. (Based on the latest announcement, its likely they had very small return on the hours spent coding in VR support – in comparison to conventional playing of their game) – lets be real, it’s probably about money.

        I also suspect this very topic was debated in depth at much higher levels and the decision to code (if at all) after release was obviously made. In reference to my original statement. This does not entitle VR users to call codemasters stupid. This is merely unfortunate for the VR community.

        Also as a very original Kickstarter backer, I guess I shouldn’t come to sites like this to comment huh? And without knowing the exact figure of VR units having been sold. I have a sneaking suspicion that there are exponentially millions more gaming consoles and Pcs sold that will buy and play the game…

        Hence why I mentioned, I personally know well over 50+ people gaming and “Zero” of them have headsets – lending my original point – walking Codemasters shoes, “I wouldn’t invest in it yet”.

        Once again, doesn’t make codemasters stupid. And doesn’t make us entiteled to call them dickheads. Should be doing quite the opposite and petition and encourage them if “we” want support for our ever growing yet small (comparatively) community.

        • Raphael

          That not worth the effort thing doesn’t wash. Also it’s irrelevant how many people you know personally who don’t own vr. Some of my friends have vr and some more are going to buy. That’s also irrelevant. Project cars, corsa are racing sims from smaller dev teams and they made a commitment to vr. Codemasters like many big names are not risk takers and in the case of vr it’s no longer even a risk so much as forward thinking towards the inevitable.

          • Ian N Karen O

            So, in summary, the fact that the overwhelming majority of people who will play this game will not be in VR, they still should develop for it, because, forward thinking.

            This sense of entitlement for VR users is intriguing and apparantly gives us the right to call developers idiots? It appears they have lost about 7 sales here and maybe 1% off their bottom line.

            Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for VR support, but I certainly don’t insult the hands that feed me when I don’t get what I want on release day.

          • Raphael

            So you think only 7 people who post here will be the only ones to boycott their game? I guess you never look at steam discussions.

            I have no issue with biting the hand cos they aint feeding me. I will support those devs who don’t spend years debating whether to add vr.

            But you go ahead… Kiss ass. Maybe they’ll like you and listen. But then again I’m sure you will sit and wait patiently anyway.

            With codemasters i doubt it’s the devs giving and taking vr. It will be corporate beancounters who have no conection with end users. Just because vr is a niche peripheral doesn’t mean we should be ignored.

            It’s a fucking game that already had vr enabled so it’s hardly going to take 100s of hours to bring vr to the latest one. Unless they do a complete engine rewrite.

            So your argument falls flat on the basis of coding for vr not being a massive undertaking.

          • Ian N Karen O

            Well, constructively speaking, your logic is rock solid.

            Your a VR user that’s buys VR supported content – You would be silly not too hey?

            And as a VR user your entitled to insult other developers that release content without VR support on release day.

            Do you tell your mother she’s a bitch when you come home to no food on the table. That’s the encouragement logic I’m getting from your conversation.

            For reference Alexisms highlights the key points of my original discussion perfectly. I think he gets it.

            I also suggest re reading the article. VR support “is not ruled out”

            So, correct. I’ll will sit patiently, and as the community grows, I’ll keep buying more well developed content. Devs keep making money, and keep giving me more awesome shit to buy.

            And basically I’ll avoid being a cock about not getting my desert on time. Peace.

          • Raphael

            I answer yes to all questions you put forth. Where is my dinner?

    • Cobretti

      What a fallacious argument. They have already written the code necessary for VR. It’s right there in Dirt Rally, a relatively low budget side project that was supposed to be a stepping stone towards Dirt 4. And yet here we are, with the “bigger and better” next numbered entry in the series lacking features that already existed.

      That’s the main reason that’s gotten people up in arms. Not its mere absence, but the fact that it was removed. Some people simply don’t want to go back to playing driving games on monitors, and for them this is the equivalent of removing wheel and pedals support.

      • Ian N Karen O

        Yeah your right, it’s that simple they had done all the work, and chose to remove from launch just to loose a small percentage of sales and piss off the VR community. I’m sure you could copy and paste the code right across, and everything just magically falls into place.

        My “fallacious” point is quite simply I can understand why they are willing to wait, as stated in the the article, they are waiting to see how sucsessful it is on PSVR. And im lost when the minority VR community feels the right to abuse software companies when they don’t get what they want on launch day.

  • Noel Grundy

    It would have been day one for me with VR support, Now I may just wait for Project cars 2.

  • Rick Moore

    If this had Vive support I’d buy it instantly. No interest without it.

  • elev8d

    Didn’t pick up Dirt Rally because of lack of Vive support. Wanted to play it, but didn’t want to hack it. I would’ve bought it for sure if it supported the Vive.

  • Alexisms

    You guys up in arms over lack of VR support. Don’t complain here, but complain directly to Codemasters. That’s the only way they are going to change their minds. Keep on at them until it’s less hassle to just implement it than to read all the complaints.

    • Raphael

      Absolutely right. Badger and hound… Sounds like a pub. Keep on at them. I’ve done this with quite few devs.

      • Alexisms

        Hehe pub or a tenacious firm of solicitors :-)

  • Too bad, would have bought a copy for the rift and vive today. Now I’ll just wait for the next Project Cars for my wife and I to get our racing fix.

  • Jason Mercieca

    No vr for vive dirt 4 will go to the dirt

  • Muhammad Jihad ✓ᵛᵉʳᶦᶠᶦᵉᵈ

    No VR, no sale for me. Plus Dirt Rally made me incredibly motion sick incredibly fast. Meanwhile a game like iRacing doesn’t bother me in the least – which makes me think it’s all about framerate, Dirt Rally in VR runs like garbage even with a GTX 1080.

    • Alexisms

      Could be the jumps. Your stomach expects the feeling but nothing happens.

      • Muhammad Jihad ✓ᵛᵉʳᶦᶠᶦᵉᵈ

        No, it’s the motion in general and the frame rate issue, the game isn’t meant to run at a solid 90fps and that shows. There is an IGN overview of the VR version where they have a bunch of people try it, and it’s pretty funny, you see like 70% of their staff sweating profusely after playing the game and they look like they’re going to puke. I’m not alone on that one.

  • Simon Graham

    It seems Oculus didn’t rush forward to fund the VR aspect and claim exclusivity. As the code is probably already there, they may be waiting for the highest VR bidder…which will probably be Oculus (FB). I won’t be buying any more racing games that lack VR support..ever.

    • Des Dearman

      Pretty much.
      Codemasters are nothing of the company they used to be. They will be waiting for somebody to pay them to do the vr. I’m in the same boat, there’s no way I can go back to racing on a letter box screen.
      It’s not a hate thing, just the way it is. The reason I bag on codies though, is purely because they outright lied to people when PC vr first came in. They said vive support was oncoming *a month I think? on release. This was never the case. Not a vive/oculus thing, I couldn’t care less on that, just didn’t find the deceit very good form. Can’t see myself in the short term buying product from them again.

  • Darren Herd

    No vr no me. Buggered if I’m paying for a rally game when I got a vr headset sitting in the corner that I brought for my racing sim. Yeah naa no thx codemasters. The only rea son I got my vive was to play sim racing on it. Looks like I’ll be sticking to elite dangerous for awhile yet then or put my money on the next rally vr game to come out

  • chaos_in_ashland

    Please do this! Dirt Rally is amazing with the Vive, even tho its Revive

  • Gonzalo Novoa

    Bought Dirt Rally on psvr and later on PC. Without VR I wouldn’t even think of buying Dirt 4.

  • Rick Robinson

    Pleeeeze make a VR dlc like Dirt Rally did

  • The Decline

    So I guess I’m skipping this and F1 2018. Once you race in VR there is no going back.