EA Sports World Rally Championship live experience: enjoy exciting races, but VR beta still needs further optimization

EA Sports WRC has recently created a new program forPC VRBeta support has been added, but how does this rally game fare? Read on for our full impressions.

虽然Codemasters继续发布年度的F1游戏和越野赛车游戏，自2019年的《DiRT Rally 2.0》以来，我们就没有看到这家工作室推出VR拉力赛游戏。这实际上是一款使用官方的国际汽联世界拉力锦标赛许可的精神继承者，拥有超过18个地点的200多个拉力赛道，大约80辆真实世界的汽车和可定制的车辆。在去年11月的平板发行之后，第四个赛季最近推出了PC VR支持。

As with F1 23 and GRID Legends, each race can be played in your VR headset in a 360-degree view from the driver's seat. All remaining operations use 2D menus and place you in Cinema Mode. Only joystick and steering wheel accessories are supported, and in this experience I often switched between my Thrustmaster T248 steering wheel and the official Xbox joystick.

As someone more accustomed to track racing than off-road tracks, the controls of the EA Sports WRC were slicker than I initially expected. Handling the car was an enjoyable challenge, and the "Rally School" tutorials were useful in helping me learn the mechanics step-by-step. Like the easierAIAssistive features like the difficulty settings provide welcome help for beginners, and it feels good to drive these environments after finding a comfortable balance. This is made possible by the diverse range of tracks and the excellent choice of vehicles.

There's no shortage of content in EA Sports WRC. The enjoyable "Career" mode lets you choose between Junior WRC, WRC 2 or the main WRC division, with success measured by meeting performance targets set by your donors, such as reaching a specific position in the Drivers' Championship. "Championship" offers a great alternative to pure rallying, while "Moments" offers an interesting twist with daily challenges based on the real history of the WRC.

There's a lot to like about EA Sports WRC, which makes me expect better PC VR functionality. Currently, VR support is in beta, and I initially tested it a few weeks ago using a Ryzen 7 2700X and Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070. I quickly noticed that even at low performance settings, the screen still wobbled and gave me vertigo. I've since upgraded to a new PC with an RTX 4070 Ti Super and Intel i9-12900 processor, and while the wobbling no longer occurs, the other issues remain.

The worst problem is that when I load a pro event or tournament match, my headset screen often goes black, but the game still runs on my PC. This problem doesn't go away until you quit the game, which has happened at least seven times. This severely limits what I can play at the moment, although I've had better luck with the tutorials, individual matches against AI opponents, and online multiplayer. I mainly useQuest 3 and Virtual Desktop, but using theQuest 2Similar problems have arisen.

It's a shame, because EA Sports WRC is great in VR.Codemasters even includes a nice array of VR-specific comfort settings, such as adjustments to the HUD, vignettes specific for collisions, head camera height settings, and more. However, this is inconsequential when you can't reliably play the core game modes in PC VR. I just hope that VR support improves when it is officially released.

source:uploadvr