Senior creative director on the upcoming EA Sports WRC, Ross Gowing, has explained Codemasters’ decision to make use of Unreal Engine 5 for the game. In an interview with VG247, Gossing stated that the studio’s older engine, called EGO, was reaching its limits when it came to creating longer stages and larger environments.
“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,” said Gossing. He also goes on to talk about the decision to go with Unreal Engine 5 over EA’s own in-house engine, Frostbite.
“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.”
Gossing goes on to talk about adapting Unreal Engine 5 to the studio’s needs, especially when it comes to the distinct ways in which Codemasters-developed racing titles tend to feel and play. According to Gossing, the studio worked with Epic Games to bring these capabilities to Unreal Engine 5.
“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,” said Gossing.
“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 has been getting quite few trailers leading up to its November 3 release on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. Earlier this month, Codemasters gave us our first look at gameplay for the rally racing game, and we got bit of a deep dive into various game modes thanks to a trailer back in September.
For more details on EA Sports WRC, here’s everything you need to know about the upcoming game.