EA Sports WRC released to a collection of positive reviews yesterday on day one of early access. But as time goes on, community feedback highlights many performance issues which raises the question, did EA Sports WRC release too early?
Yesterday, Codemasters and EA Sports celebrated the release of its first rally game under the new World Rally Championship licence. Content outlets across the internet appeared happy with the title with reviews seemingly positive. In fact, we ourselves very much enjoy the game.
However, as more and more players test out EA Sports WRC with a variety of systems, performance issues are rapidly emerging. Furthermore, first hands-on console gameplay is showing limited graphical fidelity.
With so many issues, it is worth wondering if the title needed more development time. Luckily, the internet is banding together, with several fixes presenting themselves for issues. Here are some of the problems to look out for and potential solutions.
EA Sports WRC Stuttering
In our review of the new rally game, we pointed out that EA Sports WRC suffers from stutters. However, we were far from aware of the extent of the issues. Depending on PC system hardware and graphics settings, these stutters can render the game near unplayable. Comments on RaceDepartment forums show that some players are going to the ends of refunding the game.
With the big news from the title’s launch being the switch from the EGO engine to Unreal, many wonder if UE4 shader precompilation downfalls are at the origin of these stutters. In fact, some players are reporting that secondary runs on a same stage in a same session helps to alleviate the issue.
Elsewhere, Reddit user Kleist suggests that Unreal’s power-hungry reflections are the cause. They point out that simply dropping the Reflection setting to Low can provide a performance boost. Unfortunately, this is not something that will help those with the real framerate issues.
Poor Console Performance
Whilst stuttering is plaguing PC players of the game, console fans seem to suffer from other problems. On PS5 in particular, EA Sports WRC appears to run at far lesser graphical fidelity than the PC version of the game. Seemingly, EA is protecting framerate on consoles by reducing the graphics settings.
However, this does not seem to be working. Community feedback for EA Sports WRC is consistently reporting terrible performance on consoles. Be it framerate, or input lag, the game is being dubbed ‘badly optimised’ by many racers.
On console, this is something one can only hope patches and updates will resolve. In fact, tweaking graphical settings is not as popular as on PC games, so one must stick to the default look and feel of the game.
In addition, many console players report severe screen tearing, showing that the systems are struggling to keep up with the demands of Unreal Engine at the high speeds of rallying.
Bugs in EA Sports WRC
There is no doubt that glitches in EA Sports WRC are prominent. There are seemingly an endless supply of random events that should not occur in the game. In his video review of the title, Michel spotted several graphical bugs in the replay mode and even experienced crashes on one of the Monte Carlo stages. On the editorial side, we did not experience outright crashes, but strange textures in the mirror were difficult to look past, and missing podium animations were hilarious.
Less amusing glitches include this strange occurrence in which changing the AI difficulty mid-rally no longer counts following stage times to one’s opponents final times. As a result, the AI can finish a nine-stage event with a sub-five-minute time. We can all admit that even Esport professionals will struggle to beat that.
It seems other players however are experiencing worse than us. On RaceDepartment, user Kulibob cannot even boot up the game. Once more, they cannot find a fix for the issue saying, “Verifying files didn’t work, re-downloading didn’t work, restarting didn’t work, admin rights didn’t work, running exe itself didn’t work… and I’m not the only one.”
Indeed they are not. Boosted Media wrote a rather damning post on YouTube. They are not looking to put together a review on the game in its current state. Not only does it suffer from many issues, they also feel it is important to note that the game does not output telemetry. Furthermore, VR and true triple screen support will feature in an update down the line.
Hope in Sight?
As aforementioned, Codemasters and EA plan to release an update one week after the game’s official launch on November 3. We believe this patch will focus on stability and performance, with certain Monte Carlo, Croatia and Sweden stages named explicitly.
Much like F1 23, the development team also has a list of known issues. The community is constantly adding to it as in-game hours rise. If you come across a bug, glitch, drop in performance or crash, make sure to file it on the website.
What bugs, glitches and issues have you encountered during your time with EA Sports WRC? Let us know on Twitter @OverTake_gg or in the comments below!
