Changing AI Difficulty in Dirt Rally 2.0

[DSS1970 4]

Is there a way to change the AI difficulty after you've made your initial profile?

I have been playing Dirt Rally 2.0 and enjoying it for the most part. Recently I have been getting very frustrated. When I created my initial profile I left the AI Difficulty at the default of 70, medium. I made it through the Open championship using the Fulvia and completed even after having to retire from 2 events.

I moved up to clubman and used the Fiat Abarth and I found it crazy hard, I was finishing last or next to last every stage. I finished 26th, 24th, & 28th in the 1st 3 rallies and was getting frustrated. I looked through the options and could not find a way to change the AI difficulty. I even tried a custom championship with one stage and could not select the difficulty as you could in Dirt Rally. I tried an AWD Group A car and finished 19th.

Since I was getting frustrated, not enjoying the game, and could not find away to adjust the AI difficulty, I reset my profile and when that wouldn't let me change it, I nuked my whole profile, losing all of my progress and still could not change the AI difficulty.

Is the only way to change the AI Difficulty to uninstall and re-install or hack the game registry?

 

For some background on me. I play on PC and use a controller. I have played all of the Colin McRae games and Dirt Rally. In Dirt Rally I was able to proceed up to elite without issue using the older fwd and rwd cars (I prefer the newer cars myself). To unlock Masters I had to use the overpowered Alpine. I found that elite was where I was comfortably challenged doing top 5 or better times, while rarely winning.

Dirt Rally 2.0 on Clubman at 70 AI difficulty is miles harder than Master on Dirt Rally.

I hope there is an easy fix for this as I like the game, but not being able to change the AI difficulty is a big flaw and the crappy Racenet connections don't help. 

 

UPDATE

I have to correct myself. the AI performance isn't in the driver profile it's when you 1st start My Team Events along with whether you want hardcore damage or not. There doesn't seem to be any place to view your choices or change them after your initial selection. Hopefully there is and I'm not seeing it as otherwise it's a big detriment to me.

A suggestion to Codemasters outside of letting us be able to change these after our initial selection would be to give us some frame of reference, such as telling us what the equivalent Dirt Rally AI Performance is in comparison and it isn't 70 as Clubman in Dirt Rally 2.0 is way harder than in Dirt Rally with the same class car and similar experience.

It also doesn't work saying medium as medium means something completely different to say a new player coming straight from the Dirt series games to Dirt Rally 2.0, to a casual sim player like myself, and to high-end sim racers like Jimmy Broadbent.

[DJaaron94 1]

I have too this problem, where i can change IA level? 

If u don’t want to let me change the difficulty, you have to do a tutorial with valutation at the first start of the game, only with this i can find the true level i am

 

[jvdwijden 0]

If you choose Custom Championship you DO have the option to change it.  However in Career mode I can’t seem to find it anywhere. Really frustrating to do a clean, semi fast stage and still end up last with 30 seconds down to the person one place ahead of me.

[DSS1970 4]

2 hours ago, jvdwijden said:

If you choose Custom Championship you DO have the option to change it.  However in Career mode I can’t seem to find it anywhere. Really frustrating to do a clean, semi fast stage and still end up last with 30 seconds down to the person one place ahead of me.

I totally agree with the frustration. I just finished my first Clubman championship and finished dead last and got punted down to Open. I looked all over and couldn't find a way to change the AI Performance either.

I'm going to do some Custom Championships and see how those workout.

[jvdwijden 0]

Just now, DSS1970 said:

I totally agree with the frustration. I just finished my first Clubman championship and finished dead last and got punted down to Open. I looked all over and couldn't find a way to change the AI Performance either.

I'm going to do some Custom Championships and see how those workout.

I’ve tested the Custom Championship on 35 difficulty and immidiately felt it was more ‘fair’. +20 to +35 seconds behnind the leader still got me within the first 10, just LinkedIn Dirt Rally. I decided to reinstall the game to see if I can adjust the difficulty there.

I tried everything else: erasing sage data, resetting profile, disconnecting from Racenet. Nothing gave me the option to set the difficulty.  The weird thing is it still ‘knew’ the damage to my Subaru and credits I earned but it erased my Career progress.

Will get back to you once the 2nd install is done!

[DSS1970 4]

5 hours ago, jvdwijden said:

I’ve tested the Custom Championship on 35 difficulty and immidiately felt it was more ‘fair’. +20 to +35 seconds behnind the leader still got me within the first 10, just LinkedIn Dirt Rally. I decided to reinstall the game to see if I can adjust the difficulty there.

I tried everything else: erasing sage data, resetting profile, disconnecting from Racenet. Nothing gave me the option to set the difficulty.  The weird thing is it still ‘knew’ the damage to my Subaru and credits I earned but it erased my Career progress.

Will get back to you once the 2nd install is done!

I tried that stuff also. I'm going to stick to the Custom Championships, which should allow me to cut down on all of the night and rain stages.

Good look with the 2nd install.

[jayro49 0]

The game is so hard. I set the difficulty at like 75% initially and I can't progress to get credits, and my cars are all dusted - despite resetting the entire game. It sucks that you can't seemingly change the difficulty level even after resetting the game. Were you able to do a reinstall or find a way to get back to these settings??? Thanks. 

[jvdwijden 0]

I erased all save data, deleted the game, rebooted my PS4 and reinstalled the game only to see it reconnect with Racenet, not giving me the option to redefine AI difficulty. It just loaded and left me with half of the progress (credit and damage wise) from the previously installed game.

I don’t mind it being hard. When I took up Dirt Rally 3 years ago it took me 5 hours before I even started enjoying the game. I continued to improve and got through Open and Clubman difficulties playing 2 or 3 championships each, trying to push as hard as possible and doing multiple retries. Professional took me 5 Championships and each of the difficulties I finished either 2nd or 3rd.  On Elite I’ve managed to end 6th and 4th, just taking one shot at each stage, embracing mistakes.  

I mean, I never won a rally, but was able to progress and kept evolving. I love that game for giving me the feeling closest to driving a real rallycar, especially with my VR headset on!  The difference is really felt within the balancing of stage times compared to the AI’s times.  In Dirt Rally you’d easily get top 10 being 20 to 30 seconds behind.  Whereas in DR2.0 it seems to knock you down in the late teens, early twenties.

Anyway, I’m gonna try one more time, erasing my Racenet profile and doing another full install. If that doesn’t work, I guess I’ll have to practice even harder and it’ll take me even longer to progress.  I hope they patch in the option, rebalancing the game to the point it resembles DIrt Rally.

Cheers,

A medium skilled Sim enthousiast

[DSS1970 4]

I thought that the re-install might not work as everything is uploaded to Racenet.

I have stopped doing the Career Mode altogether until they hopefully patch it. I have come to love the Custom Championships. You can change the AI Performance and Hardcore Damage at anytime by going back out to the Custom Championship main page and it takes effect at your next event. You don't earn money in the Custom Championships and as such don't buy or upgrade cars as they are fully upgraded as with your team, but you do get points. While that's a bit of a bummer, the pro's of the Custom Championships outweigh the cons for me.

The Custom Championships are different from the ones in DR1 where you couldn't configure anything but the difficulty. Here you can configure what events (you can even have Rally and Rallycross events in the same championship if you want to) you want, what stages you want, the time of day, the weather, and not only whether you want a service before the stage, you even select how long the service is, you can have 15 minute, 30 minute, or 60 minute services, which is pretty awesome.

One thing I've started doing, is mimicking what I see in a lot of the WRC rallies, where they run a loop of 3 or so stages in the morning and repeat them in the afternoon. I'm currently doing an R2 Custom Championship. Since I'm not a big fan of the FWD cars, I made each of the rallies, have a long stage and short stage that I repeat, but with different times of day and/or weather. It's a lot of fun.

It takes me about 20 or so minutes to make a championship and then I save it, so I can do it again with the same class of cars if I want to. You choose the class of car when you make the championship and you have the option to change to a different car or livery for every event in championship if you want to. Nice if you choose a car you don't like.

Since you determine when you want service you can do 1, 2, 3, 4, or even more stages between services, requiring longer services and giving you a reason to use soft or hard tires. I always stick to medium tires for the standard 2 stages as they didn't give us a manual, tool tips, or even an in-game tire wear gauge at the services to see how your tires are or how long they are supposed to last 😞

As for AI Performance as I said above in DR1 I was able to get through all of the levels with too much difficulty until I hit Master and then had to use the Renault Alpine. Masters was challenging for me to get top 10 times, so I started doing Custom Championships at Elite and could do top 3 to 5 finishes. In DR2 I started setting the AI Performance in the Custom Championship at 50 and it was still way too hard. I currently have it set at 30 with the R2 cars and if I'm pushing at the ragged edge of losing control with my skills and using a controller I can win stages or be in the top three. If I make even fairly small mistakes I'll be down 8th to 10th, bigger mistakes will have me in the high teens.

I love it that the AI really pushes you and punishes you for making mistakes. When I do my next Custom Championship with the R4's I'll probably drop it down to 25 so I have to push hard to do well, but don't have to be on the ragged edge of crashing if I want to do well.

[jvdwijden 0]

Good to hear you've found a way to enjoy the game! I started doing RX championships and immediately got through open and clubman winning almost all races. It's weird but the AI seems way slower in RX. This way I was able to use my credits for repairment and upgrades so I now have a fully stocked Colin's Subaru. 

I continued the Open championship and sometimes I'm even winning stages, depending much on my Tyre choice and small changes to the setup of the car.  Clean stages usually get me within the top 5 or top 10 but once you make 2-3 mistakes on short stages or 5-6 on the long ones, I'm dead last. I guess that's to be expected though. 

I'm gonna keep switching between RX and Rallies and try to progress. That's the way I'm enjoying it. I still hope they patch a couple of things like tarmac physics and the AI in the lower difficulties, or put in a slider to adjust the overall AI. 

I use a T300RS wheelbase with the Sparco mod wheel, loving the feeling on gravel and dirt. The only thing that bugs me is I can't seem to map my TH8 shifter as the handbrake so I mapped my clutch pedal as the HB. Haven't tried playing with a controller, is it enjoyable? 

[DSS1970 4]

I'm glad you're enjoying. I've always used a controller and it works for me. A wheel set up would be better to have better control instead the off/on of the controller, but I'm not interested in spending the money and I use a standing desk.

[Macadosheesh 1]

I've noticed that if you stick with H1 throughout the career rally championships it's more fair on the difficulty setting. More powerful vehicles seemed to get smoked on the tracks with the AI noticably faster in all aspects. I'm currently playing on 84 difficulty. Rallycross seems to be pretty more stable in playing without frustration of the AI constantly putting you to shame. Hope they get this figured out or I'm stuck with Dirt 4 as a rally fix.

[jvdwijden 0]

14 hours ago, Macadosheesh said:

I've noticed that if you stick with H1 throughout the career rally championships it's more fair on the difficulty setting. More powerful vehicles seemed to get smoked on the tracks with the AI noticably faster in all aspects. I'm currently playing on 84 difficulty. Rallycross seems to be pretty more stable in playing without frustration of the AI constantly putting you to shame. Hope they get this figured out or I'm stuck with Dirt 4 as a rally fix.

This is what I've been thinking all along.  That sucks donkeyballs though.  I bought the deluxe edition so the '95 Impreza was available to me right away.  If in 'Open' championships you get punished as severely as in Elite or Master, we can't really discuss the AI because it doesn't act like AI, more like it's just programmed times on a roster.
I don't think it's far fetched to say that it should be as easy winning in the Impreza than it is in the Fulvia.  If not it totally beats the purpose of having 5 cars available from the start.

[Macadosheesh 1]

4 hours ago, jvdwijden said:

This is what I've been thinking all along.  That sucks donkeyballs though.  I bought the deluxe edition so the '95 Impreza was available to me right away.  If in 'Open' championships you get punished as severely as in Elite or Master, we can't really discuss the AI because it doesn't act like AI, more like it's just programmed times on a roster.
I don't think it's far fetched to say that it should be as easy winning in the Impreza than it is in the Fulvia.  If not it totally beats the purpose of having 5 cars available from the start.

No the difficulty should def amp up with the performance, but the curve is too steep. I go from winning most tracks in H1 with the Fulvia to placing 20th or so in H2 with the 205 GTI.  

[jvdwijden 0]

1 minute ago, Macadosheesh said:

No the difficulty should def amp up with the performance, but the curve is too steep. I go from winning most tracks in H1 with the Fulvia to placing 20th or so in H2 with the 205 GTI.  

I fully agree, the difficulty should increase, but it should be defined by what championship you're doing (open - clubman - pro - elite - master) not by what car you're driving.  That's what I mean saying it should be as easy winning in the Impreza as it is in the Fulvia (doing a championship on 'Open' e.g.).

[Macadosheesh 1]

4 minutes ago, jvdwijden said:

I fully agree, the difficulty should increase, but it should be defined by what championship you're doing (open - clubman - pro - elite - master) not by what car you're driving.  That's what I mean saying it should be as easy winning in the Impreza as it is in the Fulvia (doing a championship on 'Open' e.g.).

I'm currently on pro, but I could probly still pull off wins with the Fulvia but the game would just feel so slow. The Day 1 patch increased AI difficulty across all game modes, so hopefully the next patch or two should balance that out from community trial and error. I played through the rally career on Dirt 4 on medium with wins in all championships and it definitely felt more fair.

[joulz75 5]

AI is way too much agressive in rallycross I think... Any departure I get bumped  and I spin around 😞 I think less agressivity would be better, or other type of collision physics...

[Praetorian1960 3]

Same here. Im just not enjoying the game. I win the stage and beat the class leader(clubman) so I think iv won. When results come up Im 20 to 30 secs down and came 12th. I cant figure it out. Im not the fastest in the world but im not as bad as the game seems to make me.

Iv seen people on youtube driving in clubman class. They dont have a clean race and still win the stage by 2 or 3 secs. Im going flat out no errors and finish 20th.

Please patch this

[Makromatic 17]

is it now possible to change the campaign difficulty after the patch? Can i change the difficulty by resetting the profile? I want to reset only if it's possible to do so.

[Makromatic 17]

ok, i saw it's not possible. Guess i am still on open difficulty, should i take the Lancia Fulvia to proceed?

[TheApexBadger 4]

I think this should be basic, but please allow us to reset the My Event career times. The reward money can be adjusted or you can just reset your progress on your profile, but please allow us to choose a difficulty. It's bad enough to have a persistent online connection, worse to not EVER be able to "start over" with different vehicles.

[Skeeve 0]

I purchased the game yesterday and I also have to say I'm very disapointed and frustrared by the AI difficulty. I'm not a good driver but I like rally games and I'm a big fan of dirt 4 and dirt rally. In dirt rally, I could achieve a ranking position between 4-7 with some practice, which was fine for me. But in dirt rally 2.0, no matter how I try, I'm *always* on the last or at least second last (If the AI has a burst tyre) position. This is no fun!

I'm up for a challenge and I think it's cool for all the guys that can handle this difficulty, but please consider there is also a big crowd of people who doesn't have the same capabilities but they also want some fun from the game.

So please consider a lower AI difficulty mode for the campaign. It would be nice if we're able to lower the AI difficulty at least to a similar level of dirt 1 rally. (Which was hard enough in my opinion!) The high score lists and multiplayer modes wouldn't be affected, but it would make a lot of people happy!

Thanks,
Kind Regards

[SkiddyMcCrash 311]

You can change AI difficulty in Custom Career

[Shmeefly 125]

On 3/2/2019 at 6:46 PM, jayro49 said:

The game is so hard. I set the difficulty at like 75% initially and I can't progress to get credits, and my cars are all dusted - despite resetting the entire game. It sucks that you can't seemingly change the difficulty level even after resetting the game. Were you able to do a reinstall or find a way to get back to these settings??? Thanks. 

You should quit playing career like I did, progress to where the game is unbeatable, for my skill level it’s Elite even though I can get world records with a controller, consistently be in the top page of leaderboards and was able to do DR1 at Masters with no trouble, quit until/IF they bother to fix it, if your cars are all damaged too much because you can’t earn cash in career like me, I make my cash only playing the community events, I haven’t touched career until I hear AI is going to be addressed, you should be able to make enough cash in a couple monthly events to repair your cars at least, I have almost every car in the game, except 2 R5s and 1 RX SUPERCAR, and most I’ve used are all upgraded (with every engine bought) and all upgrades to most of them so it’s a good way to earn cash for the time being