Codemasters Releases Dirt 3 Screens

Codemasters has released new screenshots showcasing what players can expect to see when Dirt 3 hits store shelves. Coming in 2011, Dirt 3 will feature more cars, more locations, more routes and more events than any other game in the series, including more than 50 rally cars representing five decades of the sport. Dirt 3 delivers mud, sweat and gears from the intense weather-beaten rally stages of Europe, Africa and the US to performance driving showcases and career challenges where car control is pushed to spectacular limits.

The Dirt series traces its roots back to Colin McRae Rally, the rally-sim franchise Codemasters built around the real-world World Rally Championship driver of the same name. The series shifted its branding to Dirt starting with Colin McRae: Dirt in 2007, broadening its focus beyond pure rally stages to include a wider mix of off-road disciplines, spectacle-driven events and a more accessible driving model aimed at a broader audience than the earlier, more simulation-focused entries had been.

Dirt 2, released in 2009, continued that shift toward a flashier, more extreme-sports presentation, with rally cars sharing space alongside buggies, trucks and other off-road vehicles across a range of real-world locations. Dirt 3 builds directly on that foundation, expanding the roster of vehicles and adding new locations and event types while keeping the series’ emphasis on dramatic weather and varied terrain that has defined it since the rebrand.

Career progression in the Dirt series has typically been built around climbing through tiers of events and vehicle classes, unlocking faster cars and tougher stages as a player’s reputation grows. Dynamic weather and lighting have also long been a hallmark of the franchise, with rain-soaked, muddy stages and shifting visibility adding an extra layer of difficulty on top of the courses themselves, forcing drivers to adjust their approach to a track that can look completely different from one run to the next.

Dirt 3 eventually released in 2011 for PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and PC, continuing Codemasters’ push to make off-road racing feel as much like an extreme-sports spectacle as a motorsport simulation, a tone reflected in the “mud, sweat and gears” framing used to describe the game ahead of launch.

Codemasters, the studio behind Dirt 3, is a long-running British developer with deep roots in racing games, having also produced the Formula One series of officially licensed F1 games and later the Grid series of circuit racers. That breadth across simulation-leaning F1 titles, street-racing Grid games and the more spectacle-driven Dirt series gave the studio plenty of technology and racing know-how to draw on when building out Dirt 3’s expanded roster of cars and locations. Screenshots released ahead of launch were meant to show off that scale directly, giving fans an early look at the range of environments and vehicle types before the full game arrived on shelves the following year.