Introduction
The purpose of this post is to give you a brief overview of how best to tackle Dirt 3 and in what order within the game......my MODUS OPERANDI. I will also include any tips along the way throughout the subsections of the game and I welcome your thoughts and contributions.
Dirt Tour
After creating your new profile you arrive at the main menu. Your guides will suggest going for the Dirt Tour option or Multiplayer option. As standard with all my games, I always start off with the offline option rather than delving straight into the multiplayer action. I see the offline mode as a kind of training session to prepare you for the multiplayer action. Lets face it, there are some damn good gamers out there online who have all the time in the world to perfect their skills within a game. Unfortunately, not everyone has the time to do this. Using the offline mode to perfect your skills prevents you from embarrassing yourself in the multiplayer mode, especially if you are part of a team and peeps are counting on you not to let the side down!! This way your reputation is not tarnished.
In this case, the offline mode is the Dirt Tour option on the menu. Once you select this option you will be met with four large transparent triangles. Your guide will tell you that you have been signed up for four seasons. Each triangle represents a season. The-left most triangle will then flash into colour. This is your starting point. Selecting the season will unfold the triangle to present you with 4 trophies. Only one trophy will be available until you have gained enough points from events to unlock others. Generally, the middle trophy is the "final". In the first season, the final trophy consists of a series of tutorials for various skill sets such as smash, jump and Gymkhana. Once you complete a season you can move on to the next one.
When you finish and gain a trophy, you acquire a sum of reputation points depending on how well you faired during those events. These points attract sponsors, and in turn cars, which will benefit you further in the game.
Along your journey through the seasons, smaller triangles will appear representing the disciplines of Rally, Rallycross, Trailblazer, Landrush, Head2Head and Gymkhana. These are world tours and take these disciplines through all world stages.
In addition to this, a fifth large triangle will at some point appear to the left hand side on the Dirt Tour menu. This represents the Battersea Compound challenges. As you progress through your career, areas of the Battersea Compound will unfold gradually, starting with the Parking Lot, then the Depot and finally Powerstation. Each of these challenges contain a number of individual missions in the form of the likes of jumps, double donuts and drifts etc. in certain areas of the map.
Despite all of these things to do and witnessing the seemingly premature credits, I found the Dirt Tour mode to be over very fast. The biggest problem I had was the Bob Sleigh race level. Here you have to race your Mini down a snowy icy mountain in competition with a bob-sleigh, but taking a slightly different route. To gain platinum in this it took me a whole week, which is very disproportionate with the rest of the Tour mode. Or maybe it's just me and my incompetence with the bob-sleigh level....
You will finish your Dirt Tour offline career with a picturesque explosion of fireworks.
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| Dirt 3 Gamers |
In this case, the offline mode is the Dirt Tour option on the menu. Once you select this option you will be met with four large transparent triangles. Your guide will tell you that you have been signed up for four seasons. Each triangle represents a season. The-left most triangle will then flash into colour. This is your starting point. Selecting the season will unfold the triangle to present you with 4 trophies. Only one trophy will be available until you have gained enough points from events to unlock others. Generally, the middle trophy is the "final". In the first season, the final trophy consists of a series of tutorials for various skill sets such as smash, jump and Gymkhana. Once you complete a season you can move on to the next one.
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| Dirt 3 Career Menu |
When you finish and gain a trophy, you acquire a sum of reputation points depending on how well you faired during those events. These points attract sponsors, and in turn cars, which will benefit you further in the game.
Along your journey through the seasons, smaller triangles will appear representing the disciplines of Rally, Rallycross, Trailblazer, Landrush, Head2Head and Gymkhana. These are world tours and take these disciplines through all world stages.
In addition to this, a fifth large triangle will at some point appear to the left hand side on the Dirt Tour menu. This represents the Battersea Compound challenges. As you progress through your career, areas of the Battersea Compound will unfold gradually, starting with the Parking Lot, then the Depot and finally Powerstation. Each of these challenges contain a number of individual missions in the form of the likes of jumps, double donuts and drifts etc. in certain areas of the map.
Despite all of these things to do and witnessing the seemingly premature credits, I found the Dirt Tour mode to be over very fast. The biggest problem I had was the Bob Sleigh race level. Here you have to race your Mini down a snowy icy mountain in competition with a bob-sleigh, but taking a slightly different route. To gain platinum in this it took me a whole week, which is very disproportionate with the rest of the Tour mode. Or maybe it's just me and my incompetence with the bob-sleigh level....
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| Dirt 3 Bobsleigh |
You will finish your Dirt Tour offline career with a picturesque explosion of fireworks.
Multiplayer
After finishing the Dirt tour (in it's entirety) I then felt confident to take on fellow hardcore gamers. In the Multiplayer option I didn't bother with the "Local Network" mode as it is 2012 don't you know. Who, today, lugs their computer over to their friend's houses for a LAN game (unless it is Starcraft II!). I have a 6 year old son who quickly got very much into Dirt 3, so I would play split screen mode with him on a regular basis, mainly Joyride.
For my own personal hardcore fix, I go straight for "Online" mode. I started off my online career in "Pro Tour". This is because when you are starting out with no online experience or Dirt 3 related friends then this mode is more suited. This is because the structure is based on one-game-at-a-time and players remain more anonymous. Players cannot invite friends to games and if you try and meet someone in one of the games as pre-planned, it is highly likely you will end up in a parallel, but different lobby. The reason why this is more suited to the newbie is because, while you are learning the ropes of online gaming, you are not likely to walk in as an outsider to a gang of close nit territorial buddies with a cynical view on newbies. This makes it a very welcoming place to start. Having said that, there is by no means any compromise on the competitive nature of Pro Tour! Pro Tour is billed as "competitive mode" in comparison to the Jam Sessions.
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| Dirt 3 Gymkhana |
Within the "Pro Tour" challenge there are a range of discipline categories. I never found any players at the time in the "Party Modes", "Circuit Racing", "Hardcore", or "Gymkhana" categories. It was a shame, because one of the GFWL acheivements was to win a game in the "Hardcore" category. But this wasn't a problem: later on in my online career when I had gained a few Dirt 3 friends, I was able to ask one of them to help me out by meeting me in the "Pro Tour" "Hardcore" mode. Thanks Yuri! This worked well because, despite what I have said above about different parallel lobbies, this only applied when there were many players abundant (enough to fill a few lobbys). Because the "Hardcore" mode was empty all of the time, it was possible to meet up with someone in the one and only existing lobby available at the time.
I found most players to be in the "Competitive" category. This housed the largest selection of hardcore disciplines such as competitive Rally, Circuit Racing (eg. RallyX), Point To Point (eg. Trailblazer) and Gymkhana. Why would anyone want to bother with the other categories I ask? After racking up the experience points you start to get to know some familiar faces and hence I started to add friends to my list. Sometimes, if Competitive Mode was empty, you would always find players in Point To Point Mode.
After a confidence boost and getting a taster for online competitiveness, I was excited with the idea of entering Jam Session Mode and sampling the additional Party Mode disciplines otherwise not available in Pro Tour due to lack of players. I was also excited to see the custom rules introduced by players in their own owned lobbies. Jam Session had much more of a community feel to it. In a chosen lobby you would have the opportunity to hang out with the same players for astronomical amounts of time, building up long term relationships easily. This is when I really began to add friends to my list in their hordes. It was within these Jam Session lobbies that you can invite or be invited by friends from your sudden growing friends list. In the Jam Session menu, if you go to "Custom Match" and click "Find Match" (with no filtering), this is the best way to to view all active lobbies and assess the statistics in the form of discipline, player numbers, and also glimpse to see if any of your friends are hosting a lobby. If they are, you can easily join by entering their lobby. Jam Session is where you gain the highest quality of friends at a fast rate..
This is where I spent the bulk of my Dirt 3 career, chasing that level 50 and all GFWL achievements.
Single Player
Next up on the main Dirt 3 menu is "Singleplayer". In the "Singleplayer" menu I never entertained the idea of "Single Race". There was no point! It would contribute nothing to my career and is probably best viewed as a mode for practices and trials. "Time Trial" was my chosen option.
I left Time Trial mode until last. The reason was because the purpose of this mode is to record your personal best times on the World Record Leaderboard. Now, if you are going to do this, it is very unlikey you will make it far up on the World Recrod Leaderboard tables because we are competing against the whole world here!!! So hopefully by now, you would have gained some extensive experience from the online career to make a respectable entry on the Time Trial leaderboards.
You also have the options of racing against ghosts of your friends and the world record holder. This, again, is a reason to leave Time Trial mode to the last task for tackling. You will have many friend's ghosts to choose from by now. I tackled this very extensive last leg of the game by cycling through the enormous collection of "Discipline", "Location", "Track" and "Vehicle Class" until I had worked my way through every combination. For each race, I would generally pick the three ghosts with the top times. The better the ghosts are, the more they will spur you on to do a better job. Selecting sub-standard ghosts means that their positioning on the track (ie. closer to you) can distract you! Once you start filling slots in the World Leaderboard your friends can see what you have been up to in their New Feeds or available Time Trial ghosts and you will start to receive comments and attempts to beat your times. Great fun!
And there you have it! This is the best way I found to tackle Dirt 3. There is no definitive end to Dirt 3, which is a good thing in terms of longevity. The Time Trial mode provides an on going opportunity to better yourself and compete or keep up with your friend's new Personal Bests. The Online Multiplayer mode is a great chance to continue meeting up with your friends in the Jam Sessions and have fun time after time.
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| Dirt 3 Leaderboard |
And there you have it! This is the best way I found to tackle Dirt 3. There is no definitive end to Dirt 3, which is a good thing in terms of longevity. The Time Trial mode provides an on going opportunity to better yourself and compete or keep up with your friend's new Personal Bests. The Online Multiplayer mode is a great chance to continue meeting up with your friends in the Jam Sessions and have fun time after time.
See My Other Posts
Please see my full review of Dirt 3 here. If you want to see everything I have achieved in Dirt 3 (i.e. EVERYTHING!!) then this can be found here.
Please leave a comment below to compare thoughts and experiences on how best to tackle Dirt 3.
