Black Bean Games comes with World Rally Championship game

Italian publisher Black Bean Games has a World Rally Championship game in development. The game based on the WRC license is being developed by Milestone, a studio owned by Black Bean.

Although the game is already in development, it will only appear in the course of 2010 for PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. Development studio Milestone was previously responsible for SBK Superbikes and MotoGP games. As a result, the studio does have experience with racing games, but not with games in which cars are central. However, according to Black Bean CEO Virgilio Bixio, the studio is working hard on the game and expectations are high. Milestone works with a large WRC community, which should improve the quality of the game, so stated Bixio versus Eurogamer.

Within the genre, Black Bean will mainly face competition from Colin McRae Dirt 2, which was recently released and scored high marks internationally. However, that game was criticized by fans of the Colin McRae franchise because the WRC championship, the highest class in traditional rallying, is no longer in the game as such. After Sega Racing Studios closed its doors last year, it seemed that Codemasters would no longer have competition, but that void is now being filled by Black Bean and Milestone. In the further competition Codemasters will in any case have to do without lead developer Gavin Raeburn. It is not yet known where the left Raeburn will continue his career.