Same as everyone else, I'm interested but keeping expectations low due to the developer's past games. At best I feel it's gonna be similar to Baja Edge of Control. At worst, well, it's gonna be a nice sand dune road trip simulator
Interestingly, from wikipedia there has only been 2 previous Dakar games and they are both pretty terrible. For such a famous event you'd hope there were more games, even cheap knock off ones.
I wonder how faithful to the general topography of the course the game is? If it's 15,000km² and the Dakar this year is 9000km in total distance then the open-world would be about 1.6km wide. That would be interesting, but would they go to the effort of doing it like that.
I'm not exactly well versed in Dakar technicalities, but I thought in raid style racing you only have a pre-determined start and finish point, and the route is up to you? I checked this year's route though and it seems you do follow a specified route.
https://www.horizonte-tours.com/uploads/dakar2018short.jpg
I was initially thinking a square map like FUEL's (that would make it just over 120km wide each side). This would mean even the longest drive corner to corner is about 2.5-3 hours (could be longer if the route isn't a straight path or looped). But a long thin map like what you suggested could be more faithful to the actual race. That would take considerably more effort to model though. Also whether the PS4/XB1 can handle loading the WHOLE map at once, or will it be cut into separate stages?
Would be interesting to see if they also use procedural generation (FUEL, Dirt 4 style) or hand model every terrain. One would mean much less work but potentially more boring and repetitive landscapes, while the other could mean more variety but I feel too much work for this small team.