Can Codemasters finally deliver the F1 game we’ve been wanting for years? All arrows point to hope for this year’s iteration.
Don’t get me wrong Codemasters have produced decent games for 85-90% of their series so far. No one’s expecting perfection – even triple A titles and the best racers have their flaws. Just look at the FIA accredited Gran Turismo Sport, it’s not the simulator experience we all expected, but in terms of creating a social racing experience for the more hardcore end of the community, it does a good job. Needless to say it’s only a console experience so the simulation won’t be revolutionary. I don’t think we should expect a hardcore racer from Codemasters, but if they perfect what they’re aiming for, we should be chuffed.
I’m just grateful that we get a yearly release to be honest, when I was growing up there was a good 3 years where we had no releases, and while we had the sublime F1 Championship Edition by Studio Liverpool to keep us going, even when we had a new game it was an underwhelming effort for Wii and PSP only, and as you can imagine after watching your first full F1 season was a big disappointment. Just me huh?
Anyway moving on, I’m not going to create a lists of what I want in an ideal game, more so use yesterday’s press release to create a (sort of) list of features and other things this game should have to make it the game we all want. Makes sense?
First up, probably the most prominent news coming from yesterday is the addition of custom liveries. Now I can already hear you asking ‘are liveries the only thing this guy’s gonna talk about on this website?’ Answer? I hope not! I’ll kind of combine this with the addition of the stock 2019 car, but if the liveries are as customisable as alluded to in the press release I think it’s brilliant news. If we just get a selection of pre-made liveries I would feel a little let down, having said that they aren’t bad, but if we can get this franchise to more of a social experience I think it would be fantastic. If the custom livery system is similar in its workings to GT Sport or recent Forza games, then I think it will be a brilliant addition to the game. Hopefully being able to share and download liveries is in this feature too. Fingers crossed.
The cheeky flash of what could be a F2 gives me hope as well. Hopefully this could be implemented into career mode a la MotoGP games and also is raceable in multiplayer. I’m not expecting a full MotoGPesque career mode straight off the bat, and even then I don’t think I’d be over the moon, but if it’s a means of replacing the ‘Young Drivers’ Test’ found on the 2012 and 13 games I would be happy with that. Whether it would remove the option of competing for any team you want from the outset, I don’t know but I hope it’s not just a time trial car. God forbid it only be a pre order bonus and we end up with the classic car fiasco of 2013 multiplayer. Either way the addition custom liveries suggests the F2 car should be raceable, and not just in its Dallara naked carbon fibre form. As long as it’s not just a half-hearted introduction into the franchise for F2, it should work well.
Almost hidden away in the midst of PR waffle is the hint of driver customisation. Whilst this is as vague as expected for a teaser press release, hopefully it’s possible to create some kind of avatar that actually slightly resembles some sort of human; that’d be nice. I mean I don’t think we can expect FIFA levels of player customisation from the onset but if we can look slightly like ourselves it’d be a great start. We’ll see, I may be down the completely wrong path altogether. In which case might hint at better helmet customisation. If fully customisable cars are a thing, I can’t imagine it would be that difficult to apply the same engine, figuratively speaking, to helmets. The current system is certainly adequate, but has been the same for 3 games now and it could certainly use a refresh, or at least a sigh of fresh air into the system, particularly as it covers multiplayer as well as the single player modes. We may actually get a driver number on our lids this year!
Going back to the custom cars, hopefully this means we can customise romper suits to go with the cars, obviously we can’t implement this when you’re driving for an official team but I wouldn’t want that anyway. But this is the level of driver customisation I want, and hopefully you want too, If all 3 of these ideas are in the game consider me one happy boy. But we’ll see, they were very vague, but being very critical of Codies, it is the sort of features we expect in a front line racing game in 2019.
Lastly, and probably most popular is a game that works on day 1! For too many years now we’ve seen a poor multiplayer, poor PC optimisation, and slightly broken AI. This is where the early release date is a bit of a concern. Codies have struggled with a July to August the next year cycle before. Hopefully we should be pleasantly surprised this year with the June release date, and hopefully it’s an upward trend to earlier future releases. A yearly release around the start of the European season should work, after all we want the most time on the game before it becomes stale/irrelevant. But it would only work if it works day 1, yes we can excuse minor stuff like in rare cases the game can crash and even the biggest studios suffer with this, but we can’t have half a dozen patches in the first week or so and even after that have a poor ghosting system or penalty system. How there can still be screen freezes on PC at the end of a game cycle I don’t know. We have a solid career mode which only needs minor tweaks now before an overhaul in a year or so, why not pool resources into a solid multiplayer for a year and really give it a good spring clean. Maybe a sprinkle of alternate online game modes? But F1 in 2019 really needs to be Esports ready 2 weeks after launch at the most.
The tag line for this years’ game seems to be to ‘Defeat your Rivals’, to be honest I just hope the game doesn’t defeat itself. The games recently have had a much better longevity to them and hopefully they can keep that trend going. But if it can just solidify itself into a solid game with few glitches and it have a smooth racing experience I think the F1 game will always be a success. I’ll certainly pick it up, whether I’ll be any good is another question. But there certainly is space for a serious racer with a good social and sharing system like the GT Sports and Forza’s but available across both platforms, whether cross platform racing can happen is another thing but in my opinion there certainly seems to a void left behind by Need For Speed at the moment, or at least in terms of a friendly simulator and the noises coming from Codemasters suggest that F1 this year could definitely do that. There’s hope.
George Talks 