Video: F1 2012 details revealed at E3
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Codemasters have shown off F1 2012 at this year’s Electronic Entertainment Expo. The following is a seventeen-minute video with Gamespot where they describe some of the new features:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixfloV_PMHY&feature=player_embedded#!
If you don’t want to watch the whole thing, here’s a summary of the game’s design (in the order they are presented):
– Codemasters think that they struck the right balance between hardcore simulator and accessibility with F1 2011, so the focus of the game has shifted to making the game and the sport appeal to a wider global audience.
– The graphics have not changed much from the previous games, but the gameplay mechanics will evolve again, as they did between F1 2010 and F1 2011.
– They really want to work on improving the career mode, particularly making the off-track stuff more involving (a common complaint in reviews). Codemasters will reveal a few new items over the coming weeks, but Hood admits that they want to tell the “story” of a season, with various subplots – like inter-team rivalies – running throughout to make each race feel connected to the others, and create the overall experience of being a part of one whole season rather than twenty races in isolation.
– Career mode will feature the Young Driver Tests as a tutorial mode for novice players. There is no word on whether this can be skipped by more-experienced players, but the idea behind it is once again accessibility, to get new players up to speed faster instead of dropping them into the middle of a season and expecting them to work it out for themselves.
– Replays will have more-realistic and “cinematic” trackside camera angles, plus angles used in the actual broadcast (ie McLaren’s front wign).
– The development team are trying to match the overall performance of the cars to their real-life counterparts, by taking all of their results to date into consideration.
– Multiplayer may have the option of running cars with realistic or equalised performance.
– Objective systems will take strengths and weaknesses of the car into consideration before providing an objective (in F1 2011, Williams often had objectives that would have been very difficult to meet in the FW33). This will also be expanded to multiplayer.
– Codemasters want to encourage players to play the multiplayer modes properly, rather than barge into everyone, but they are finding it difficult to refine the system because more complexity means more loopholes for players to slip through. The online penalty system will be improved from F1 2011, though.
– The game will incorporate the element of randomness that sometimes strikes the sport, like mistakes in the pits, but Codemasters are very conscious about penalising the player for something that is beyond their control or ability to influence. Pit performance in particular will be tied to a team’s overall competitiveness (ie Ferrari will be better at pit stops than HRT).
– The game will give players the option of staying with a favoured team over the course of their career, rather than staying with one team until they get a better offer. Meeting R&D objectives will improve the overall performance of the car, and this will carry over from year to year, allowing the player to take a team like Marussia from the back to the front of the grid.
– Possibly the biggest new feature was saved for last: the game will feature “active weather”, which is a localised wather system that means different parts of a circuit can (and will) feature different conditions. So if you’re racing at Spa, La Source might be bone-dry, but by the time you get to Les Combes or Stavelot, the track might be very wet.The game will be released on the 360, PS3 and PC (but not the Wii-U) in “late September”.
I’m surprised it took so long for this stuff to come to light. But then I supposed it would have been easily overshadowed by the likes of The Last of Us, Agni’s Philosophy, Tomb Raider and the Unreal 4 engine (all of which look fantastic) considering that F1 2012 is, at its heart, the annual update of a sports game. It’s big for us, but to the wider gaming community, it pales in comparison to the way Naughty Dog have single-handedly reinvented the survival horror genre in The Last of Us, or the fantastic stuff Square-Enix and Crystal Dynamics have been doing with the Tomb Raider reboot.
Sounds good. I’m hoping they also include adjustable steering sensitivity with the controller. F1 2011 was too sensitive for me.
Because they use the cars the debut in Australia, hence why the Marussia did not adopt the shark fin in the 2010 game and why drivers do not get replaced.
@Prisoner Monkeys I agree there are a lot of better looking games and more new interesting formulas. The last of us, Sleeping Dogs, Hitman to name a few. I think we need to wait though. I’m not sure if I will get this one. They have said within the coming years they will have a classic mode with older cars and that interests me greatly. For now though I think we just have to wait and see what F1 2012 has to offer that deserves my hard earned moneys.
why drivers do not get replaced.
Drivers don’t get replaced for licencing reasons, not because Codemasters sets the roster at the beginning of the year. If drivers changes were allowed, it would be too easy to create a situation where Sebastian Vettel races for Caterham. It might not sound like much, but Vettel races for Red Bull, while one of Caterham’s sponsors is an energy drink, EQ8. All that’s going to do is upset people.
@prisoner-monkeys I believe @sozavele is actually referring to the situation such as NHeidfeld being replaced by BSenna midseason. ie the sheer factual accuracy of the roster as the season progresses.
I can’t wait to be able to stick to a single team for my career though – 5 seasons is a bit too short IMO and you end up spending 1 or 2 seasons building your rep before your favorite team (in my case McLaren) accepts you anyways.
I’m also loving the upgrades-carried-forward type of gameplay. I’ll be bringing that Marussia to the front of the field – just you watch :P
I hope they can encompass more of the drivers’ characteristics though – ie you have Captain Smooth in JB, Lewis “stick the nose in under braking” Hamilton, relentless Alonso etc. I’m also hoping for something that I have never mastered since F1 2010 – how to race as a certain driver! Lol. (eg I have never been Button’s teammate in the game – always LH. And when in Red Bull – I’ve always replaced Webber rather than Vettel)
Loving what they say they’ll put in with all the intra-team rivalries etc.
I believe sozavele is actually referring to the situation such as NHeidfeld being replaced by BSenna midseason. ie the sheer factual accuracy of the roster as the season progresses.
That also seems like a bad idea to me. What if you’re racing for Renault, and you’re having a really good season, but then your team-mate gets changed, and he’s horrible? And then what happens when you get to your second season? Does Heidfeld start the season, only to be replaced after Hungary every year? When you start scripting events like that, you open the door to scripting all events. You might as well just have the game accurately re-create every race of the season.
Having mid-season driver changes for the sake of accurately reflecting a changing driver roster is a purely cosmetic thing. Drivers are more often than not replaced because of poor performance. However, their performances in the game are not tied to their real-life performances – F1 2010 was notorious for having a few drivers (most notably Vitaly Petrov) who were consdierably better in-game than they were in real life. The only way to justify a mid-season driver change would be to tie in-game performance to season performance, and that just starts down the path of scripting every race to be an accurate reflection of the actual races.
I can’t wait to be able to stick to a single team for my career though – 5 seasons is a bit too short IMO and you end up spending 1 or 2 seasons building your rep before your favorite team (in my case McLaren) accepts you anyways.
I’ve heard the game could have up to ten seasons, but that’s unconfirmed.
Perhaps the only mid-season change that could be do-able is the player. If you don’t meet the team’s expectations of you, you can be fired. You could then try and get a race seat with another team, or go back to the Young Driver Test mode/FP1 running and try setting pre-determined lap times that would get you back into the race seat for the beginning of the next year.
@prisoner-monkeys yes – other than name, helmet design and team the drivers in games bear just about no resemblance to their real life counterparts. But if that’s your reasoning – why have names at all?
IMO it’s for realism. People don’t want to play an F1 game just to race against a field where it’s just 2 McLarens, 2 Ferraris etc. They want to race against Lewis Hamilton. Against Fernando Alonso. Etc etc. Similarly some want to race against a Bruno Senna or a Nick Heidfeld. It’s a simple helmet retexturing and a name change. Just for realism’s sake.
You don’t have to remap the performance maps of each and every AI driver for it. I’ve seen plenty of silly occurrences in F1 2011 to really think that the game has some sort of performance multiplier for each driver anyways, other than a car performance multiplier.
Just for realism’s sake.
I hardly think it’s the most-pressing issue Codemasters need to address.
Besides, they’re not going to do it. They’ve said in the past that they can’t do it because of licencing restrictions. That hasn’t changed.
They had the rights to build Senna into the game. However, Senna repalced Heidfeld on August 24th. The game was released on September 20th – less than a month later. By that point, the game would have been all but finished, so there simply would not have been enough time for Codemasters to go back, develop the code for a scripted driver change, implement it into the game, and still have it ready for release on time.
@prisoner-monkeys being an ex-software man myself I can live with that answer. But now the question is – so why didn’t Ricciardo drop into HRT in Silverstone in F1 2011?
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