A crazy amount of reader submissions today, this one comes to us from Ben, warning us about F1 2015. We’ve flip-flopped on our opinions about the game several times, both praising the steps taken by Codemasters to ensure this is the best F1 game to date, but worried at how lackluster the leaked preview appeared to be.
Ben attempts to fill us in on what’s been happening on the official forums:
I don’t quite have your style of writing, I either end up in full 4Chan mode including words like faggot in every sentence, or just end up rambling on and on.
Anyway, this is more of a vent, I guess, regarding Codemasters and F1 2015. On the official forums, pretty much everyone is slagging it off, and for good reason. From what we can see, the game has been delayed, all we got was a 20-something second shitty video and barely any interaction with the staff. At least when Steve hood was about he would pop in now and again, albeit in an extremely defensive, Ian Bell sort of way.
The game cover is terrible, Massa looks like he’s in full rape mode, Lewis has his “Still I Rise” hairstyle and Ricciardo does not respond well to Photoshop. We already know the game is lacking a lot of features, and from the screenshots we’ve seen of the drivers it looks like the game will be full of cut-scenes which once you’ve seen once or twice, you’ll just be skipping anyway. Kind of like Madden.
There has been no news regarding multiplayer mode, which means league racing will most likely suffer. I hope I’m wrong.
The graphics aren’t looking too great either, check out this shot which I took from the teaser video, I don’t need to explain to you how shit it looks and I won’t even go into another rant about how many duplicate boats are in the image. Next generation graphics right here!
It seems for us console guys, at the moment we’re fucked. Project CARS isn’t great at the moment, and it looks like we’re in for a disappointing F1 game and I know AC is in the pipeline but from what I’ve seen, it won’t be much different than what’s on PC and I want something more than a bland driving simulator.
I agree, the game needs higher detailed boats and a more diverse cast of hoes before it can truly be considered next generation.
But for real, at this point with the huge lack of games coming out for next generation consoles, do yourself a favor and look into PC gaming. I’m not saying this as a fanboy, but this has been a horrid year for racing games and like you said, the future isn’t improving.
Eh, we’ve seen a good few positives as well so far.
For example, the short bit of leaked gameplay at Singapore has Rosberg almost flying into the wall after being hit at the start. This never happened in any of the previous iterations due to the AIs being almost glued to a specific line (at most you could barely push them off, but nothing like the near-total loss of control that AI Rosberg experienced there), which already points towards potential massive improvements towards the AI, especially with regards to making them more organic.
Similarly, the multiplayer code has been fully rewritten from scratch according to Lee Mather, so there’s still every chance in the world of it actually being good this time around.
So as much as I’m unhappy with the loss of Career Mode, the lack of moddability (even from a graphical perspective – it was already nearly impossible to add anything to the game, but now that Career Mode is gone, modding helmets is pretty much completely pointless now, and the series was already notoriously weak in this regard anyway) or the sheer lack of features (come on, even Pro Season is a carbon copy of GRID’s Pro mode, and Codemasters released that game almost 8 years ago), I definitely wouldn’t call it a no-buy just yet. The gameplay is what’s going to matter the most, and if that and the multiplayer are good, then the game will be good enough. Personally, if they make the AI more organic and give them real tyre wear and fuel consumption instead of just simulating them, then I’ll be happy, since a lot of modern racing games suffer from terrible AI and this would help F1 2015 stand out from the crowd a little bit.
It’s impossible to deny that there are weird things going on at Codemasters with regards to this series though. Pinning the removal of Career Mode on the fact that few people did more than one season is a bit weird when you factor in the addition of Pro Season – I would be seriously shocked if the percentage of people who did more than 20% of GRID in Pro mode was higher than the percentage of people who did more than one season in F1 2010-2014’s Career Mode.
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