Few motorsports—hell, few traditional sports—operate with the tasteful elegance of Formula One. Whether it’s the posh European aura, a curated assembly of human beings exceptionally adept in the realm of hand-eye coordination, or the pride of operating the world’s quickest circuit races, Formula One’s classic and graceful reputation is like no other.
I can’t possibly hope to reconcile the reason why Formula One’s incredibly fast automobiles and challenging tracks fade in the light cast by NASCAR’s preference for brute strength and condensed ovals, but such is the presence of popular culture in the United States. Much like soccer and its contributions to global athletic entertainment, Formula One is the world’s most popular and enduring motorsport everywhere but here.
The folks at Codemasters, long-standing engineers of Formula 1’s videogame equivalent, don’t seem to mind. In our presentation at Bandai Namco Global Gamer’s Day, two members of the development time confidently and comfortably declared their work on F1 2015 to be part of the greatest racing game on the planet. On one hand of course every developer is going to think the world of their creation (not doing so in front of the press is generally a bad idea!), but, with these guys, I kind of got the feeling they owe it to their sport to turn in the best work they could possibly do. With what we saw of F1 2015, Codemasters are at least off to a promising start.
F1 2015’s most glaring adjustment lies with its projected mission; one look at the box cover reveals the faces of Formula One’s most admired drivers. By adopting a measure employed and perfected by EA Sports’ popular (and profitable) games, Codemasters seeks to add a touch of personality and culture to an otherwise mechanical experience. How this will be employed in the final product is still a bit murky, but we were treated to interstitial between-race sequences of drivers and their team milling about garages. We were also told the F1 2015’s AI has been tuned to mimic the specific and aggressive tendencies of its respective drivers
The development team also seemed to be tremendously excited about finally getting the opportunity to work on a current-generation platform. Declaring the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 hardware a bottleneck on development, an exclusive focus on their successors felt like a affirmation of creative freedom. For generations, racing games have been graphical exhibitions for their aligned hardware, and F1 2015’s rainy, night-time track we saw in person certainly looked the part.
F1’s traditional release date of November has been moved up to June. Ordinarily I wouldn’t consider this a big deal, or at least I didn’t until Codemasters offered a more detailed explanation. The Formula One season starts in late March and concludes in November, meaning the season is practically over when the game is usually released. This is the functional equivalent of releasing Madden in February, so debuting closer to F1’s 2015 season—and letting players participate in this year’s races as they happen—is a smart move. As a bonus, then entire 2014 season and its accompanying courses will also be made available in F1 2015.
F1 2015’s latent problem, and one that has yet to be cracked, is its means of accessibility. NASCAR games, with their reliance are on bump-and-pass and drafting, give the player other objectives along oval courses. F1 on the other hand, with its penchant for sharp curves and dramatic straightaways, exhibits a great focus on actual racing. Speed is the most attractive and respected card in F1 2015’s deck, and it pushes that angle for all its worth. Also included, perhaps as a way to ingratiate the player, is detailed and dynamic advice from your crew chief, who’s always willing to buzz in with on-the-spot tips for your place in the race.
Playing F1 2015 came with a series of expected conclusions. It was fast, it was beautiful, and I was absolutely terrible at it. Managing a racing line is a skill I’d learned in Gran Turismo long ago, but I wasn’t prepared for the raw power projected by F1 2015’s crop of automobiles (or dealing with different fuel mixtures, a feature I was glad wasn’t activated in my virgin experience). Proficiency will come with familiarity, of course, and the only true negative I experienced were the awkward pileups when a group of cars turned a corner. Three times my wheels got stuck in or on someone else’s, paralyzing both cars and (in one case) apparently knocking me out of the race. With that in mind, F1 2015’s release is still a few months away, and bugs like that are often squashed toward the end of a game’s development.
There is no doubt that F1 2015 maintains the style and elegance established by its namesake. The team at Codemasters carry an enormous sense of pride in the sport and their work in translating it to an interactive experience. How it will pay off—and how well it can separate itself from its predecessors on the last generation of hardware—remains to be seen, but F1 2015 is certainly positioned to turn in its fastest time yet. We’ll know more when it his retail shelves this June.
