Codemasters F1 2015

[Dave]

Best Buy is offering a $10 giftcard with purchase this week. Combined with Gamer's Club Unlocked, it nets the game to $38. Even with Sim's less-than-glowing assessment, it makes it a little more appealing for those of us that have a hard time staying away from an F1 game.

[pk500]

Best Buy is offering a $10 giftcard with purchase this week. Combined with Gamer's Club Unlocked, it nets the game to $38. Even with Sim's less-than-glowing assessment, it makes it a little more appealing for those of us that have a hard time staying away from an F1 game.

This promotion proves sales already are disappointing, at least in America. Show a bit more patience, and this game probably will be $29.99 at retail or in the Xbox Store by Labor Day.

For example: The Elder Scrolls Online already is on sale for $35.99 in the Xbox Store, and that game only has been on the market for a couple of months.

[Rodster]

This promotion proves sales already are disappointing, at least in America. Show a bit more patience, and this game probably will be $29.99 at retail or in the Xbox Store by Labor Day.

The first Codies F1 game ever that i'll just wait for the bugs to be fixed, hopefully at the end of the F1 season. Funny how Codies said this year would be different as the game would get season updates to go along with the current F1 season. Little did we know they were referring to bugs.

The game is getting hammered on the Steam forums and reviews. The only game more hated is the new Batman game and WB had the decency of pulling the game and giving everyone a refund.

[Dave]

This promotion proves sales already are disappointing, at least in America. Show a bit more patience, and this game probably will be $29.99 at retail or in the Xbox Store by Labor Day.

I'm guessing it was a deal to get Best Buy to carry the game, even partially (majority of Best Buy stores around me do not have it stocked based on an in-store pick-up search). Target's site says online only and no Walmart near me has it in stock either. So Amazon and GameStop are the only two major retailers fully stocking the game and they will only order their pre-orders and not much more.

I'm sure there will be deals on it sometime in the next couple months, I bet the deals will be on the Xbox Store - no one else is probably going to be stocking this game by September.

I decided to pick it up, also had some reward certificates to bring the price down even further. Hopefully there is enough here to get me to the Forza launch and maybe it'll keep enough of its value that I can get most of my money back with a trade.

[GB_Simo]

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts, mate.

The game is getting hammered on the Steam forums and reviews. The only game more hated is the new Batman game and WB had the decency of pulling the game and giving everyone a refund.

Yeah, from what I've read it's a million times more broken on PC than the console editions. Three patches in the last week just to try to give it some amount of stability. The XB1 version has been known to declare the winner of an online race before that race has actually started but at least it runs...

On all formats, it was the best-selling game in the UK in the week after release and only outsold by PGA Tour in its second week on sale. Week one sales were up 367% on the 2014 game, probably attributable in part to it being released on current-gen consoles this year. It'll be interesting to see if that holds true in other territories after the initial reviews and feedback.

[Dave]

First things first - this game has its issues. In the one 25% race in Canada I completed, Nico Rosberg drove right through me on his way to the pits. He had driven to the inside to try to pass and decided that it was time to hit the pits instead of taking the chicane onto the main straight. Thanks, Nico. I also had the game jump around between gears exiting the pits.

There also just isn't enough content, not for a game released in 2015 with a $60 price tag.

That said, the handling model and controls feel great. You can really feel the torque kick in and use it to help get the car pointed in the right direction (or wrong direction, if too much throttle is applied) to get out of a corner. In a very welcome change from Project Cars, I can keep the car under me when the rear starts to come around. Not a lot to say about the AI (other than Nico) since I had the difficulty turned down at least one level too low, they generally behaved as expected as I came back through the field after recovery from the punt.

Hopefully they iron out the bugs because there is a lot of fun to be had with this game.

[Dave]

Wow, this game is fun. I've been lucky enough to avoid the major bugs so far while doing one-off races (pit exit is dicey though).

The Mercedes cars might as well be boss battles - I've been able to out-run them for a while on hard, but eventually the tires start wearing out and they come on like a freight train.

Codemasters has a hell of an engine here, hopefully they iron out all of the bugs.

[Rodster]

I like the new handling and I haven't been hit by any pit exit bugs or controller issues but that could be due to using a wired 360 controller. The graphics are a disappointment with all the settings dialed up. The framerate is silky smooth.

[GB_Simo]

A new and exciting way to stop corner cutting: force the car to an immediate, uncommanded stop, then stick it in reverse for no good reason I can immediately think of.



If I had a capture card, I wouldn't have filmed it with an iPad...it's clear enough, though, to show that my front tyres were going off, I got my corner entry all wrong and the game's response was creative. It didn't actually give me a warning for cutting the corner. It just stopped the car stone dead.

I've started to use the flashbacks as a means of fixing the game's more obvious quirks as and when I see them, which means I got to the end of that race - Singapore at 100% distance, 61 laps, with a mid-session save - and got to see changing weather through a race. It would happen in a night race where I couldn't see the clouds...

It started full wet, with the track being good for inters around lap 33 and slicks around lap 47. I missed the jump to inters because it was still raining fairly hard and though I'd seen AI cars pit, I thought they needed new wets. My strategy screen pre-race suggested I'd be running non-stop to the end on wets but I'd got the McLaren up to 4th and thought that must have been through the AI suffering tyre wear, since my fronts were going away from me. Thinking I had it all figured out (and forgetting that if I'd paused the game and read the Race Director, it'd have told me who was on which tyres), I came in for new wets to avoid being undercut, confident in my decision as it appeared to be pissing down.

It turned out I was looking at the wrong graphical cues. If the track is wet and there are no obvious tyre tracks on it, you use wet tyres. If you can see a wet track with thin tyre tracks on it where cars have passed, that's an intermediate track, irrespective of how hard it's still raining. Once there's a fully dry line, you need slicks. I needed slicks even though it was still raining and hadn't ever stopped, which is why you've got to look at the track, not the weather. I had to work this out for myself too because while the engineer is brilliant at telling you when you're a few minutes away from needing a different type of tyre, he's not so hot at telling you when those few minutes have passed. Shouldn't be an issue in future races, though - now I've seen it in action first time around, I know what to look for, so I shouldn't find myself spending far too many laps tearing a set of wet tyres to bits again.

As the track dried, I fell to a lapped 7th. Everyone who wasn't on the podium was lapped, in fact. I think that may have been because we got stuck behind a slow Williams in the wet phase, which then outran me when the track turned dry - it's only one race but I really liked that the wet weather seemed to act as a bit of an equaliser. My only massive concern is a carry-over from the last-gen games: the track seemed to go from 'definitely inters' to 'definitely slicks' quite quickly, with minimal crossover, and I'm not sure how well that'd scale down with shorter races.

[Dave]

Have you noticed the CPU cars are a little off the pace in qualifying? It is either that or I have horrible race pace since the AI makes up 1-2 seconds/lap on me in the race vs. qualifying. I had a great 25% race in Melbourne in a Toro Rosso - started on the front row, lost a spot to Hamilton on the start and then slowly worked my way backwards during the first stint before stopping early. I was able to make up a couple of the spots I lost and would have had a shot at Massa if the race went a couple laps longer.

Having a wide range of car abilities makes it easier to find the right difficulty level, trying to find the right car for me on hard difficulty right now. Toro Rosso could be the right one but want to try a few more. I'm definitely not good enough to make up for the Honda McLaren's deficiencies.

[GB_Simo]

Have you noticed the CPU cars are a little off the pace in qualifying? It is either that or I have horrible race pace since the AI makes up 1-2 seconds/lap on me in the race vs. qualifying.

Yes, but I can't make my mind up if it's because they lack pace in quali or because they're as thick as mince.

I ran a race at Silverstone tonight where my pole time in a Williams was 1:34.2. Rosberg was 2nd on a 35.7, while Hamilton was down in 6th on a 36.9 having put in a 34.6 in Q1.

Hamilton's fastest lap in the race? 1:35.8. He was already up to 3rd before we'd completed half a lap and I burned the tyres up a lap early in the first stint just trying to keep ahead of him, Rosberg and Vettel. We were three-wide into Copse at one point until I strategically ran out of bravery, the racing was brilliant (and I'm still finding that to be the case regularly) but that huge gap from quali had gone.

When I go on board with the AI cars in quali, though, I usually see them in clumps of 8 or 9 cars, all in a queue, none of them trying to find space for a clear lap and none of them delivering their true pace. In Q2 I was on board with Hamilton, who caught Kvyat on his flyer (both Red Bulls on primes in Q2 for who knows what reason) and decided not to lift and create a gap but to go side by side into Becketts instead, a manoeuvre both vehicles survived by going 40 mph too slowly.

Are you seeing the AI sabotaging themselves in the same way through qualifying? If so, that's where the problem must lie.

The other thing it does is bugger up those team objectives still further. Our qualifying position normally flatters the car and then every team wants us to go 7 places forward in the race...

[Dave]

I've only been doing short qualifying and haven't paid attention to what the AI cars are doing. During a Melbourne race, Hamilton laid down a 1:29.3 on lap 2 after running in the 1:29.9 range in practice and qualifying. Considering my 1:29.8 pole lap was with the engine turned up and low fuel, Lewis quickly ran away.

[GB_Simo]

I'll try a race at Melbourne with a short qualifying and see how it goes, mate. Sounds like it might well be the issue I've been having elsewhere but I haven't really paid attention to the AI in short qualifying so I don't know.

The XB1 version finally got a patch today. It fixes, among other things, the "2nd gear on pit exit" bug and cars being dumped into the middle of the road if you use a flashback while they're in the pits. Feels like there are performance enhancements too - yesterday I was getting bad slowdown through the last sector at Monaco in cockpit view, which isn't present today.

Hopefully all the major bugs are fixed because I really believe this game is a better, more satisfying racing experience on console than Project Cars, not just because the controls work but because the AI are smarter, the tyre wear is better implemented, the handling model better suited to high powered single seaters than the SMS version. Leaving aside the chronic lack of content (which is not really something that actually can be left aside, I realise...), every real issue I've had with it has been a bug of some kind and while there's no excuse for letting the game out of the door in its initial state, the core gameplay has always been there.

While I'm here, I misspoke twice earlier in the thread and would quite like to correct myself. First, I said the menu for selecting questions to ask your race engineer only stays up for a picosecond. This is true if you just press the left bumper, as I'd been doing, but it's since dawned on me that you're meant to hold down the bumper while flicking through the menu with the d-pad, which takes some getting used to but basically works fine. Second, I said the Race Strategy menu often gave only one choice, so you couldn't start on primes instead of options and find an alternate route. In fact, as long as you're starting outside the top 10 or in a session that's set up to allow free tyre choice, you can still switch your starting compound just as before.

[pk500]

I need a discount to even consider this game. I'm trading in Project Cars toward my Forza 6 purchase, but there doesn't seem to be enough content in F1 2015 for me to justify $60.

I might bite at $40.

[cfiore]

Next patch for the PS4 dropped today. You can now have all three practice sessions and full qual (Q1,2 & 3) and run any length of race. There are other fixes but that was the big one for me, as well as fixing the engine mixes.

[Dave]

Definitely understand waiting for a discount, it is a pretty bare bones game. But at this point, it is my favorite racing experience yet this generation (not the highest bar...). The combination of sense of speed, solid controls, and good racing is unmatched.

[pk500]

Definitely understand waiting for a discount, it is a pretty bare bones game. But at this point, it is my favorite racing experience yet this generation (not the highest bar...). The combination of sense of speed, solid controls, and good racing is unmatched.

Damn, you weren't kidding. Got this game for $20, and the driving and racing models are exceptional in its current patched format. I'm in console racing heaven with F1 2015 and Forza 6. Once DIRT Rally hits consoles, I'll be in petrol rapture.

[pk500]

This game is $20 new for XB1 and PS4 this week at Gamestop. Very limited modes, but the driving and racing models are superb. This game is well worth $20 if you're an F1 fan or a driving game enthusiast.

[GB_Simo]

XB1 owners: turn your traction control down after downloading the latest patch. The patch notes talk about various online tweaks, new liveries and car models. They don't seem to mention that Codemasters have had a bit of a play with how the cars behave under acceleration. There's bags of extra rear grip and traction, which brings 3 obvious changes: it's harder to completely duff a start; it's easier to apply power on corner exits; and the ever-present Codies AI advantage through twisty sections of track with major traction events (sector 3 Melbourne, sector 3 Austin) now seems much reduced. Previously, the AI could hammer me through the traction zones no matter how good a job I felt I was doing of opening the throttle. Now I can hang with them where I couldn't before.

It'll probably make time trialling and hot lapping less engaging, purely through the cars being less challenging to hang on to, but I could see it improving the overall racing experience against the AI.