F1 2016

[Rodster]

F1 2016 reintroduces safety car and career mode to Codemasters' series

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2016- ... ers-series

[pk500]

No vintage cars or tracks.

How can a Codemasters F1 game produced three years ago for last-gen consoles still be more full-featured than the upcoming game? Ridiculous.

[XXXIV]

oops wrong thread.

Still reeling from last night but i do agree with Paul.

[DChaps]

http://blog.codemasters.com/uncategoriz ... a-sign-up/

F1 2016 – Closed Beta Sign-Up Open

Codemasters is inviting a select number of gamers to participate in a closed beta test of their recently-announced F1 2016 title. 300 gamers across the title’s three platforms (PC, PS4 & Xbox One) will be selected to get access to a content-limited version of the game featuring time trial run on three tracks (Australia, Austria & Spain), hoping to gain feedback on the car handling from the gaming community.

Picked testers will be getting access to a private forum to share their feedback, interested gamers can apply for a beta key here.

F1 2016 will be coming to the PC, Playstation 4 & Xbox One later this summer. F1 2016 can now be pre-ordered here.

[GB_Simo]

I applied for that last night. I hold out no great hopes but we shall see.

On the subject of classic cars, I'd be more upset about their removal if the classic content in 2013 had meshed together properly, which I'm not entirely convinced it did. Something like Grand Prix Legends (which itself played fast and loose with various aspects of the 1967 season, not always out of necessity) or GP79 for rFactor works because it's representing a moment in time, which is reflected in the content. If you were to stick a McLaren M23 into GPL it'd look daft. Racing a Williams FW07C against a Ferrari F187/88C, cars conceived 7 years apart, on a track neither car raced at in period...for me, it had a novelty value which wore off after a little while to reveal nothing of real substance underneath.

If a developer was to do it properly, that'd be different. It'd be a massive undertaking too - just the thought of sorting out all those licences makes me wince. Perhaps Indy 500 Evolution had the right idea - base yourself around an era before sponsorship and image rights and you're golden. Fangio and Moss at Aintree in F1 2017, anyone?

[GB_Simo]

This, I like.

http://blog.codemasters.com/f1/07/f1-20 ... s-trailer/

[pk500]

Very stoked for this one. I still play F1 2015 a couple of times per week in offline races.

Codemasters has done a nice job with this series. Consistently quality game.

[GB_Simo]

More news, this time via Autosport:

http://www.autosport.com/news/report.ph ... e-what-new

All sounding very promising.

[pk500]

I'm very excited for this game. I still play 25-percent length races on F1 2015 regularly.

F1 2015 provides almost the perfect balance of playability and realism, so I'm glad to see Codemasters isn't f*cking with the gameplay formula and physics that much.

[TCrouch]

Looking forward to this, but really wish they had VR support on PC. Tough to play a racing sim without it, now.

[GB_Simo]

Chaps, Codies have advised me that as the closed beta period ended today, I'm allowed to talk about my experiences and field any questions you might have. I suppose a good place to start would be this: I got into the closed beta.

The majority of our testing was around car handling in all weathers - there were 3 separate builds during the testing period, each of them quite different from the others - and setup work, though the last build featured Quick Race mode with AI, tyre wear and damage testing. We did not test career, R&D, championship modes and so forth, so I know nothing more than has been released to the media there. We did no formation lap, safety car or VSC tests either, though we did use the new manual starts.

There's still time for our most recent feedback to be taken into account before release, so I can't comment on the final retail game with any certainty, but if anyone wants to know anything more about what I've driven to this point, just shout up.

[Rodster]

Yeah, Adam if you were playing the PC version how's the in game performance? In 2015 there was a nasty bug where the game would momentarily chug for several seconds into a race and then it was smooth sailing after that. Has that been addressed?

[GB_Simo]

Yeah, Adam if you were playing the PC version how's the in game performance? In 2015 there was a nasty bug where the game would momentarily chug for several seconds into a race and then it was smooth sailing after that. Has that been addressed?

Ah, I should have mentioned that I was on XBox One, mate. My bad. What I can tell you is that there are no current reports of that issue among the PC testers - there were some issues raised with the first build but nothing major since. On XB1, there's no chugging in wet or dry on the tracks we ran, which were Melbourne, Bahrain, Red Bull Ring, Barcelona and Spa. (The big test for this would be Monaco, which we didn't have access to.) The tearing present last year remains, though it's very rarely in my line of vision and doesn't bother me one bit.

[cfiore]

Chaps, Codies have advised me that as the closed beta period ended today, I'm allowed to talk about my experiences and field any questions you might have. I suppose a good place to start would be this: I got into the closed beta.

The majority of our testing was around car handling in all weathers - there were 3 separate builds during the testing period, each of them quite different from the others - and setup work, though the last build featured Quick Race mode with AI, tyre wear and damage testing. We did not test career, R&D, championship modes and so forth, so I know nothing more than has been released to the media there. We did no formation lap, safety car or VSC tests either, though we did use the new manual starts.

There's still time for our most recent feedback to be taken into account before release, so I can't comment on the final retail game with any certainty, but if anyone wants to know anything more about what I've driven to this point, just shout up.

From everything I have read, especially since they lifted the NDA today, this will be the game that makes me get a new wheel for my console. GB, have you posted anything on the Codemaster F1 forums? Just curious, as I read them daily, there is some great info coming out today from some of the beta testers (and wondered if one of them was you) and there have been some great videos as well.

It seems if you liked 2015, this will be the one we really have been waiting and asking for. Anyway, obviously I am super excited to take Haas F1 to the top!

[GB_Simo]

I post very, very occasionally there as bigsim and haven't done so since the NDA was lifted. My lack of presence there is one of the reasons I was so surprised to end up in the beta, in fact. The community beta testers have had their own private forum in which I've been more active and there's been a huge amount of useful discussion in there, much more than I expected.

[DChaps]

Did not even realize this game is already out! Downloading Now! Thanks for the info Adam. Very cool that you got in on the beta. The next few weeks are pretty stout from a console racing standpoint:

F1 2016 - out now
Assetto Corsa - Aug 30
NASCAR Heat Evolution - Sep 13
Forza Horizon 3 - Sep 27

[pk500]

I ordered F1 2016 from Best Buy. Should be here Tuesday. Can't wait! Getting great user and press reviews.

Not interested in the NASCAR game, as NASCAR bores me to tears, in general. I'm also skeptical of Asseto Corsa's port to consoles due to the repeated delays, so I'll wait until I get player feedback from reputable sources. We all know about the mess surrounding Project Cars after its port from PC to consoles last spring. The game is tolerable now, but I'm not going through that sh*t again.

I'm in the same wait-and-see boat with Forza Horizon 3. I LOVED the original Horizon. It was one of the freshest gusts of air into the racing genre in some time. But I thought Horizon 2 added almost nothing to the series other than a new locale. One of the most disappointing titles of recent years for me, so I'll probably wait for Black Friday sales if I get Horizon 3 at all. It also didn't help that DSP racing was almost non-existent with Horizon 2 compared to our fun nights of racing and Infected in the original Horizon.

Not trying to piss in your martini, The Donald. But there are so many good sports, racing and shooter games releasing between now and Christmas that I really need to be discerning in my full-price choices. I've already bought Madden 17 and F1 2016 at full boat in the last week. At least full boat for me is $48 thanks to Best Buy Gamers Club Unlocked.

[GB_Simo]

I've had a little bit of time with the final release and the handling is absolutely spot-on.

You'll find it instantly recognisable if you've ever played a Codemasters F1 game but in several key areas, there's a bit more depth to it. The increased feeling of weight will smack you in the face straight away, to the point that the steering might feel like it's a little slow to begin with. Stick with it, though, and you'll be rewarded - it takes only a few laps for the driving experience to start feeling more intuitive and after a couple of hours you'll wonder why you ever had an issue. More weight means more management of that weight is needed, so you've got to be sensible in every phase of a corner, but after that bit of practice, it also makes it much easier to place the car consistently lap after lap.

There's more torque as well. You can use this torque to rotate the car if you've run a bit wide or picked up some understeer mid-corner (try this at Hungary's Turn 5) to tighten up a corner exit during a series of interlinked turns (Bahrain Turn 1, pulling the car to the right to improve your line into 2) or to propel yourself at speed into the nearest fence (pretty much anywhere you like). A quick note on torque here: beta 1 required an astonishingly delicate touch on the throttle at all times, which was a terrific demonstration of what this game engine can do and something I really enjoyed, but was a bit much for a game targeting a broad audience. Beta 2, in which the cars understeered like an airport luggage trolley, was almost exactly the opposite of that and I was among many to lament the direction being taken. Beta 3 brought back some of that authentically strong torque and the retail release has added a bit more, but it's always completely manageable and there's always the traction control aid to call upon for assistance if needed.

These two handling tweaks in particular mean that you'll find yourself needing to concentrate a bit on corners you could previously drive through without thinking. The medium-fast chicane in Spain is a prime example, with a 4th gear left hander feeding into a much more open right turn that was previously just an acceleration zone. Now, you're having to manage that weight transfer and deal with a bit of camber and elevation change while powering out of the turn. Get it right and you're away up the hill into turn 9, ready to tackle a little brow that always unsettles you just as you're trying to go full throttle. Get it wrong and you're away into a reasonably big shunt. Have that shunt with the new Simulation damage switched on and you'll knock a wheel off.

The game is just as scaleable as it always was, so if this sounds a bit daunting, don't worry. There's still traction control, ABS, racing line, pit assist and all the usual. You'll know by now, though, that I'm the kind of racing gamer who thinks it's terrific when he drifts a bit too close to the wall on a street course and ends up with three wheels on his wagon, even though it was only a glancing blow and he was driving down a straight at the time. Whether you're in that camp or not, you'll like what they've done to free practice in Career mode.

In addition to driving around by yourself as before, you can now select from 3 pre-set practice programmes. Track Acclimatisation is all about learning the course, which you do by driving through gates placed on the optimum line. Quick, accurate laps score points which are put towards your Research & Development budget for the season. There's also a Qualifying Sim programme, in which your team set you a target lap time and use your performance to forecast a likely grid position.

My favourite, though, is the race simulation, where you're given targets for both lap time and tyre wear over a 4 lap run. Throughout the run there's a coloured bar on your screen, split into red, green and purple thirds where red is bad, green is expected and purple is optimum tyre wear. Whenever you do something to punish the tyre, the bar moves towards the red accordingly. Be kinder than expected and the bar moves towards purple. The aim is to deliver 4 laps that beat the target time and end each lap with your wear bar in the purple zone. You learn a massive amount from having that visual indicator; married to the solid, consistent force feedback, you quickly develop a strong feel for how to look after your tyres at a solid race pace. You get R&D points to spend on car development for every programme, so they're all worth doing for that reason alone, but even without that, they're genuinely informative and enjoyable reasons to play through free practice for every race.

I'm yet to see a safety car or a VSC so I've still got nothing to tell you about there. I am running the formation laps but I'm not entirely sure they add all that much, really. I'm pretty confident that I'm not getting my tyres or brakes up to operating temperature but I don't feel like it's making any difference to how my first racing lap goes. I'm looking forward to hearing some of your thoughts on that - I'm sure I must be missing something - but I can take or leave them for now.

A few other quick bits...starts are better this year, though I'm not sure the new "manual start" procedure makes that much difference. Instead of putting the car into gear when the lights go out, you're releasing the clutch but the fundamentals of it are the same and you'll probably not notice a lot of difference as long as you get the revs right. You can, however, spin off or go into anti-stall mode if you get the revs wrong, depending on which extreme you land upon. A bigger difference is that the AI starts are much more varied through the field this year, which makes for a more immersive run to the first corner.

While generally well behaved, there are a couple of potential wrinkles with the AI, chief among them being that they can be a bit timid when trying to overtake you. I took a Manor to 11th in Melbourne on Expert difficulty having found a path through a turn 1 shunt (the AI will spin and crash of its own accord, not only when racing you but when racing itself too) and fought a rearguard action thereafter that I had no real business getting away with. At one point, Button was actually ahead of me on the inside at the start of a braking zone and had me beaten all ends up, but came over a bit faint at the prospect of me trying to tough it out around the outside and backed out of a move he'd all but completed. It should be noted, though, that while this behaviour was consistent through the race, it didn't stop me having a lot of fun and did lead to me ending the event feeling like a god of Norse legend.

It should further be noted that I've had races against AI Perez and AI Verstappen which ended a bit differently. The Verstappen one was at Monza and ended with us both in the gravel, in fact, through one of those incidents where the overtaking driver ends up a bit short on the move, doesn't quite back out in time and makes contact, front tyre to rear tyre, with the leading car. The replay looked brilliant and I found myself sat analysing the bloody thing like it was real. Should I have turned in? Should Max have backed out? Should I have had something better to do?

[F308GTB]

I've read the AI is still a bit daft as it was in F1 2015. Is that the case? Races in 2015 are infuriating with multiple restarts trying to get a clean start off the line without getting cornholed.

[GB_Simo]

I've read the AI is still a bit daft as it was in F1 2015. Is that the case? Races in 2015 are infuriating with multiple restarts trying to get a clean start off the line without getting cornholed.

From what I've played so far, it's better than 2015 but there's still some occasional oddness. One carry-over from last year, for example, is that when coming down certain straights - the curving "straight" between turns 2 and 3 in Melbourne is still a prime example - an AI car with a speed advantage will try to overtake you on the opposite side from the one you expect, which a) puts them on the outside for the next turn, b) is invariably a smaller gap than the one you thought they'd take and c) often leads to an accident because you're just not ready for them doing it.

They've been pretty well behaved off the start in the races I've played up to now, save for having the occasional crash amongst themselves. The only incident I've really been caught up in was when I thought I'd been absolutely drilled by Bottas in Spain. I'd made a ropey start and I was slewing across the track under acceleration when he just clattered me. So I thought, anyway. When I watched the replay back, Bottas had made a demon getaway from the row behind me and I'd gone careering straight across his bows, completely out of control, into an accident entirely of my own making.

Every other incident I've had with them so far has been either believable or my own fault. I've been punted from behind while driving defensively on a couple of occasions but I've been driving like an arse at the time - very late blocking moves, mainly - so wouldn't fault the AI for that. The Verstappen crash in my last post was more the AI's fault than mine - he wasn't fully alongside, I could have left him room but didn't feel obliged to - but it didn't feel cheap, overly aggressive, broken or anything like that, and I've been bumped off the road coming off the first chicane on lap 1 at Monza aiming for a space that was always going to disappear before I got to it.

What I don't have at the minute, though, is enough play time to tell you whether that's a consistent experience. My main worry with them at the minute is how generally polite they've been when trying to pass. It's good fun going side by side with them into a braking zone but I'm hardly ever losing. I might bump the difficulty up tonight and see if that makes any difference.

[pk500]

Got my copy in the mail today from Best Buy and was took it for a three-lap spin at Brazil. Definitely noticed the increased, earlier precision needed for turn-in. It also seems like understeer is more pronounced when following a car closely, which is realistic as hell due to aero washout. Not sure if Codemasters modeled that but wouldn't be surprised.

I LOVE the new manual starts. Not hard to manage but still quite fun.

More impressions to come in the upcoming days. I'm home only four of the next 12 days, so my comments will be sporadic.

Thanks for the detailed impressions, Adam!

[tjung0831]

Got my copy in the mail today from Best Buy and was took it for a three-lap spin at Brazil. Definitely noticed the increased, earlier precision needed for turn-in. It also seems like understeer is more pronounced when following a car closely, which is realistic as hell due to aero washout. Not sure if Codemasters modeled that but wouldn't be surprised.

I LOVE the new manual starts. Not hard to manage but still quite fun.

More impressions to come in the upcoming days. I'm home only four of the next 12 days, so my comments will be sporadic.

Thanks for the detailed impressions, Adam!

Paul, you still working for the IRL? I saw they announced a multi year agreement to race in St. Louis(actually just across the river in Illinois) this morning. Very happy to have open wheel racing here again. CART was a long long time ago but it was great racing on that track.

[pk500]

Paul, you still working for the IRL? I saw they announced a multi year agreement to race in St. Louis(actually just across the river in Illinois) this morning. Very happy to have open wheel racing here again. CART was a long long time ago but it was great racing on that track.

Tim:

No, I left IMS and IndyCar in January 2014. I work for an Indianapolis PR and marketing agency, working IMSA sports car races all over North America. Enjoy it quite a bit.

Nice to see IndyCar back on another Midwestern oval, even if Gateway is a complete sh*thole of a facility.

[pk500]

This game is a winner in our house. I dig it, and my 11-year-old son -- who had no interest in F1 -- LOVES it. He is the first year of his career with Sauber and wants to watch the real race at Spa with me Monday night after I return home from working a race this weekend at VIR.

[Rodster]

Quit with the impressions damn it. I'm trying to hold out for the Steam winter sale and you guys ain't helping. I'm so weak the game is in my cart waiting for purchase but my wallet keeps saying "don't do it".