Codemasters F1 2017

[Rodster]

This year will see the return of classic cars. No mention if there will be anymore classic tracks as well.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2017- ... in-f1-2017

[pk500]

Four threads down:

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=16642&start=125

[Rodster]

Oops didn't look there

[pk500]

Well, sh*t, I linked to the wrong thread! Silly me.

Here's the correct thread: viewtopic.php?f=1&t=12163&start=2250

[Zeppo]

I just hope the classic cars mode is more robust than last time. As Adam pointed out back then, it doesn't make much sense to race cars from different years against each other. Still, it was a lot of fun hotlapping them, and the classic tracks were really cool as well.

[Jimmydeicide]

Caps Suck!!!!!

[GB_Simo]

No idea which thread we've settled on here, or who the Caps are driving for this year, but we had a separate thread for the game last year so we may as well crack on.

I just hope the classic cars mode is more robust than last time. As Adam pointed out back then, it doesn't make much sense to race cars from different years against each other. Still, it was a lot of fun hotlapping them, and the classic tracks were really cool as well.

I've got the same concern this time, Zep, at least from what we've seen so far. There's a span of 14 years between the 3 cars unveiled so far; I'm not sure how you'd ever go about balancing relative performance without rendering the whole thing a bit pointless. In saying that, my Facebook cover picture is of an FW14B and the opportunity to drive one virtually, which I'm getting here, tends to make me just give the store my money now and have done with it. All the same, I'll be interested to see what they unveil over the next few weeks, particularly in relation to the 4 "alternate layouts" they're promising - classic tracks, F1 '97-style works of fiction or something else altogether?

As far as the core game modes are concerned, the big thing I still want is an improvement in how the game handles the transition from dry to intermediate to wet and back again. I banged on at the development team about this last year through the closed beta programme and got no joy from it, but the high water mark for changing track conditions is still Grand Prix 3 - I have difficulty accepting that 17 years (!) down the line, Codemasters can't do a better job of indicating when it's time to take a set of inters on a damp track, for instance. Other than that, make the safety car work properly, add a bit more strategic variety to the AI, make them a bit more eager to race me wheel-to-wheel and I'd be a happy chappy indeed.

[Rodster]

When Codies slapped on the Classics feature to F1 2013 I ended up using it as a hotlap feature. I'll still buy the DLC but unless they can fill it with a full grid i'll just do the same. What I would like to see Codies do is a proper Classic Season like what Geoff Crammond used to do with his Grand Prix racing games.

[FifaInspected]

I hope they don't take out the co-op season mode. Had a blast with that online.

[Rodster]

The Special Edition game can already be had on PC for under $38 on preorder.

[GB_Simo]

Classic Car #4, increasing the period covered by the known classics to 22 years: Red Bull RB6.



I'm pretty underwhelmed by that. As a general rule of thumb, what I like about "classic" content is that it tends to cover periods in which the most convincing racing experience available on a home console was Super Monaco GP, so there's still this sense of the new - of wonderment, if you like - in turning your first hot lap. How a car from F1 2010 is going to deliver that sensation, I'm not sure. Your mileage may vary.

[Rodster]

Classic Car #4, increasing the period covered by the known classics to 22 years: Red Bull RB6.

I'm pretty underwhelmed by that. As a general rule of thumb, what I like about "classic" content is that it tends to cover periods in which the most convincing racing experience available on a home console was Super Monaco GP, so there's still this sense of the new - of wonderment, if you like - in turning your first hot lap. How a car from F1 2010 is going to deliver that sensation, I'm not sure. Your mileage may vary.

Yeah Adam I share the same sentiment as you. My idea of classic cars would be the 50/60/70 and 80's eras. Why not Gilles Ferrari from the 70's ?

[pk500]

Classic Car #4, increasing the period covered by the known classics to 22 years: Red Bull RB6.

I'm pretty underwhelmed by that. As a general rule of thumb, what I like about "classic" content is that it tends to cover periods in which the most convincing racing experience available on a home console was Super Monaco GP, so there's still this sense of the new - of wonderment, if you like - in turning your first hot lap. How a car from F1 2010 is going to deliver that sensation, I'm not sure. Your mileage may vary.

Yeah Adam I share the same sentiment as you. My idea of classic cars would be the 50/60/70 and 80's eras. Why not Gilles Ferrari from the 70's ?

Bingo. A 7-year-old car is FAR from a "classic." I don't even think the the 2002 Ferrari is a classic.

About the most-recent F1 car that I would consider a classic is the fully active 1992 Williams that Mansell drove to the championship. That car was in the last Codies' F1 game to feature classic cars.

[GB_Simo]

For those who haven't already seen, a little game of Spot The Difference:



On the "alternate tracks" front, it looks as though we're getting short versions of existing F1 tracks, with videos from E3 showcasing the Bahrain Short layout:



Overtake mode looks like some of the Showcase events from Forza 6 or, for those with longer memories, One Lap Magic from Gran Turismo 4. I haven't seen word on which other alternate layouts will feature but presumably Silverstone International, Suzuka East (or West), CoTA and Abu Dhabi are candidates.

Reaction elsewhere suggests that there actually is an appetite for having the 2002 and 2004 Ferraris, without any other period opposition, in the same place. For me, and I suspect a fair number of us here, it's getting towards time to reveal a few things that aren't classic, or indeed "classic", vehicles.

[pk500]

A 15-year-old car is not "classic." As I wrote here before, I would take the 1992 Williams or any car from previous years.

Twenty-five years or older connotes "classic" to me.

[GB_Simo]

As I wrote here before, I would take the 1992 Williams or any car from previous years.

Already announced, mate, so that's one tick in the box. I'll give the 412 T2 a pass as well, since we're probably just about at the stage where a V12 engine gives you an automatic pass into the classic category. The official forum is full of folk proclaiming that it'll be some kind of travesty if there isn't a classic Renault in there, but they're not talking about an early turbo car. They're after one that Fernando Alonso - the currently active, not especially old Fernando Alonso - won a world title in, and if they can't have that, they'd like the Brawn instead.

I'm 31 years old and apparently I'm already completely out of touch...

Let me offset my "classic" rantings for a second by adding that the general consensus from E3 was that the handling remained solid across the board. Evolutionary rather than revolutionary, from the accounts I've seen so far, but there wasn't a huge amount wrong with how 2016 handled, so that's fine by me.

[GB_Simo]

Screw it, I've pre-ordered.

Here's a new trailer, set in an alternate reality in which Vijay Mallya hasn't had to surrender his passport. Codies call it Make History. I call it Monaco At What, Sorry?:



There are also a boatload of additional championship modes for both the modern and the classic cars, none of which Codemasters have discussed yet, so head to 5:34 in this video for a bit more:

[Rodster]

Looks good but the season is halfway over. I'm still dumbfounded that Codie's have not learned from us yanks and release the game a month before the season starts. They'd have more sales leading to the start of the season, they could keep the price higher until later in the year and discount it when the season is over.

I'll get this when it's massively discounted next year.

[GB_Simo]

I suspect, but don't know, that some of it is to do with getting teams to sign off on assets and so on. I was part of the F1 2016 beta and for most of the test period, we were driving 2015 cars with 2016 performance characteristics. The final beta build was the only one with 2016 cars in and we only got that a few weeks before release.

On top of that, Electronic Arts released F1 2000 in April, if I remember rightly - springtime, certainly. That went so well that they had to release F1 Championship Season 2000 later in the year to give the cars the right level of performance, make the Arrows and Williams the right colour and make Jenson Button less rubbish. If Codies got anywhere near that position - which is much, much easier to patch your way out of now, of course - the more cave-dwelling members of the official forums would have the kind of field day that Codies might want to avoid in any case, even if they're commercially able to.

Not having already played it for 80 hours this year is making me much more eager for the official release, I must say.

[Rodster]

Eurogamer just posted their review and they like it a lot. They say the classic cars (V10's - V12's) sound like their real life counterparts did when they were out on the track.

[GB_Simo]

Pretend Race Cars have posted their summary of F1 2017, which they've entitled "The Benchmark". It's well worth a read, being a perfect description of how this game will be when it's finished.

You've played a Codemasters F1 game before, as likely as not, so you probably know the drill. The safety car procedure will sometimes be fine and sometimes see it pull over by the side of the road, causing the disqualification of the AI cars that stopped behind it while you pass by, safe in the knowledge that some other invisible SC is going to pit at the end of this lap. That must be true, because Jeff the engineer told you so, just like he told you, "This lap's no good - abort now and box this lap," straight after you'd set the fastest first sector of the entire session at Spa. He was quiet in Melbourne, though, wasn't he? Then again, so would you be if you were engineering the only driver in the field who hadn't been disqualified while sat on the starting grid.

Here's how that one happened, because it's easy enough to avoid even if it shouldn't be an issue to start with. Having skipped qualifying, I'd given it the Full Bottas off the line trying to anticipate the start, cocked it right up and got a big old jump start instead. Rather than restarting the session, I used a Flashback to take myself back to my grid spot. Now, this jump start of mine was big enough that the lights didn't go out in the time between me setting off and me pausing the game, so everyone was still sat on the grid. Fine, except that for some reason, the start procedure was no longer taking place. The AI hadn't been given their trigger to go, nor were they going to get one, and while they sat waiting for the newly non-existent start lights, the game disqualified them. It said it would disqualify me if I didn't drive off, so I did.

In case you're wondering, I did manage to win that one. There was a podium ceremony with other drivers involved. I'm guessing they drew straws or something. Nobody thought to ask Ant Davidson if he'd record a piece of commentary that went, "What in the shuddering f*ck have I just seen?" or similar, so instead he told me that I'd done a great job on strategy when the safety car came out. This, I felt, was still better than anything Marty Reid might have come up with.

It's impossible, however, to talk about all of that without then going through what happened after Jeff tried to sabotage me at Spa. I was in a Renault with the difficulty set to 88 or thereabouts, just working through my first race weekend and trying to establish some sort of baseline difficulty. (Difficulty is on a slider this year, which goes up to 110 and can be adjusted between sessions, not just between races.) I qualified 5th, towards the bottom of the yawning chasm separating Ferrari and Mercedes from everyone else on the day, made a decent start and pinched 4th from Vettel on the opening lap. With the race length set to 25%, I was due to pit at the end of lap 3, with the top 3 disappearing and Vettel clearly faster but equally clearly stuck behind me. On that 3rd lap, I rounded Stavelot to find that it was raining. Not that heavily, but enough to make you think it might develop into something. I thought about staying out for an extra lap to see what might unfold, but thought it was smarter to be on the right tyres for now and worry about the rain later, so pitted as planned.

Ha! At the top of the hill, it was wet enough that I didn't slow down for the chicane until I was 25 yards past it. Vettel made it on his new slicks, at which point I began muttering darkly about AI having cheat's grip on dry tyres in the damp. That lasted about 10 seconds, the time it took me to fly off the road again at Rivage and meet Stoffel Vandoorne as he rejoined from the same incident, with Daniil Kvyat barely tiptoeing by on the outskirts of the corner. A few corners later, Vandoorne went off in front of me again, or I went off behind him, or both. Hugely convincing, superbly immersive, and nothing changed on my intermediate-shod recovery drive from 13th to 7th.

Pass an AI driver into a chicane and if you're not completely through by the time you turn in, they'll hang on around the outside and re-pass you when the track turns their way again. They don't always defend their line - they'll let you go if it's an easy DRS pass and there's still scope to take them by surprise on the brakes - but when they try to cover you off, you get a car's width and a few extra inches to work with. Never less, but never more. What they still don't do enough is try to overtake you when they're faster, though there are caveats to attach here. I've tended to be at my slowest on sections of track that aren't conducive to overtaking, I've been using the setup pre-sets geared towards straightline speed and I haven't quite got my difficulty settings sorted just yet. I'm still reasonably sure that the AI needs more oomph when it comes to overtaking you, but I might yet be proven wrong.

That PRC article I linked to makes the claim that with the classic content, Codemasters are effectively simulating the BOSS GP series. I'm not sure I really want them to. I am sure that the cars are generally a lot of fun to drive, though some of them don't have as much front end bite as I feel they ought. This applies most notably to the Williams FW14B, in which the famously front end reliant Nigel Mansell won the world title and probably didn't spend his 1992 wondering exactly when the car would respond to his steering input. At the other end of the scale, it's the rear end of the 2002 and 2004 Ferraris that's trying to kill me, which doesn't tie in with how I remember the actual cars behaving but does make Copse, Maggotts and Becketts in the F2002 hugely entertaining. The V10s and V12s sound glorious, with the 1991 Honda and 1996 Renault being my personal favourites, and winning my class in an FW18 at Silverstone put a big smile on my face. Maybe that's the point, and maybe it's a waste of time looking any harder for one.

It's easy to start making these little judgements about how individual cars behave because the handling model has an instant familiarity to it. You've got more grip and more downforce in the 2017 cars than in 2016, yes, and you can feel that difference immediately, but what sits underneath that is a sensible evolution of 2016's handling. If you've played 2016, you'll be able to jump straight in and feel reasonably comfortable. If you haven't, you won't know that it's slightly easier than before to feel the limit of grip under braking and tell when your tyres are about to lock up, but you will find it intuitive. The biggest difference I'm finding between this year and last is that even though there's more grip and traction available on corner exit, it's a bit easier to lose the rear in medium-speed corners if you ask the outside rear tyre to do too much accelerating too soon. It's a snappier grip loss than last year, much as we've seen with the real 2017 F1 cars, though you can usually catch it if you're alert enough.

A curate's egg, then, but when it's good, it's sensational. Did I tell you about how I mugged Verstappen on a safety car restart in Canada? Got the jump on him on the restart, had a bit of a look down the inside and he pushed too deep into the corner trying to hang on, straight over the sausage kerbs and nearly into the Wall of Champions...

[pk500]

Superb feedback, as always, Adam. My copy of F1 2017 arrives Friday at my local Best Buy. My youngest son and I can't wait to drive it.

[DChaps]

Thanks Adam for the detailed and as always hilarious commentary. I just read that PRC review and while I don't necessarily agree with his assessment of the current state of sim racing, it certainly provides a provocative take and makes me interested to get more into F1 2017. Got it last week and I guess I just did not give it the proper time, as I was feeling underwhelmed, very similar to my experience with DiRT 4 earlier this year. Some of the quotes that really stood out for me from that PRC review are as follows:

https://pretendracecars.net/2017/08/26/the-benchmark/

Yet despite home computers progressing far into the future – now possessing the ability to render each individual hair on Mario’s mustache while taking into account a gentle breeze in the area – racing simulators have become lifeless shells of what the future once promised them to be. The joys of rushing home to a feature complete $60 game a decade ago have now been replaced with eternal science projects, message board wars, and rampant apologist rhetoric – brainwashed supporters bending over backwards to defend what in any other market would be blatant anti-consumer practices.

It is for this reason that Formula One 2017 not only succeeds in being Codemasters’ finest grand prix racer to date, but establishes itself as quite possibly the greatest racing game that has ever been released to the general public. In an era where simulated motor racing is an embarrassingly bleak hobby to enter, Codemasters have constructed a package so anti-status quo and so pro-consumer, I’m honestly left wondering why other developers would even bother trying to compete with a game so polished and robust. Finally matching the abundance of bells and whistles crammed onto the DVD with an equally satisfactory on-track experience, Formula One 2017 is absurdly good, and you’re doing yourself a disservice if you intentionally ignore what Codemasters have created.........

.......Combined with the introduction of a traditional numbered difficulty slider rather than named preset skill levels, and you’re looking at a grand prix game that isn’t just an improvement compared to previous iterations in the series; you’re looking at something that will undoubtedly challenge Geoff Crammond’s Grand Prix 4 as the undisputed king of offline racing.......

.....Formula One 2017 is not merely just a game that features F1 cars and tracks from the current season; it’s our equivalent to FIFA or Madden, and something we as a community can be genuinely proud of.......

Formula One 2017 is the greatest racing simulator that has ever been created. This $60 purchase is impossibly good, and while we’ve had to suffer through some abominations from Codemasters in previous years, this one has been well worth the wait. This is the absolute pinnacle of driving games, and ignoring this modern masterpiece in favor of ultra-stale simulators that offer little more than “here are some cars and some tracks” is only reinforcing the stereotype that sim racers merely use their favorite genre of games as an elitist masturbatory tool. In a rare instance, the unanimous glowing reviews surrounding Formula One 2017 are not the work of paid shills, but rather the result of perseverance from a team who certainly got their s*** together.

If it's even 50% as good as what the review says, it is worth me giving it some more time. Likewise, while I think PRC tends to be a little too harsh when it comes to reviews, they are always very detailed with facts and scenarios to back up the statements, so I tend to believe this is not just a blatant attempt to set the racing sim community on fire, but you you never know.

[TCrouch]

Well, s***. I guess I better buy this one now...

[Rodster]

Geoff Crammond's Grand Prix 4 was and is still the benchmark for racing AI. The AI in GP4 were almost humanlike. From what I've read in that review it doesn't appear it's been dethroned.