Way back when Codemasters first acquired the Formula One license in 2009, it used the following tagline for its debut multiplatform effort F1 2010: “Be the driver. Live the life.” And it fulfilled that brief as best it could, for the time. You took part in press conferences, attended meetings, generally watching the Formula One world in first person. But after the race was over and you were done fiddling with the menus, the lights went out.
We’ve gone on all kinds of diversions with the series since then, delving into classic cars, R&D and team ownership. We’ve followed a quasi-cinematic story of a young driver making his way up through F2 and into the big leagues, in a series of playable vignettes sandwiched by cutscenes. But this year we’re going back to the original brief: F1 22 wants us to live the life of a superstar driver, on and off the track.
As far as I’ve seen so far, that doesn’t involve posting problematic Instagram posts, walking through other drivers’ interviews while screaming or establishing vegan burger restaurant chains. Instead, F1 22 introduces several new components that give you some downtime, away from the adrenal overload of F1 racing.
F1 Life is the most significant of these. It’s a new hub area, on first impression similar to NBA 2K’s Neighborhood, where players can customize their surroundings, hang out with other drivers, and show off their bling. And drivers at this level aren’t strapped for cash: when they do bling, they go big. Like, supercar big.
This brings us to the next major area of novelty for the series, the introduction of driveable road-legal vehicles. Inspired by the Pirelli Hot Lap events at real F1 race weekends, in which drivers take journalists and celebrities out for five of the more troubling minutes their gastrointestinal systems will ever experience, the new game brings in various handling-based challenges in vehicles such as the McLaren 720s, Mercedes AMG GT Black Edition, and Aston Martin Vantage.
The latter two, of course, are the 2022 season’s official safety cars, and while that doesn’t mean you can drive the actual safety car in a race scenario, you can at least take the very same vehicles out onto the track and enjoy their handling for its own sake, away from lap deltas and porpoising. Although it wasn’t spelled out by developers at this stage, the implication is that these vehicles, like the furnishings around the scenes of F1 Life and the clothing your driver wears, will be bought using in-game currency, which in prior installments has been earned either through completing in-game objectives or paying for it with real-life cash.
Speaking of porpoising, the latter aerodynamic phenomenon doesn’t feature in the new game. Like the teams themselves, developer Codemasters was blindsided by the new regulation cars tendency to bounce along the straights at high speed as the aero parts on their floors intermittently made contact with the ground. Perhaps the designers will have sorted out the problems before we even play the game on 1. July – either way, we won’t be bobbing along on our way to virtual victory. That’s good news for VR fans, who will be able to play F1 22 across all modes, including multiplayer with their headsets on. And their spew buckets close to hand. That’s thanks to Codemasters outsourcing the VR development to a third-party studio, Climax.
We won’t see another cinematic journey like Braking Point this year, though. Creative director Lee Mather says the development time involved in turning around those stories means a two-year cycle. I doubt anyone will be taking to the streets in protest at the omission of such a mode this year, but it’s unusual to hear. FIFA’s The Journey and NBA 2K’s various MyCareer ‘joints’ as the kids call them both managed to bring new stories on an annual cadence, albeit with wildly different budgets and dev teams involved. Milestone just introduced an innovative playable documentary, Nine: Season 2009 with help from documentary maker Mark Neale. One suspects, now under EA’s stewardship and considerable budget, the F1 series could have rolled out a narrative mode if it really wanted to.
Instead, the focus on the track is revamped handling behavior. In part that’s brought about by the dramatic 2022 regulation changes, which have introduced heavier, radically different-looking vehicles and shaken up the hierarchy of teams. You’ll feel that extra weight through the corners thanks to the force feedback in your wheel or the rumble in your controller, says Mather. Historically the F1 series has been outstanding at this, conveying incredible subtlety of feeling with just a couple of rumble motors, so it’s not simply hyperbole.
This preview also granted us hands-on access to a handful of tracks including the new Miami circuit however, so we didn’t have to take Mather’s word for it. Many laps deep into it, it’s clear that the characteristic subtlety of force feedback has been retained, and there are some noticeable differences in car behavior, particularly at race starts, where everyone moves off at a much slower rate and with low traction, producing great clouds of rubber smoke. Trackside kerbs are no longer as deadly, either, upsetting the ground downforce much less and, in our experience, hardly ever sending us into a spin as they used to in F1 2021.
This doesn’t feel like a transformative step forward, though. Two longstanding bugbears remain, whatever the cars look like, and that’s disappointing to observe from a game that’s taking a year off doing the big grandstand story mode to focus on the driving. The first is that there’s something artificial about the way cars lose traction, and it’s not particularly enjoyable to manage. Whereas other racing sims give you a sense of where the car’s weight is and why you might be losing grip (ie your suspension has bottomed out on one side because you’ve thrown the chassis into a corner too aggressively), here there’s no such feedback. And on a pad especially, it’s very unforgiving to try and correct. The sensation’s especially noticeable on high-speed corners, of which the new Miami circuit has in great supply.
Secondly, AI is still very timid about passing you even if it has the pace advantage. This has been a problem for ages now, and it means you often end up with cars packed into a concertina behind you, ten of them separated by about 1.5 seconds, so when you pit in you lose an immersion-shattering number of positions and all sense of race strategy feels arbitrary.
These impressions are, of course, generated by a work-in-progress build, and we hope our concerns are either rendered redundant, or sidelined by how pleased we are with the new additions. The off-track lifestyle components look genuinely exciting, and we’ve all been wanting to drive the safety cars for years – but F1 22 needs to secure the fundamentals if any of the rest is to hold value.
Written by Phil Iwaniuk on behalf of GLHF.
