I just read an interview on the official F1 website with the Codemasters CEO. Now, I’m a huge F1 fan. I used to love playing the F1 games on PC (before they went Sony Playstation exclusive) and I still love driving the BMW Sauber in rFactor. I desperately want another F1 game for my PC that could be considered a “simulation”. However, it looks like I won’t be getting that with Codemasters at the wheel. When asked about how realistic their F1 game will be, this is the answer he gave:
Codemasters’ history in TOCA Race Driver has been very heavily weighted towards simulation, appealing to the real hardcore fan - be they V8 supporters in Australia, DTM fans in Germany etc, we have always recognised international traits. But if you want to take the game to an even wider audience, particularly the United States (for us the largest gaming market in the world), then you have to appeal to a mass audience and so we blend the simulation with an awful lot of arcade elements too.
Holy crap, does he really think that TOCA Race Driver was a racing simulation? Has he ever even driven a car? Why don’t they just kick me in the nuts now and just forget about releasing the game. He even says they will be using their “Ego” engine, the same one that powers their new game, GRID. When he was talking about using Ego for the F1 game he mentioned, “we have the basics of the car dynamics and handling”. I have heard that GRID is ultra-arcadey, and if they think they can use the same vehicle dynamics for their F1 game they are sadly mistaken.
It seems that whoever manages the F1 video game license needs a good stern talking to, as they seem to be wholly incapable of finding anyone decent to develop games from their license. Remember when ISI had the F1 license in the late 90’s, early 2000’s? Those games were fun, hard, and realistic enough considering the CPU power they had to run on. Whatever happened to the ISI team? Well, they broke out from under the EA umbrella and created one of the most realistic PC racing simulations available right now: rFactor. These are the people who need to be creating the next F1 game, not a bunch of arcade racing monkeys.
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