After recent F1 games deviated from left field into areas like story modes and supercars, EA and Codemasters have gone out of their way to make their core players the main focus for this year’s title.
F1 24 has ditched or deprioritized some of the less popular features in a refreshing move to improve on the more conventional aspects of an F1 game. That means there are no more supercars and F1 World has only undergone minor changes.
Essentially, though, you can split the numerous changes and improvements made for F1 24 into three different groups. The most hyped of these is the driver career mode, which is noticeably different from previous games.
A long-awaited overhaul of career mode
To the delight of many, the main focus for F1 24 has been on overhauling the driver’s career mode. This is the first significant change to that side of the game since My Team mode was introduced in F1 2020 some five years ago.
The Driver Career has been reworked so that it is now the deeper career option and distinct from My Team, whereas in previous entries the Driver Career was really just a slightly scaled back version of My Team.
Before you even start the on-track action, you’ll be greeted with a cutscene of your driver and his agent in Monaco signing your first contract. It is the first introduction to the new contract negotiation system, which has not only been improved in terms of presentation.
As a driver, you start with an overall rating, which can go up or down depending on your results. Teams expect improvement, and part of your contract is a target number that you must achieve by the end of the contract.
In our experience so far, we’ve found that improving your rating is quite easy – and even an increase of four in total, which is the game’s recommended improvement goal, is very achievable as long as you achieve reasonable results for the pace of your car .
Technically, you could end up in a position where the team doesn’t want to keep you after your contract, but that would require a significant rating drop, which is unlikely unless it’s deliberately orchestrated.
While that lack of challenge may be welcome for some who don’t want to deal with the constant struggle to keep their place in F1, it does open up some moments of questionable logic that undermine the illusion of being a Formula 1 driver.
EA and Codemasters have put a lot of focus on the “secret meetings” added to a driver’s career. However, just three races into our F1 career we were approached by Aston Martin to see if we were interested in moving from Williams for the following year. It certainly suggests that career mode progression will be very easy, especially since we hadn’t even scored a championship point yet.
The negotiations are also taking much longer, as the first meeting after Australia was just to say whether or not we were interested, and the second after Monaco, where Aston revealed how many and what car upgrades it had fitted and then asked if we were still interested. in ongoing conversations.
In all fairness, this lengthy negotiation period is in some ways quite realistic and certainly a step up from previous F1 games. We should also mention that we’ve only played just over half a season in career mode so far, so we can’t comment on how these conversations will end.
But there are some strange omissions from what we’ve seen. First of all, there doesn’t seem to be any way to do that initiate ‘secret meetings’ with other teams.
Plus, negotiations move at the pace of the team you’re speaking to. While conversations over several weeks or months are completely plausible in real-world F1, the fact that these conversations always go on for so long in the game and seemingly only conclude late in the year is not necessarily accurate.
Some kind of risk reward for closing a deal early, perhaps closing out potentially better options that could have come later, would greatly improve the system.
Maybe we just had an extraordinary experience in our career mode, but we achieved realistic results at Williams and were in talks with Aston Martin almost immediately – yet none of the backmarker teams wanted to talk to us. Maybe this will all come together at the end of the season, but that would somewhat undermine the secret meetings themselves when you have greater freedom of choice at the end of the year anyway.
The driving behavior of the car changes
It’s worth noting that many of these changes are exclusive to a driver’s career. Although My Team has undergone its own presentation changes, with some opening scenes being redesigned and set in different locations, in reality it plays out almost identically to F1 23.
The other big change that EA and Codemasters have heavily implemented in their marketing is the physics and car simulation. This includes a new suspension kinematics system and updated tire and aerodynamic models.
It’s all come together to produce a riding model that’s easier to get started with. Compared to F1 23, there is more rear grip and catching slides is easier, so running without traction control will be feasible for more players than before.
It’s worth noting that the car’s handling was widely panned by major F1 gaming influencers last week when the game’s preview build was made available.
The consensus was that the cars felt too unnatural and that the physics were designed primarily for controllers, which hurt the experience for players using a steering-and-pedals setup.
However, after playing both the preview and launch spec versions of F1 24, there are changes between the two. The mid-corner understeer, which was a big contributor to the unnatural driving feel, isn’t present in the final game, and the first corner isn’t as sharp as in the preview build.
That won’t completely change the belief among more passionate players that the physics have been toned down in favor of making the game more accessible to controller users.
But if you are one, or would simply appreciate that the game is easier to pick up and play and keeps the car pointing in the right direction, then you’ll feel more at home with F1 24 than with the other recent EA F1 games.
Other changes
Other smaller tweaks include some much-needed updates to model tracking.
Silverstone, Spa, Jeddah and Lusail have all been overhauled and updated – the outer track markings at Eau Rouge being the most obvious change.
When you race as one of the real F1 drivers, whether in regular Grand Prix mode or Career mode, you’ll hear them comment on their performances using snippets of real radio chatter. There’s also a good variety depending on whether you performed above, at or below expectations or even if you crash.
There are also some context-specific solutions related to a specific circuit or exact result. A 1-2 finish with Ferrari was answered for us with a radio message from Leclerc specifically stating that we had achieved a 1-2 – so the radio conversations are quite clever and thoroughly integrated.
Additionally, there’s the addition of engine braking as an adjustable car tuning option, and the Challenge Career, which offers a condensed career mode experience and the inclusion of in-race objectives such as keeping your tires within a certain temperature window. or overtaking a car within a certain number of laps. These are all welcome additions.
Resume
The main question, however, is whether F1 24 justifies the £69.99 price it sells for on consoles – or even the £89.99 for the Champions Edition.
F1 24 has some key differences from last year’s game and for career mode enthusiasts, there are a few things to pique your interest.
For many, however, the fun of the game lives and dies on the control model and that was the source of a lot of frustration among many in the community before release. It’s improved since that first wave of comments, and Codemasters promises further tweaks to make it even better.
As it stands now, for those who use a controller, want a game that’s easy to pick up, and mainly play career mode, F1 24 should be far more appealing than any F1 game since EA’s inception involvement in the series.
But it really comes down to how excited you are about the changes to the driver’s career mode and whether being more forgiving is the direction you want the car’s handling to go.