Codemasters’ well-established F1 series has been an extremely dependable annual dose of open-wheel motorsport action for many years now. Of course, while F1 2021 will undoubtedly arrive with a range of welcome tweaks and improvements, its new Drive to Survive-inspired story mode ‘Braking Point’ is easily the most exciting one.
Casting players as an up-and-coming F2 driver, Braking Point will steer us through a linear, three-season story from 2019 to this year. As such, Braking Point seems poised to inject the F1 series with a mode akin to FIFA’s The Journey, Madden’s Longshot, and Champion Mode in Fight Night Champion – one of the thoroughly underappreciated pioneers of sports game story modes.
[ignvideo url="https://www.ign.com/videos/2021/04/15/f1-2021-announce-trailer"]While it won’t actually be the first time Codemasters has dabbled with a story mode in one of its racing games – as any remaining Ryan McKane fans from 2002’s TOCA Race Driver can attest to – it does promise to be a huge leap forward from F1 2019’s brief F2 intro, and F1 series senior creative director Lee Mather is excited to put it into people’s hands.
“Considering that Braking Point is really quite a significant departure from what we’ve done traditionally – and what we did in F1 2019 with dipping our toe in the water with the F2 feeder intro – we’re just really excited because the quality of what we’ve delivered this year for Braking Point is so massive,” Mather tells IGN. “You know, as a team that makes racing games, to do a full narrative, to do CGI cut scenes – it’s quite a departure from some of the things we’ve done in the past.”
[poilib element="quoteBox" parameters="excerpt=As%20a%20team%20that%20makes%20racing%20games%2C%20to%20do%20a%20full%20narrative%2C%20to%20do%20CGI%20cut%20scenes%20%E2%80%93%20it%E2%80%99s%20quite%20a%20departure%20from%20some%20of%20the%20things%20we%E2%80%99ve%20done%20in%20the%20past."]“I think everybody’s excited to see how it’s received and also how people gel with the story, the characters, and the journey that we take in the mode, because we didn’t do it by halves. We got two professional writers in to do it with us, so it’s a proper journey.”
[caption]
The teams players can join in Braking Point are Williams, Haas, Alfa Romeo, Alpha Tauri, and Racing Point (now Aston Martin).[/caption]
Mather is also optimistic Braking Point will be able to attract players who don’t traditionally pay a great deal of attention to the games but may be drawn to the drama of an F1 story – especially on the back of the success of Netflix’s Drive to Survive (the streamer’s popular and surprisingly candid docu-series that dives deep behind the scenes of the world of modern F1) as well as movies like 2013’s much-loved Rush.
“I’m not a massive football fan, but I’ll certainly play The Journey in FIFA... and [Madden’s] Longshot; I enjoyed that,” says Mather. “And the NBA titles and things like that.”
“So I definitely think there’s a case for that. I think the connection to Drive to Survive will draw people in as well and certainly pique their interest. And I think that they’ll be more interested to give it a go and in seeing how it pans out.
[poilib element="quoteBox" parameters="excerpt=I%20think%20the%20connection%20to%20Drive%20to%20Survive%20will%20draw%20people%20in%20as%20well%20and%20certainly%20pique%20their%20interest."]“Drive to Survive obviously plays heavily on what goes on behind the scenes in Formula One, and I think that that’s something the fans haven’t really seen until Netflix came along.... Something like Rush really showed the relationships outside of that; taking it a step further and seeing the private relationships. So we’ve certainly drawn from that. But also we’ve spoken many times about how players build their journey while they’re playing the game and they craft the stories in their head as to what’s going on. And this time we’re able to take all of those things that people are imagining and present them to them.”
F1 record breaker Lewis Hamilton is facing stiff competition this season.[/caption]While Codemasters has been beavering away at Braking Point for several years now, it’s almost funny that F1 2021 is arriving with fictional drama added alongside what’s actually turning out to be the most interesting F1 season in many years.
“I mean, there’s always mixed feelings, isn’t there?” chuckles Mather. “Because if you’re a Lewis fan you kind of want to see Lewis continue with his domination – but you can’t lose out when there’s competition at the front and you can’t lose out when there’s something mixing the racing up.”
[poilib element="quoteBox" parameters="excerpt=You%20can%E2%80%99t%20lose%20out%20when%20there%E2%80%99s%20competition%20at%20the%20front%20and%20you%20can%E2%80%99t%20lose%20out%20when%20there%E2%80%99s%20something%20mixing%20the%20racing%20up."]“So even though [at Baku] I went through literally seconds of elation and disappointment when Lewis had his incident at the end of the race, I couldn’t feel bad about the race because I enjoyed every second of it. So that was still amazing. And I think that the midfield at the moment is just so tightly packed, you can’t split them. It doesn’t even need to be a bad day for the front team – it just needs to be a slightly off day – and anybody could be up there on the podium.
“I think there’s definitely going to be wins from other drivers this year. It just takes Max and Lewis to just not have a perfect weekend. You’ve got Sergio up there. You’ve got Leclerc up there. I certainly expect to see more Norris up on the podium. It’s super exciting for the sport, definitely.”
It would be nice to see Danny Ric chugging from his boot again this year, too.[/caption]Braking Point is not the only new addition to F1 2021, though, and Codemasters is promising a far more detailed damage model, plus far more granular control of very specific settings in My Team and Driver Career.
“We’ve added in an Expert mode now,” explains Mather. “Expert is essentially us giving people access to some of the tools that we have when we’re configuring the game modes.”
“Obviously when we’re balancing something like My Team or Driver Career, we balance it based on the kind of experience we want people to have, and the length of experience and the progression that we want people to have. But as players get into multiple seasons of it, they might want to mix that up quite significantly.”
As such, Codemasters is giving players the option to fundamentally change the rate at which they can progress, the rate at which other teams progress, and the challenges they will face.
“If you’re tired of doing R&D because you’ve played it for so long, you can have the game handle the R&D for you,” says Mather. “If you want to make driver moves really crazy and have drivers moving around and going places where you wouldn’t expect them to, you can change the way that acclaim is accrued by either yourself or the other AI teams. You can also restrict or improve the finances of teams. So you can give them the chance to earn money faster or slower, and the same with XP for all of those as well.
“If you want to have an insanely hard experience where you’re literally having to do everything to perfection, you can make it that way, or you can make it much easier. Or again, you can make it much harder for the AI. There are different ways you can balance that out.
[poilib element="quoteBox" parameters="excerpt=It%E2%80%99s%20really%20a%20very%2C%20very%20tweakable%20experience."]“It’s really a very, very tweakable experience. We see players that engage with the game for so long and play season upon season upon season, and with the ability to change the tracks that you have in your season – that keeps it fresh. But the ability to change your progression will make it a very, very different experience.”
F1 2021 arrives on July 16, and you can expect IGN’s verdict to arrive alongside it next month.
[poilib element="accentDivider"]Luke is Games Editor at IGN's Sydney office. You can find him on Twitter every few days @MrLukeReilly.
from IGN Articles https://ift.tt/3j5D0Qw
No comments:
Post a Comment