Should you buy the divisive new F1 24 game?

After recent F1 games veered out of left field into fields like story modes and supercars, EA and Codemasters have made a concerted effort to make their core player base a key focus for this year’s title.

F1 24 dropped or deprioritized some of the less popular features in a refreshing move to improve the more conventional aspects of F1 gameplay. This means no more supercars and F1 World has only received minor changes.

However, you can essentially divide the multitude of changes and improvements made to F1 24 into three distinct groups. The most hyped of these is the driving career mode – which is strikingly different from how it was in previous games.

A long-awaited career change

To the delight of many, the main focus for F1 24 was on revising the way the driver works. This marks the first significant change to that side of the game since the My Team mode was introduced to F1 2020 some five years ago.

The driver career has been reworked to the point that it is now a deeper career option and separate from My Team, whereas in previous entries the driver career was actually just a slightly scaled down version of My Team.

Before you even get into the action on the track, you’ll be greeted by a cutscene where your driver and their agent in Monaco sign your first contract. It’s the first taste of the new contract negotiation system, which has been improved in more than just 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 rating that you must achieve by the end.

In our experience so far, we’ve found that improving your rating is fairly easy – even a total increase of four, which is the recommended game improvement goal, is very achievable as long as you have reasonable scores for your car’s pace.

Technically, you can get into a position where a team won’t want to keep you past your contract, but that requires a significant drop in ratings, which is unlikely unless it’s intentionally orchestrated.

While the lack of challenge might be welcome to some who don’t want to deal with the constant battle to keep their place in F1, it does open up some moments of questionable logic that destroy the illusion of being a Formula 1 driver.

EA and Codemasters have made a lot of ‘secret meetings’ added to the driver’s career. However, just three races into our F1 career we were approached by Aston Martin to see if we were interested in switching from Williams for the following year. This certainly suggests that progressing in career mode will be very easy, especially since we haven’t scored a championship point yet.

The negotiations are also much longer as the first meeting after Australia was just to say if we were interested or not, and the second was after Monaco, where Aston revealed how many and what upgrades they had fitted to the car and then asked us if we were still interested in the continuation of the conversation.

To be honest, this drawn-out negotiation period is, in some ways, quite realistic and is certainly a step up from what has been in previous F1 games. We also have to note that we’ve only done a little over half a season in career mode so far, so we can’t comment on how those conversations ended.

But there are some strange omissions in what we saw. First, there seems to be no way initiate ‘secret meetings’ with other teams.

Also, negotiations move at the pace of the team you’re talking to. While conversations stretching over several weeks or months are entirely plausible in real-life F1, the fact that these conversations always last so long in-game and seemingly end only at the end of the year is not necessarily true.

Some sort of risk-reward for trying to close the deal early, perhaps closing out potentially better options that might have come up later, would greatly improve the system.

Maybe we just had an extraordinary experience in the way of our career, but we had real results at Williams and we were in talks with Aston Martin almost immediately – but none of the backmarker teams wanted to talk to us. Maybe it all comes together at the end of the season, but it would undermine the secret meetings themselves a bit if you have more freedom of choice at the end of the year anyway.

Divisive changes in car handling

It’s worth noting that many of these changes apply exclusively to the driver’s career. While My Team has had its own changes in presentation with some of the opening scenes being redesigned and set in different locations, in reality it plays out almost identically to F1 23.

Another big change that EA and Codemasters pushed hard in their marketing is the physics and car simulation. This includes a new suspension kinematics system as well as updated tire and aerodynamic models.

Everything comes together to produce a driving model that’s easier to get into gear with. Compared to the F1 23, it has better rear end grip and grip on the slider is easier, so running without the help of traction control will be viable for more players than before.

It’s worth noting that the car’s handling was widely criticized by big-name F1 gaming influencers last week when a version of the game was available for preview.

The consensus was that the cars felt too unnatural and that the physics were designed primarily for controllers – hurting the experience for players using a wheel and pedal setup in the process.

However, having played both the preview and launch spec versions of F1 24, there are changes between the two. Mid-corner understeer, which greatly contributed to the unnatural handling feel, is absent in the final game and initial turn-in is not as sharp as it was in the preview version.

This won’t entirely change the belief of more avid gamers that the physics have been watered down in favor of making the game more accessible to controller users.

But if you’re one of them, or you just wish the game was easier to pick up and play and keep the car in the right direction, then you’ll feel more at home with F1 24 than with other recent EA F1 games.

Other changes

Other minor tweaks include some much-needed updates to model tracking.

Silverstone, Spa, Jeddah and Lusail have all been reviewed and updated – the track markings on the outside of the Eau Rouge being the most obvious change.

If you’re racing as one of the actual F1 drivers, whether it’s in regular Grand Prix mode or career mode, you’ll hear them commentate on their performance using clips from the actual radio conversation. There’s also good variety depending on whether you’ve been above, at or below expectations or even dropped out.

There are also some context-specific ones, tied to a particular round or exact score. The 1-2 finish with Ferrari was met for us by a radio message from Leclerc specifically mentioning that we had achieved 1-2 – so the radio calls were quite cleverly and thoroughly integrated.

On top of that is the addition of Engine Braking as a customizable car setup option and Challenge Career, which offers a condensed career mode experience and includes in-race objectives such as keeping tires within a certain temperature range or overtaking cars within a certain number of laps. These are all welcome additions.

Abstract

The key question is whether F1 24 justifies the £69.99 price it retails for on consoles – or even £89.99 for the Champions Edition.

F1 24 has a number of key differences compared to last year’s game, and for career mode enthusiasts there are plenty of things to pique your interest.

For many, however, the enjoyment of the game lives and dies with the management model and this was the source of much frustration among many in the pre-release community. It’s improved since the initial wave of backlash and Codemasters promises further tweaks to make it even better.

As it stands today, for those who use a controller, want a game that’s easy to pick up, and mostly play career mode, F1 24 should appeal far more than any F1 game since EA’s involvement with the series.

But it really comes down to how excited you are about the changes in driver behavior and whether more forgiveness is the direction you want the car’s handling model to go.