Following our hands-on with an early build of F1 25 back at the beginning of the month, we can now talk about the final aspect of the event: the return of the Braking Point story mode, with some new features and functionality.
For those unfamiliar with Braking Point, it’s effectively an alternate timeline narrative constructed around newcomers to the F1 grid, delivered in a mix of on-track action and cutscenes. It made a debut in F1 2021, as primary protagonist Aiden Jackson struggled with his first steps, with the second chapter arriving in F1 23 as the new Konnersport team started to establish itself on the grid.
“Braking Point 3” advances the team a little further, with Konnersport and Jackson setting their sights on the sharp end with a new owner and a new driver line-up following long-time antagonist-spectrum racer Devon Butler’s health-led retirement from racing.
That’s brought his sister, Callie Mayer (using her mother’s maiden name and, sensibly, a contraction of her forename “California”) into the team after she won the game universe’s FIA F2 Championship, teaming up with Jackson for the plot.
“When we introduced these characters and this team, we kind of knew that it was not really authentic if these people came on the scene and immediately starting winning championships right off the bat so previous narratives of Braking Point have always been very much about them battling it out in the midfield,” says F1 25’s creative director Gavin Cooper.
“The nice thing about having invested all this time and all this narrative energy is we feel we’re now at the point where we can start to tell the story of Konnersport and its drivers actually really challenging for a championship, which is nice because it lets us tell a story that’s much more tied to the real sport.
“If they’re going for a championship, the gatekeepers of that championship are the other official teams, which means we’re kind of name-checking the faces and teams you see in the real sport.”
That’s certainly the case in the opening two chapters that we played, where you’ll be required to come back from a collision at Imola with Max Verstappen (as if that’s ever happened…), or get ahead of 2024’s emerging championship contender Lando Norris within a certain number of laps — and our quick test also took advantage of the first big change in Braking Point.
Unlike previous instalments, you’ll be able to pick which of the Konnersport drivers you want to play as within some of the individual chapters.
“Player agency is something that we talk about every year when we come back to doing Braking Point,” says Cooper. “Ultimately Braking Point is a linear experience and that’s a deliberate choice on our part. We have Career Mode as our free-form, anything-can-happen mode where you tell your own story… whereas Braking Point has always been intended to offer, a story with a beginning, middle, and end.
“The ability for the player at certain key events to choose which of the two Konnersport drivers they actually want to play as for that event… can impact the story in a few different ways. When they experience the narrative they’re going to be viewing something specific to the character they’ve chosen to play as. It can also in some cases affect the on-track objectives… and all the way up to the end of the game it could also influence how some aspects of the very end of the story plays out.”
Difficulty has been modified somewhat too, with a new fourth tier to add an extra challenge for hihg-level players who found the mode too easy previously and a rejig of the other three difficulty levels to make the jumps between grades more consistent.
“The way we’ve built these events, because they’re so authored, because they’re quite hand-worked when we put them together, previously we’ve been doing the story with three difficulty levels and we know that’s under-served our most skilled players.
“We’ve made a number of improvements to the way we author these stories that we can now support a fourth difficulty level for those top-end players. Adding that fourth difficulty level means we’ve also been able to shift around the existing three to reduce the gaps between them to make it that little bit easier for players across the board to find a difficulty level that’s appropriate to them,” says Cooper.
Once you’ve completed Braking Point — which promises “a dramatic event” that “throws the team into chaos” — you’ll also now be able to carry the Konnersport team over into over game modes too. The squad will be enabled in both My Team and Driver Career as an eleventh outfit, somewhat previewing what’ll happen in the real world soon with the Cadillac team.
There’s still more than a month until F1 25 launches, on May 30 for players who pick up the regular edition or with three days’ early access for Iconic Edition pre-orders, so while that’s the last part of our own hands-on covered there’s doubtless more to come over the next few weeks.
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