Codemasters and EA have revealed more details about F1 25 in the lead up to its launch this May, with a look into the changes to the game’s career mode and what the developer says is the most significant update to My Team since its introduction in F1 2020.
Dubbed “My Team 2.0”, there are some major changes coming although it retains the same ethos and — on our quick playtest at Codemasters’ Birmingham office — is pretty familiar to play in the broad strokes.
The biggest and most fundamental change is the switch from being an owner-driver to just the owner of the nascent 11th team on the grid. You’ll still be driving too, but rather than as and for yourself as a modern-day Jack Brabham, you’ll be taking part in the races as one of your two contracted drivers — and you can choose which on a race by race basis.
Gavin Cooper, the creative director on the odd-year F1 titles (including F1 25), told us: “The old system, where you identify as one of the drivers, cut off a lot of potential avenues we could pursue in terms of interesting decision-making. We would have liked to ask you to prioritise one driver over another, and that whole decision just becomes a bit meaningless because you always just want to pick yourself because you want to win.
“So that’s very much the reason why we kind of wanted to move away from you identifying as one of the drivers and actually make you feel external to that pairing – make you feel like you’re the person who’s making decisions about that pairing – so we can make you uncomfortable, and make you choose between your babies.”
Lee Mather, senior creative director on the F1 series, added: “It also opens up a scenario that we see in the sport at the moment. You’ve got Red Bull, which has Max as the overwhelming dominant factor in the team, but then you’ve got a team like McLaren at the moment, who’ve obviously got two drivers on a very even footing.
“Which of those scenarios are you likely to find yourself in running your team in My Team? Have you chosen go one of those routes to blow all your money on a top driver and then not worry about the second seat, or have you gone on a more even approach to try and take the constructor’s championship?”
That did make us think that F1 25 might be picking up the slack left by the end of development on the F1 Manager series.
“It lets us differentiate between the two F1 fantasies,” says Cooper. “We have Driver Career if you want to live the fantasy of being the F1 driver and being the best on the grid. It sells the differentiation between that and My Team where we’re very much management-oriented.
“Fundamentally, we’re never going to go as far as F1 Manager – we are still fundamentally a racing game with management elements — but it has opened up a lot of sort of interesting depth. I think players who want that kind of experience can find it.
“We’ve tried to make it as approachable as possible. It’s a balancing act, balancing that extra depth with how easy it is for new players to get stuck into that. There’s a bunch of stuff that lets players do things like have the R&D system automated for them or auto-fill activities instead having to worrying about in-detail those kind of things.
“We want to try and hopefully get as many players able enjoy the experience as possible and live the dream of being the F1 team owner.”
The switch in roles and team hierarchy isn’t the only change though, with developments in how you can manage the team but also what you can do — and the effects thereof.
Your hub will be a new “Team HQ” which changes as your team evolves and grows, with — hopefully — more facilities and more staff as you invest and develop various aspects of the team. There’s three key areas for this, with each run by a facility head NPC: Engineering, Personnel, and Corporate.
That latter item is the necessary evil, governing financial strategy and brand identity. You might want to run certain color schemes to match your title sponsor, and sponsor relations is part of this section, as well as also being the hub for your financial planning. No catering overspends, please.
Personnel is the area that deals with your workforce, both in terms of staffing across the various areas of the team and the drivers themselves. You can expand and invest in your personnel to improve efficiencies — but beware of the cost cap — and meet with different drivers for contract talks.
As you’d expect, Engineering deals with the evolution of your car, with its duties now split into two. You can research new parts and develop them separately, and you’re able to manufacture them independently and apply them to one or both of your cars — which can affect your drivers’ disposition towards the team.
As for the drivers, you can hire for your team from the junior formulae, as well as “Driver Icons”, esports racers, and generated fictional drivers — although you can elect to not include some of these in order to preserve as much realism as you like. Notably the other teams on the grid can also recruit these drivers, so you might suddenly find yourself up against a team with Michael Schumacher in one of the cars…
All of this feeds into your team’s “Fan Rating”, which essentially governs how your outfit is rated among the current grid. You’ll also be able to change your ratings by completing various Accolades.
There’s also a “Sentiment” metric which comprises a historic and a current standing — a team such as Haas may have a positive recent image but little history to draw on, while Williams would be quite the other way around. This might affect who you can hire too, with some drivers preferring a team with more history and others going by current form.
There’s two more teams to consider too. You’ll be able to take your place on the grid as part of the Konnersport team from the Braking Point story mode — more on this in a later article — or, if you pick up the Iconic Edition of the game, the APXGP team that features in the upcoming F1 movie.
A good chunk of the above also applies to the Driver Career as well, only from the other side of the coin. You’ll still be able to race as yourself in the career — living out that fantasy as noted by Cooper — or take on the role of an existing driver as before, but with the added ability to do so with APXGP (where available) or Konnersport, or to simply have them as an 11th team on the grid as opponents.
Again, the “Driver Icons” might be hired by rival teams, and Codemasters again allows you to enable or disable some of these as players wish in order to allow for flexibility with regards to realism or any other personal preference.
We’ll have more from our hands-on with F1 25 over the coming weeks, along with more news on the various changes coming this year. F1 25 will launch on Friday May 30, on PC and ninth-gen consoles, with three days’ early access for players who pick up the Iconic Edition starting Tuesday May 27.
See more articles on F1 25.
