As popular as big multiplayer games are, there’s nothing quite like the solo escapism and wish fulfilment of playing single-player, is there? And when it comes to sports games, that wish fulfilment comes in the form of stepping into the shoes of a professional athlete and rising to glory, whether it’s becoming the world number 1 tennis player, leading an underdog football team to win the Premier League, or bringing your favourite F1 team both kinds of championship glory. F1 24 is bringing a bunch of great new options to the career mode, which will add just a few more variable and fun twists in your quest to be the best.
The tagline for F1 24 is “Be one of the 20”, and that’s with good reason. Up until this point in Codemasters’ 15 years of games, you’ve always had to create a custom driver and join a team, or more recently, create your own team and manage it from top to bottom. Those are both still options in F1 24, but for the first time you’ll now be able to pick a real F1 or F2 driver and play as them. Sure, you could pick the boring option of being Max Verstappen (even if the game and various difficulty settings will make Red Bull’s rivals a bit more competitive), but there’s so many stories and narratives that you can lean in on. Do you want Sergio to keep his seat and pull off a wonder season next year? Help Lando get his first win? Hulkenberg his first podium? Or were you excited by Ollie Bearman’s debut drive and want to deliver on the promising potential career he has ahead of him?
It’s not just F1 or F2 drivers that you can pick, but the historical “icons” as well. So Mika Hakkinen can finally come out of his decades long sabbatical and show that he’s still got it.
Helping to really nestle you into the persona are two new elements. F1 has given Codemasters access to their back catalogue of team radio, with the audio team then delving in and picking out appropriate voice lines to play at key moments when playing as those drivers – Lando can give a jokey “Vamos!” when he gets an exciting finish, while I dearly hope (but could not get it confirmed) that Alonso’s “Yes! Bye bye!” will trigger after he pulls an overtake.
The other factor is that drivers will actually look like themselves, thanks to a huge improvement in eye and skin shaders, full hair rendering and more. Codemasters have done fresh captures of all the drivers to make them look so much more lifelike than the weird mannequins of the series to date – OK, so they’re bound to end up in the uncanny valley still, but this is a big step forward.
But whoever you play as, there’s some significant new features and changes to help spice up the career in the long run. Driver ratings are given more emphasis throughout the various career elements, feeding into rivalries and the contracts that you can go for. As you drive better and better, you’ll get a better weighting within the team that will influence their contract offers, targets and more. There’s new on-track targets are live goals set by your race engineer and run alongside the broader targets from your team of Specialists. In the moment, you could be tasked with cooling down your engine by getting out of the slip stream, manage a gap to a chasing car, do quick laps to aid in a strategy change, and you’re naturally rewarded for pulling them off.
The intent is really to make playing multiple seasons more interesting or rewarding through the addition of things like rivalries that can last multiple years and Accolades. These are short, medium and long term goals and driver specific. For a custom driver, it’ll be things like hitting targets in your first practice session, your first pole position, but Lewis Hamilton will obviously be fishing for that 8th championship.
The start of a season brings the option to apply an R&D scenario to the year ahead, which could range from putting your team into financial difficulty, give you increased funds, or some other kinds of modifier that challenges you both in management and gameplay – going in tandem with the new physics system.
Contracts aren’t just for a single season anymore, but can be multi-season deals that tie you to a team for an extended period. You can also indulge in a little bit of F1’s traditional “silly season” antics by taking secret meetings earlier in the year to agree terms with another team… but you’ll have to beware that your current team might find out and the impact that this has on your relationship with them. Tie that with missing targets, and you might have to renegotiate your terms, or your seat could possibly even disappear, leaving you with a search for another seat and tumbling down to the back of the grid.
In a great move, all of this applies to the 2-player driver career as well, which breaks you out from having to race on the same team as your buddy and one person having control over the R&D path. You can battle to control the R&D path within a team, contracts can take you to separate teams, and if you’re racing in the same part of the track a lot, can even lead to a heated rivalry with your buddy.
Of course, big and hefty career modes aren’t for everyone. Within F1 World and its topical seasonal content is the new Challenge Career. This brings curated playthroughs with combinations of tracks, drivers and R&D options for you to test yourself against. All F1 24 players will have access to the same career settings, with four difficulty levels, and be able to play test themselves against one another in a race for the leaderboard.
As always, there’s an iterative approach to how F1 24 improves over F1 23, but there’s a lot of nice touches sprinkled throughout the F1 24 career mode that should make a good bit of difference to those who love this solo mode.
