GamerZines: Race engineers certainly are pivotal in modern F1 and we really liked the involvement of the Rob Smedley sound-alike last year, but he’s not in this one. What happened?
Steve Hood, chief game designer for F1 2011: Well, we got rid of him. Not because he wasn’t very good, he’s a brilliant voice-actor, but he almost got tarnished by us not making a good race engineer last time. We gave him the script and we wrote the logic for it, so he had to suffer for that. We’ve written him into the newspaper clippings to see what happens, and whether he comes back in the future.
You have a new race engineer this year and we’ve gone for a bit of a different style with it. We’ve got a completely new script and new logic, so now it’s about feeding information to you that you wouldn’t usually grasp, for example what is the race pace? What kind of lap time do I need to be doing to order to match the guy in front? Etc. It’s cool stuff, because if you’re out on your own and for whatever reason you’re doing a long stint on the prime tyres and you’re chugging around, it isn’t meant to be a no-man’s land. You shouldn’t be wondering whether you should go faster or slower? This guy can feed you this information by saying, “We’re running two-seconds off the pace, you need to up the pace or we’re in danger” or “A guy is gaining on you a second a lap.” You don’t have to be reading the OSD all the time, we’re having an overhaul on that, but it’s about using the engineer a lot better this year.
GZ: On Codemasters’ F1 2011 forums, you’ve really been selling the idea of fuel mixtures and different engine modes. Obviously that was in last year’s game albeit in a diminished format, has that aspect been expanded upon?
SH: A big thing in Formula One which sounds massively geeky and it’s very hard to sell to marketing is fuel conservation. As soon as I say that internally, they say, “Really? That sounds shit!” But it isn’t really because that’s what F1 is built around, commentators always go on about how much fuel equates to how many laps. That’s always drilled into the audience, and that’s something we can make something out of in the game as a gameplay element. You could over fuel the car or under fuel it – races aren’t about driving flat-out all the time. That’s what Forza or Gran Turismo are built around – 3-4 lap sprints – which is great, but that’s what we do in qualifying.
The race is about conservation at times which sounds anti-gameplay, but it means you have a different story from those other racing games. So you might have the quickest car or be the quickest driver and you’ll get me in qualifying, but I could do a ‘Jenson Button’; save my fuel, look after my tyres and go out on primes first of all and do a really long stint. I’ll get you in the end because you’re having to conserve fuel, and my race engineer told me that. I could dial my engine up and get the power down to get past you. That creates this complex and interesting story for gamers, other than who is the absolutele quickest on the track.
GZ: It is about the storylines at the end of the day, that’s what BBC’s F1 coverage has been built around, but it’s just a shame there isn’t a better way to make gamers aware of those other stories unfolding on-track…
SH: Well that’s what the race engineer is about, that’s why he is more intelligent this year. We’re putting mechanical failures in this year, instead of them being random – which we could have easily done in five minutes last year. We took the pain of not having them in 2010, so that in 2011 if you’re down shifting too early or hitting the rev limiter, you might develop a fault with the car then your race engineer in the closing stages will say, “We hear driver X has a fault with his car, if you do this kind of pace you’ll get him.” That’s cool because it means that the race isn’t over until you’ve crossed the line.
Certainly in the real world of F1 last year, if you got to the first corner before everyone else the race was yours, but now it isn’t about that. If you’re pushed down the grid early on, you can shift your strategy and play the long game. It’s quite difficult for a player to dial things back, because invariably you want to go as fast as you can all the time, but people will realise that you can take a slower pace at the start and speed up at the end and it’ll make all the difference.
GZ: It must be such a strange player feedback hurdle to jump over because you need to not only make the player aware that they are going much slower than they used to be, but that fact is okay at that particular moment in a race…
SH: For a race engineer to tell the player they are going too fast will feel alien to almost every racing gamer out there, but that’s what they get in real life as well! Even at this year’s European Grand Prix, McLaren was telling Hamilton to slow down and he said, “I’m driving as slow as I can!” Well you’re not really are you, you could slow down, but that is weird for a racer and sometimes you dip below that threshold and you’re driving too slow. You’re losing your concentration and it’s all about maintaining that rhythm and concentration.
GZ: The Senna documentary revived a lot of beloved feelings regarding F1′s past among all those that watched it, is that something you guys felt and do you see the potential of doing a racing game set during previous racing decades?
SH: It’s difficult, because we always talk about the licensing thing. The further you go back the greater the likelihood is that the license holder isn’t one person, but multiple persons or businesses. You can’t do Tobacco advertising, or this and that. Senna’s sister holds the rights to him, so you need to negotiate with all these people, it’s a nightmare. It’s bad enough just getting a normal season out, you wouldn’t believe the pain we go through to get that working!
When you talk about historical stuff, we really want it! I want to be able to race the ’92 Monaco race, with Senna versus Mansell as a particular scenario – it would be awesome! I think it’s more likely for the first instance to get individual cars and build scenarios around them, rather than building the entire field in a season. I don’t think it would be a standalone game because the further away you get, the less likely you are to have a market for that. However I do think it’s a cool thing to include and if it was built on top of the game as DLC, I honestly think Codemasters could make money out of it and gamers would appreciate it.
GZ: We are seeing historical racing come back, SHIFT 2: Unleashed had a historic racing pack with old circuit layouts and things of that ilk. It just would be nice if developers could build an entire game around it…
SH: I agree and we’re pressing to do DLC. We have those discussions, we’ve been having them since ’10. If Codemasters keep those licenses rolling and the Concorde agreement gets renewed in 2013, I think we’ll definitely hit that mark.
GZ: Are there any plans to port progress over between different iterations of the F1 games? We’re about four seasons into an eight season campaign with Lotus and we’d love to be able to carry it over…
SH: Yes, but without giving too much away, my ultimate aim is to carry your save across, so you could opt to comeback as a rookie, or ‘do a Schumacher’ and return to the sport. We were going to build it around that and I don’t know whether it’ll be in this generation of machines or maybe ’13/’14. I want to take that history and have the whole fanfare of, if you choose to, returning to the sport.
GZ: Codemasters Birmingham has already shown they can build a great game around a license and the British Touring Car Championship has risen sharply in popularity over the past few years. Would you ever fancy making a new game in the TOCA series?
SH: It often comes up internally. There’s the Racing Studio team who have rolled onto another project now after doing DiRT. Obviously in Birmingham we’re doing the F1 title and we’re ramping up to do another title which hasn’t been announced yet and that’ll be mentioned at some point. I personally would love to do touring cars again at some point, because I used to love TOCA – it was amazing! I’d love to go back and pick that up for Codemasters and do it again, but I don’t know. I need you guys to bang on about it!
GZ: We try to! I know you guys are really busy with F1 but…
SH: I’d love to do it, but it’s up to the people who have the time and money.
Many thanks to Steve Hood for taking the time to answer our questions and we’ll have plenty more on F1 2011 before it’s released for PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and PC on September 23rd.
Tags: F1 2011
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