So let me start out be saying that I have played Codemasters F1 2010 and F1 2011 along with the PS3 F1 Championship and all of the EA Sports F1 games from the late 90's and early 00's. So when I say that F1 2012 is the worst one out of any F1 game I've ever played, I've made clear that it's not the only one.
This game is so riddled with stupid bugs and is missing several major features that completely take away from the F1 experience it's supposed to be. Codemasters touts the game as the most realistic F1 game ever made, with excellent AI, fantastic physics and beautiful graphics. They couldn't be further from the truth and I feel as if they've stolen $50 from me. If I could get my money back, I'd ask for it.
Now, I'm not going to rant about how bad the game is, without listing my reasons and comments to CodeMasters responses to the issues. So let’s start off.
- Missing Free Practice 1 and 2.
CodeMasters made the comment that "No one ever used FP1 and FP2 so we removed it.". It's already a feature of the game, why go through the hassle of removing something that makes the game more like the real thing? It's not like you threw away F1 2011 and started from scratch. The feature existed already and there were no rule changes during the offseason requiring you to add additional content. So you're argument that it takes a lot of work to add it sounds really stupid, it was already there. I've programmed for 18 years and even done some game development during that time. It's more work to remove a feature completely than it is to tweak it a bit, re-skin it and ship.
A friend of mine and I used all three practice sessions every time we ran a Coop championship. I used it in every one of my career seasons (I ran a full career 4x and 6 Grand Prix seasons and have logged over 300 hours in F1 2011 according to Steam). F1 is supposedly a great sim style game for the enthusiasts and arcade options for casualists.
Removal of both of those features completely ruined the experience for me. With tire degradation and fuel consumption enabled you can't come up with a solid car setup in 1 practice session when starting out on the new game. It's stupid. By the time I run my tires enough to get worn and try out some worn setups, the session is half over and I don't even have a solid setup yet to compare fresh tires against clean tires. I have "a setup" but not a completed one. - Parc Ferme Rules
I absolutely love this feature, but it has a horrible bug. You disable the save feature of the game when in Parc Ferme! After spending the entire ONE practice session trying to get a decent setup and then you forget to save your setup, you are pretty much out of luck. I understand not being allowed to load a setup, as you could switch car setups that way illegally, but why disable saving?? Again, it's stupid. - Where is the damage?
I have the damage turned on to realistic and hit a wall at 160mph (any angle) and I loose a small piece of my front wing or at worst the entire wing. No suspension damage and I've only had one tire go down (which took me purposely trying to get it to deflate). This is supposedly realistic? If you are aiming for casual racers, that's what a "light" option would be for. When I enable realistic, I expect suspension failure when I slam into a wall, or crash into 4 different cars without braking into a chicane. The damage sensitivity for 2012 is half that of 2011. It seems like you guys keep taking the game backwards instead of forwards. - Steam Voice Chat
I'm in favor of the new way the game is managed via Steam instead of Games For Windows Live, however F1 2012's implementation of Steam Voice Chat is horrible. The Steam "Push To Talk" doesn't work and I can't output the voice to a headset. You even try playing multiplayer before you released this game? You can't hear the other person talking through your game speakers because the engine is to loud! I suppose I could turn the in-game volume down. Err, wrong. You only allow users to decrease the volume to 50%, really? Stupid. - Retire from race missing
Now the game has some really good mechanical(non-collision mechanical) failure features, but what happens when I'm running near the back of the pack (or the front for that matter) and I decide I want to retire from the race to conserve my engine? Whoops, guess I can't do that because you guys removed that too. Why in the world would you remove the ability to retire from a race when in career mode? I haven't tried in the other modes, but this is stupid. You force people into completing the race or leaving the game which is absolutely horrible. Just like the other features I've mentioned, it was existing and you removed it. - Tire Scaling
Ok, so Code Masters thinks that players would be lost in the fact that a 10% race has a different amount of wear than a 50% race. That's the whole point of scaling. That's the design point of it. It sounds more like you guys were tired of the fact that 2011 was glitching every time you tried to make a change, that you just removed it. You understand how you have skewed proper racing online when some people run option tires for every lap but the last in a 25% race because there's no scaling? How is that realistic.
They also make the comment that "We can't keep adding to the pot" and yet that's what you have done here. You already had tire scaling working (albiet bugged) in '11, but then you remove it and build a whole new tire wear modal for the game. Once again, why would you remove an existing feature that does exactly what it's expected to do? You added the new tire wear method, so instead of spending the extra time removing the old one, why not leave it as a "Tire Wear Scaled" and add a new option for the new tire wear modal such as "Tire wear non-scaled"?
Code Masters makes the comment that they can't keep throwing things in the pot because it doesn't fix things, which is correct. However you didn't even follow your own philosophy. Instead you removed content from the game and rebuilt entirely new things to replace it. You added to the pot!
On top of that, you removed these major items without warning people of it before you shipped. You hid these from us and the only reason I can think of is because you didn't want to hurt sales. I pre-ordered the game and ended up just playing 2011 instead.
The last thing I want to mention, is that typically I don't post my complaints to forums because I have expectations that the bugs would be fixed by the company. However, after the way Code Masters handled F1 2011, releasing bug fixes only to introduce new ones and then drop support all together (leaving the game in a seriously gimped state for some) has me wondering if any of the bugs and issues will be resolved with this version.
I tried to make my post polite and mature. I would like to know if anyone else agrees with my points or if I'm the only person to feel this way. It's really frustrating for someone who loves to play it with as realistic a setup as I can get. I didn't dump $600 into a racing wheel and stand setup to play a arcade game. Code Masters themselves even demonstrate the game with complete racing wheel system setups on the weekends during the F1 races on BBC. It's emphasis on realism is pushed hard. Yet they don't provide a realistic product.
Johnathon.
