Braking Point is Back and Better Than Ever - F1 25 Interview with Codemasters

Audio transcription

"Hello everyone and welcome back to Gamereactor.
Today we have a very special interview for you, because I'm here with Senior Creative Director Lee Mather and Creative Director Gavin Cooper to talk all about the upcoming next chapter of the F1 series from Codemasters."

"So first of all, guys, how are we all?
Are you all excited about the upcoming release?
I must be getting to crunch time over at the office now.
Very exciting. Yeah, definitely."

"As in every year, this is probably, for me, one of the most exciting points of the year, because we finally get the chance for people to see what the team have been working on."

"And it's always hard to keep it under wraps when you want to share the excitement of what's been going on.
Fantastic. Well, let's get into it then.
So let's talk to start with the cover stars for the game."

"Obviously, the big one is having Lewis Hamilton front and centre as part of the iconic edition.
But you guys have gone, I would say, a little bit unorthodox with the base standard edition by choosing Carlos Sainz, Oscar Piastri and Oliver Behrmann."

"What's the sort of process that you guys go through when you choose cover stars?
And is it perhaps a little bit of a gutsy choice to not represent Red Bull or Mercedes or some of these other sort of big teams?
I think we like to give everybody a fair shot."

"You know, as you'll see over the years, we've alternated who we have on the cover.
Also, there's always a bit of internal discussion around who people's favourites are as well."

"You know, one of the guys on the brand team's Australian, so he obviously wants to see, you know, Piastri on there.
Obviously, we're all Brits and Behrmann's fantastic at the moment, and it's great to see that young blood coming into the sport."

"And then Sainz, that's a big change moving to Williams.
Williams are on a bit of an uptick at the moment.
I think there's a story behind each of the drivers and I think story's a big portion of, you know, F125."

"So, you know, that's how we really relate those choices.
But of course, there is some sort of internal personal opinions as well as to who people support and like the most.
So when you're making an F1 game, how closely do you work with the F1 teams?
What's the sort of process that comes into accurately and authentically representing the driving feeling of an F1 car?
For example, have you even been in an F1 car at some point?
Not necessarily driven one, but sat in the cockpit?
I've driven one of the team's simulators, which is the closest I've ever gotten."

"And to be fair, not many people get the opportunity to do that, so that was pretty special.
And I have been in a two-seater Formula Renault three-and-a-half litre car, which is also as close to F1 as somebody like me would probably get."

"But yeah, with the teams, we're really lucky that even though we do the sim racing with the teams, we can actually split that out as well, so we can get the results from their sim racing teams who can give us feedback."

"But then during the sim racing tournaments, we can then go to their engineers.
And several of the teams have got engineers who are really big into sim racing and also have worked on other sim titles in the past, so their feedback's fantastic."

"They've got a knowledge that's relevant to gaming as much as it is bringing knowledge from the sport that we don't have access to.
And occasionally, we do get the opportunity to get the drivers in the seats as well."

"And if that timing aligns, we can get their feedback.
So when we've recorded things like previous pro challenges and things like that, they give us feedback on what they think of the previous game so that we can apply that to future learnings."

"It must be quite an unusual experience developing a racing game in the current climate, because obviously it's very different to how it would have been 10 years ago."

"There's a lot of sim racing gear out there, a lot of wheels, lots of pedals, and lots of different ways to experience a racing game.
But at the same time, you have to cater to that core audience that want to play with a controller."

"So what's it like designing a game that feels good to play both with a wheel setup but also with a controller?
And what's some of the pitfalls that you have to avoid when trying to balance an experience for both sort of audiences?
Yeah, sorry, Gav, I'll grab this one as well, shall I?
Go for it."

"Yeah, so we've always taken a very similar approach, which is build the car authentically from the data so that we've got a Formula One car to start with as the base.
That plays fantastically on a wheel."

"Then we bring in technology that allows us to support controller effectively.
I think you'll see a couple of years ago we brought in the precision drive technology, for example, which we've continued to refine."

"That has, again, been refined this year to work with the car model as it is this year.
We've continued to build on the assists by bringing in a level of stability control to the full traction control."

"So I think scalability has always been the key.
You start with authenticity and then you scale from there to suit the style of play that a player's expecting.
Some of the big changes that are planned in F125 include making adjustments to the My Team mode."

"You're doing a few different things to sort of spice it up and further differentiate it between the career mode.
With that being the case, with an annual title like the Formula One series, I can imagine if it can be a little bit of a challenge to make these changes and make these adjustments on an annual basis and to keep it feeling fresh."

"So how do you go about making these modes, these modes that people will recognise and be familiar with, how do you go about making them feel fresh each year and continuously updated and constantly surprising the audience and the fans?
I think a big part of it is obviously we follow a lot of community sentiment."

"What are the players saying about the game?
What are they looking for?
That helps drive a lot of our internal discussions about how we can evolve these modes over time."

"I think the difficulty always comes from balancing across the game as a whole, balancing players' expectations of the established modes like career versus offering new experiences every year as well."

"That's always kind of tricky.
But when it works, I'm breaking point, for example, at one point was just a fledgling idea that gave us the opportunity to explore something new and that one really landed."

"It's coming back for another chapter this year.
So trying to balance those two things, trying to make sure that we still have the ability when we really want to go deep on a big improvement like we have this year with my team, making sure that we have the scope to do that while still making sure that we're hitting all the notes that we know the players have enjoyed in the past and are looking for in future updates."

"It's referred to as My Team 2.0, so can we expect something similar like a Career 2.0 at some point, or maybe some of these changes you've made to My Team, can we expect them to creep into Career down the line?
From our point of view, the goal with My Team is to very much differentiate the fantasy of being the driver from the fantasy of being a team owner."

"So a lot of the stuff that we've invested in in My Team 2.0, some of it may not be relevant to pull back into Driver Career in the future.
But that said, we have adapted some of the stuff from Driver Career last year into My Team."

"We brought over the Accolade system, we've adapted the Rivalry system from last year's Driver Career update, so we have now team versus team rivalries."

"So we're certainly open to pulling some of that stuff back into Driver Career in the future, if that kind of makes sense, and if there's the opportunity to do so."

"So we'll get to the breaking point three in a moment, but one of the big things about F125, with it being an odd instalment, is that it is bringing a new breaking point chapter."

"Have you thought about a way to potentially balance out the series a bit so that you have the big breaking point series on the odd games, and then you have something to maybe fill the gap on the even ones?
Have you thought about anything to potentially balance the load a little bit between the F1 games?
It's not something that we want to pursue at this point."

"I think we're quite happy with the two-year cycle.
There's a lot of benefits to it.
The way we work behind the scenes is so much effort goes into doing a breaking point."

"We started this chapter of Breaking Point literally straight after Chapter 2 shipped in 2023, and so having a narrative that potentially overlaps our work on a main chapter, as you'd call it, has the potential to limit the kind of stories that we can do because we need to know where a story is going in order to be able to line things up nicely from one product to the next."

"But also as well, I think one of the nice things about the structure that we have is it means that within a chapter of Breaking Point, we can actually explore a couple of seasons' worth of content."

"We can tell a story over a longer period of time in the characters' lives, and that's something that's worked out quite nicely for us as well.
I think we're quite happy with it at the moment, but going forwards, there's lots of things that we'd like to pursue with narrative."

"What stories can we tell in the future?
How can we tell them?
That's definitely something I think we'll continue to sort of look to evolve over time."

"So who knows?
We'll see what happens off the back of this one.
I'd probably add as well that the Formula 1 fan base is definitely changing significantly as well."

"You'll see the direction that the game has gone in recent years has shifted a little more as well with things like Breaking Point.
So there's certainly a lot of learning to be taken as well from what's going on in the sport and what the Formula 1 fans are doing at the moment."

"Talking about Breaking Point as well, the key thing about Breaking Point 3 is that we're now sort of fighting for a championship.
We're at sort of almost the pinnacle of the sport and really gunning for the trophies that really the top teams are battling it out for."

"By focusing on this sort of side of the story, by putting the Conor Sport team at the pinnacle of the sport, does that potentially limit you a little bit in where you can go in the future of Breaking Point?
Have we already figured out a way to potentially offset that down the line?
No, I don't think it limits us."

"We know from kind of like the real sport, just because you make it to the top doesn't mean you get to stay there.
So I think it comes down, Breaking Point fundamentally I think rests on the stories of these characters."

"So it really comes down to what stories can we tell with them?
And I think that's more about just whether or not they win the championship."

"That can certainly be a really important part of the backdrop, a really important narrative thread.
But the characters are more than just that.
So yeah, as I said, still to be decided, where we take our narrative offerings in the future."

"But if we can continue to sort of tell good stories with Conor Sport and the characters that we've created and sort of invested time in, then we'd certainly be open to doing that and taking that further."

"But as I say, we'll see.
Let's talk then a little bit back again about the technology behind the game.
So this is the first Formula One game that you guys have dropped last-gen support with."

"It's only launching on the current-gen stuff, which is PC, PS5, Xbox Series X and S consoles.
With that being the case, what does dropping those last-gen systems allow you to do and improve on in this year's game that you wouldn't have been able to do prior?
Yeah, so the obvious changes this year you'll see will come from the visuals."

"You'll certainly see that the game does look fantastic.
It's really an opportunity as well, though, to set a new baseline for where we go in the future.
So the amount of time that we spend balancing the game across a real wide level of performance and platforms does take a huge amount of time and resource."

"So now we've been able to focus on really refining the experience the player gets now, so frame rates, visual fidelity, the amount of detail that we have in the image."

"That's really important.
You'll certainly see in the tracks that have been refreshed, the level of detail that we have in those tracks is accentuated by the quality of the render."

"But also, as I said, it sets us up for the long term for the future.
There's things now that we can start to consider developing the AI further because we have the capacity to give them more knowledge of what's going on in the world around them."

"So it really is the chance to improve the way the game looks to give the players that authentic Formula 1 experience, but also to set us up for where we go in the long term."

"And one of those new installments or those new additions is the LiDAR scan tracks that basically give you a really authentic representation of the real racetrack.
There's going to be five of those tracks at launch for F1 25, but you guys now have the data, should we say, for all the other tracks on the F1 calendar."

"So have you thought about how these are going to be introduced to the F1 series?
Are you going to be saving them for F1 26 or will they be progressively added to F1 25 as post-launch support?
So at the moment, we're going to wait and see how things land with 25."

"So we've obviously got the reverse tracks and the LiDAR tracks.
We think LiDAR tracks obviously play a massive part in the authenticity for both players who expect to see a track ribbon that's 100% accurate and the players who want to see the barrier placement being correct, the tree placement and all that."

"So from that perspective, we will see how that lands.
We'll see how the reverse tracks go.
I think they're going to be very well received.
And then we'll sort of balance the resource going forward as to where we think we can give our players what they really want the most out of the game."

"So no fixed plans on how we introduce them in the future, but this is the first year that we'll be able to introduce so many LiDAR circuits into the game and at the level of fidelity that we've got, I think they're going to be very well received."

"And speaking about those reverse tracks as well, is there any particular one of the reverse tracks that you guys are adding that you think is going to really surprise fans and really shock them when they get to experience it for themselves?
I think we've said, haven't we, Gab, that probably the big surprise for me was Zandvoort and there's some really tricky corners on Zandvoort where the tightness of the radius sort of generally increases as you go through the corner, which is always very challenging."

"And then when you do it in reverse, it's the absolute polar opposite and the corner opens beautifully and you're on the throttle early and you get great drive out of it.
Also, some of the exciting cambers and undulations on the circuit, it makes it feel completely different when you're driving it in reverse."

"So I think Zandvoort was fantastic.
Silverstone's also really cool as well, because it's a track that I know so intricately and all of a sudden it's alien to me and that was something that I wasn't expecting."

"I was trying to picture the track in reverse and then picture it the way that I could drive it in reverse and it just doesn't work that way.
You need to sort of start with a clean slate."

"Yeah, I think what's surprising more than anything else across all of them is really just the gulf between what people imagine in their heads when they go, oh, OK, reverse track, I get what that is."

"And then just the reality of actually getting behind the wheel and actually experiencing that big difference between what it actually feels like when they get to play it.
That's the thing that I think has caught a few people by surprise."

"And one of the other major additions that's going to be in this year's game is obviously the incorporation of the Apex GP team from the F1 movie.
The Formula One cars that you use in-game, they are designed to be a somewhat reflection in performance of how, or at least they can be a design, a reflection of the performance of the real alternative model."

"So with that being the case, with the Apex GP team, where do we expect them to be competing on the Formula One ladder?
How have you designed these cars and sort of balanced them to slot into the grid?
So in the film, I think it's fair to say that the Apex GP is towards the back end of the grid."

"That'll be reflected in the post-launch chapters that we're delivering for owners of the Iconic Edition.
These are sort of scenarios that are going to sort of recreate some of the exciting track-based narrative from the actual film itself."

"Outside of that, when you use Apex GP as a team icon in sort of driver career of my team, certainly in my team, to a certain extent, you've got a degree of control over that when you play my team with any team, whether it's one of the team icons or your own custom team, you have a certain amount of control over how you start that my team save in terms of how much you want, how much starting investment you want in things like your facilities and car development."

"So if you want to just play a short career over a season or two and have them battling at the front right from the start, you can do that with Apex GP just as you would your own custom team."

"So while we can't expect Apex GP to win any Grand Prixs, and this is going to be my final question as well, guys, who do you think will actually win the Formula One World Championship this year?
Who are you currently looking at and going, these are the ones I think are going to do it this year?
I mean, this isn't the first time we've asked this one."

"I think we've both got our eye on Oscar Piastri at the minute, right, Lee?
It does feel that way, yeah.
When I was last asked, we were in a slightly different position.
We've now sort of seen a little bit more of how the things are playing out."

"And I started the season hoping Lewis would be right at the front.
I'm not writing them off.
Ferrari have got the resource.
Lewis has got the talent."

"Charles has got the talent because I'm a Lewis fan.
But Oscar at the moment, he just feels like a complete package so early in his career.
I think he's just coming across fantastic on track and away from the track."

"And I think he's a real talent.
Obviously, Behrman's great.
It's just so ace to see another British driver on the grid.
But, yeah, I think it's probably Oscar for me at the moment."

"But I've got to admit, I think Mercedes are looking like the dark horse at the moment.
I think if they just keep putting in those performances, if they're there and thereabouts every race."

"We've seen this before, that you can take a world championship without taking lots of wins.
You've just got to be consistent.
And that Merc's performing way better than I think I was expecting."

"So I think we're just in for a fantastic season.
I was saying to my partner the other day, just watching the race, when was the last time we saw four different manufacturers in the first four positions and so many across the rest of the field?
It was just across the top 10."

"I think we're in for an amazing season.
Well, you heard it here first.
F126 Champions Edition with Oscar Piastri as your cover star.
Stay tuned for that."

"And otherwise, yeah, this has been the F125 interview.
Lee, Gav, you've been absolutely fantastic.
And, yeah, thanks for joining me on today's interview.
Thank you very much."

"Thank you."