Two of my favourite racing games of all time were Papyrus's Nascar 2003 and EA Sports F1 series. While CM's F1 series is not (yet) in that class, I have been playing and enjoying it since F1 2010 was released.
The great thing about the older games (aside from the great replay system in both games!!) was the fact that they were tweakable. With a little knowledge, you could easily go in and make adjustments to improve the game experience. If the AI were ridiculously fast or slow
relative to the player on a track, I could fix it so that the game gave a great race every time. If I got better I would tweak the game again to put my main competitors
just out of reach. Heaven.
With 100,000 or more people playing a game its impossible for the settings to suit everyone. F1 2010 had some very odd relativities - I could put my Lotus near the pole in Canada and Italy but I was 3-4 seconds slower
per lap than the slowest AI in Spain. This was so bad (at least for me) that I stopped playing. I couldn't tweak it and I lost interest. Then I found a superb
AI Tool Kit on this site and I've never looked back. I've been able to tweak the game to give a fantastic race every time.
I am so grateful to the modders who made this tool. It made a so-so game into a wonderful game. I couldn't wait for F1 2011.
This is a plea to Codemasters to let us mod the game like this, track by track and preferably corner by corner.
Better still, build in this sort of tweakability (and a decent replay system - did I mention that before?) into the games. Not cheats but tweaks that enable the player to tailor the game to their own idiosyncratic strengths and weaknesses. Build it so that when racing AI-only you can do all the tweaking you like. When racing online against humans limit it to perhaps just the liveries and the like.
I don't want to cheat. Nor do I want to breach licencing agreements. I just want a great racing game where I can race against realistic and consistently competitive (for me) AI. If its not tweakable, if the code is locked away then that can't happen. I won't buy F1 2012 unless I know there's a way of tweaking it to my liking. There's no point.
No matter how well Codemasters program the game there will be tracks where the AI are absurdly brilliant and out of reach and others where I could lap Alonso in a Marussia. That's no fun.
So - a final plea to the Codemaster's legal team (they're the ones who sap the fun and creativity out of these things) -
please find a way to meet your licence obligations while allowing your customers (that's us, remember) to enjoy to the max the game we've bought.
