To drive the new F1 22 cars, first give yourself a break

Eventually, it just worked.

The engine has not changed. The torque through the rear axle has not changed. The clutch pedal, tighter than an eight-day clock, certainly hasn’t changed. I don’t feel like I’ve changed either. But in the spring of 1990, I finally figured out how to operate my mother’s manual transmission BMW 325e. I went from not being able to get the thing moving without stalling to cruising around Kiawah Island with my brother, no questions asked.

The same kind of experience awaits you in F1 22, even if – perhaps especially if – you’re a series veteran with thousands of miles on the track. New cars, as is the case in the real vehicles they imitate, have an inevitable learning curve, and AI drivers are much stronger, especially since they are not the ones learning about the pile. When I saw again F1 22 two weeks ago, I felt there was no getting around traction control assist for shifter users. My car spun at the slightest throttle using the same control and assist regime as last year’s game.

Well, there you have it, just like that spring in South Carolina, something finally clicked for me; i can run F1 22The sleek new models of on a gamepad with no traction control after all, which means I can run faster and increase the AI ​​difficulty by four or five points. Lee Mather, Creative Director of Codemasters, said I wasn’t the only one making these breakthroughs.

“What we see very often is that there is a placebo effect, when we apply a patch people think that we have changed things that we are far from,” Mather said. “We have already seen the comments of the patch that has been posted online [on July 7]about things we’ve never been close to.

In simpler terms, two weeks after F1 22, people are starting to get it and not giving themselves enough credit for getting it. Codemasters plans to rebalance the torque and throttle behavior of cars, but not until the next patch. And it doesn’t look like a huge overhaul either. “There were a few things that we had identified ourselves that we wanted to make some little tweaks to,” Mather said.

Drivers of the game’s ever-flabbing subreddit may be happy to hear this – or disappointed that the changes are minimal – but if Mather’s message is that Codemasters believes in the authenticity and playability of what he’s thrown around, then his fans should believe that they’re capable of playing him. They just need some acclimatization.

Players shouldn’t be afraid to activate aids such as traction control or braking, especially when learning to stand up. But they also need to pay attention to car behavior and be prepared to adjust their controller calibration, especially if they’re playing on a gamepad, like most F1 22 players do.

“People get into a weird mindset: ‘I shouldn’t use assists, I should be good enough to beat this’, but that’s not always the case,” Mather said. “The assists are there to make the match an enjoyable experience. You should never be afraid to use the tools that can give the gamer the experience they expect from the game. […] Don’t force yourself to try and learn to play a certain way when the tools are there to, in effect, make the game play the way you want it to.

Gamepad players should also consider tinkering with the throttle and brake linearity on their inputs, which can be found in the settings menu, under the Controls, Vibration, and Force Feedback tile in the Calibration selection. It might seem like you’re playing with stuff under the hood that could break the game, but that’s not the case. A lower linearity setting on throttle, brakes and steering gives you more granular control at the start of these movements. You also don’t need an advanced controller, like the Xbox Elite Series 2.

I drove with 40 throttle linearity last year; it fell to 23 this year. This may seem counter-intuitive, as higher throttle linearity makes the trigger less sensitive on its first pull than it is on the end. But I found it helped me pick up my acceleration and go smoother through full throttle.

If you had a forward controller and put in dead zones for throttle control on your initial throttle, remove them. You need that extra space to smoothly exit the corner.

“I think we ran a race earlier [last] week,” Mather said, “It was a created race where we had content creators from the F1 world competing against content creators from the FIFA world,” Mather said. “The final was actually a really good mix of players from FIFA and F1. I think it immediately showed that the handling changes are producing some really fantastic racing. Many content creators from around the F1 world have played on rigs complete with pedals and wheels, and some of the FIFA guys […] chose to play on a controller. And both were always brilliant; it was very competitive.

Apart from the handling and learning curve of the new cars, the other howls of protest from veteran F1 players in the game’s first week relate to the pace of the AI ​​drivers, particularly in relation to the created car players get. and build through the popular My Career as a team. Mather says the robot cars are indeed faster this year. Like always, F1 22The AI ​​of drives the raw pace (with AI increments of 1 representing a difference between 0.15 and 0.2 seconds in track time) as much as the aggressiveness and amount of space the drivers of bot leave to others.

So if you get mowed down on the long straights of Spain or Baku, for heaven’s sake turn the difficulty down. I raced at 97 AI in Spain in F1 22; I’m 84 this year. Mather said the faster-paced AI is there because “it gives us more of a ceiling for players who are these ‘aliens’ who run at a very high difficulty level.”

For a better understanding of the new AI and its raw pace, awesome Reddit user phail216 posted this indispensable matrixwhich shows the winning pole times, track by track, at each AI setting from 1 to 110. Basically run multiple laps in F1 22In Time Trial mode on a particular track, pick your fastest lap (or average, or median, whichever you think best represents your qualifying performance) and compare it to the chart. There’s your AI setting. It appears to be modeled after data from F1Laps.com, which is a community site with premium options – but most of its useful information, including setups and tracking AI calibration, is available for free.

New features in F1 22, which seem to be there for more casual fans attracted by the growing popularity of the sport, are still useful for advanced pilots. Supercars have taken a lot of the stick from longtime fans, for example, many of whom wish the series would instead bring back classic F1 vehicles from years past. But the slower, heavier road-legal cars, in a time trial lap, helped me get to grips with Miami, Portugal and Saudi Arabia, the three circuits I have the least traveled. Mather said the developers knew early on that Supercars — which are unlocked in gameplay, not as microtransactions — had a didactic use.

“I think that’s something we’ve always struggled with in Formula 1, is that you’re literally thrown into the fastest cars in the world, on very difficult circuits,” Mather said. He pulled out an example involving Milestone’s MotoGP racing sim that matched my experience perfectly: “I don’t play bike racing games very often, and when I do, I come to the corner at such speed that I tipped at the wrong point, and I’m leaving right away,” Mather said. “Whereas if I was able to learn it at a little slower pace, I would understand that.

“So if you first start driving a Supercar, you realize the braking distances are huge,” he continued, “so by the time you hit that track in a Formula 1 car, you brake maybe too soon – but it’s better than braking way too late The whole point of Supercars, aside from the challenges and other exciting things you do with them, is that they give players a excellent learning opportunity.

“What we’ve always wanted to impress on players is how much more advanced a Formula 1 car is than virtually any other form of motorsport,” Mather said. “When you put it against the really really fast road cars that we have in the game, when you see their differences, it really highlights what a Formula 1 car is capable of.”