The biggest complaint with annual releases is that each iteration fails to provide enough changes/new features to make it worth while. Some players even suggest that the developers in question fail to come up with new ideas and that certain franchises (Madden, I’m looking at you) should take a break until they come up with a way to rejuvenate themselves.
According to Codemasters, however, that’s not the case with their F1 series. Speaking to F1 2012 game director Paul Jeal, he claims that the team have enough ideas for the next 20 games in the series.
The problem, as far as F1 is concerned, is not coming up with new ideas, it’s with deciding which to include.
“We have a lot of features that we’d like to put in,” Jeal told us, “but we have to narrow it down each year. People always say ‘F1 2010 had this and this, how are you going to move that along for F1 2011 and F1 2012? It’s difficult to determine which ideas make the cut, but it’s not for a lack of ideas from our side; we’ve got enough for the next 20 games.
“This time around we really concentrated on the players and, for example, why some of them bought F1 2010 but didn’t but F1 2011. A lot of F1 2012 is made up of ideas that we already had on the board, but we pulled them in from different categories based on that player research.”
Our full interview with Paul Jeal will be published at the back end of this week.
