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This thread has been linked to the game 'F1 Online: The Game'.
With the closed beta part over and open beta beginning soon (no specific date has been announced at time of writing), the NDA (Non Disclosure Agreement) is up and I can now talk about the experience I had with F1 Online: The Game.
F1 Online is the browser based online game being made by Codemasters. I was invited to the closed beta in what I think was the 2nd week of invites. I had only seen a couple of screenshots of what the game was about and from what I saw, I expected something along the lines of Grand Prix Manager, a past F1 management game.
Immediately, I was surprised as the first thing I saw was a tutorial about how to drive the Red Bull car around the Abu Dhabi circuit. The steering is controlled by the mouse and you can use the mouse buttons for accelerate and brake or you can use the keyboard. The keyboard also has keys for the DRS and KERS.
Once the tutorial portion of the game is done, you are set free into the game. I'll start with the official F1 section of the game. In this section, you get to pick 1 of the 12 F1 teams from the 2011 season. Unless you spend Codemasters points (the real money based transaction part of the game), only 3 of the 12 teams are playable for a certain amount of time and then rotate to another 3, so you can play as all 12 teams but you have to wait as they cycle through.
All the 12 teams have objectives to complete. They are pretty similar for all teams but vary in difficulty depending on how good the team is. For instance, Red Bull would require wins, fastest laps and beating McLaren and Ferrari while HRT will want top 10s and beating Lotus (now Caterham) and Marussia. Completing the objectives gives you money in the other part of the game and completing all the objectives for the team gives you a cash injection and a mystery prize.
So, you select your team and you can also choose driver if you so wish and you get put in a race lobby. Ultimately, the goal is to have 24 car grids but I never got a race with more than 12 people in this mode as they were having some issues with too many spreading the players out. The reason is you can only have 2 of each car in the field so if everyone is picking the same teams then the lobbies keep getting created. They did improve it during the beta but there were still problems.
The most disappointing part is the fact that each race is only 3 laps. Maybe it is something that will change at some point or an option that you will be able to change but it is fine for a quick blast. With 3 lap races, it means that there are no pit stops, which is also a bit of a downer, especially as longer races could incorporate tyre wear and fuel if they wanted to go down that route.
The race you get thrown into is a random track from the F1 calendar. I didn't spend a great deal of time with this mode so I didn't see all the tracks. I found that my knowledge of F1 and F1 tracks gave me an edge as I was only off the podium once in 10 races and that was in a Lotus/Caterham when I finished 4th.
I spent most of my time with the other mode, which is where you create your own team. It guides you from the start about how things work. You choose your team name, you choose from a limited number of colour schemes, liveries and helmet colours. There are only a few options available but there are more available if you want to spend in game money or Codemasters Points.
Predictably, you start with the very basic car. There are multiple car classes and the races you enter will only feature cars of that class. The starting class is U and goes to C all the way to S. I only reached B class by the time beta closed but I wasn't too far away from A.
Certain parts of the car are only available to you when you move up a class. You start with just the front and rear wings and the engine at the start but when you get to B class, you can add brake, suspension and chassis parts and then A class allows you to build gearbox, cooling and KERS parts. At B class, parts can be upgraded to a Mark 2 for better performance.
You are fairly free to go in any direction you want but I worked out very quickly that what you will need a lot of is money. Anything you can do to get money is crucial to quick progression. Handily, the path is laid out for you in the objectives system they have. If you pass these objectives, you will be given an XP reward, which you need to get to higher levels and better equipment and sometimes a money reward. Focusing on the money rewards was my aim and it worked quite well.
So, you start out with just a car and a small team. To earn more money, you need to go racing. There is a quick race mode, where you will spend most of your time. There are 15 custom tracks to race around, although you will see a limited amount early on but if you want to, there is a time trial mode to get used to tracks and test parts. The race lobbies fill up pretty well and I was in races of 16+ most of the time. You are given a race target at the start of the race, achieve it and you get a cash and XP boost. The race target is supposed to be based on car and driver performance but I found myself a number of times with a tough race target with a car completely outgunned. There is also a Championship mode which features a multi-race Championship with 1 race a day and big XP and money payouts for your final placing. If you don't win it first time out, you can enter again but the payout scales to where you finished last time so you can only earn a certain amount from each Championship.
So, what do you do with the money? Once you are at C class level, things open up. To get new parts, you need to make blueprints. This costs money, time and uses people that you have working for you. While the work is being done, the people will be occupied and can't be used until they are finished. To get more people, you need to build up your factory.
Your factory consists of 4 parts, Research, Production, Commercial and Race Team. There are multiple buildings for each section and more become available as you level up. Also, as you level up, you get development points which can get you perks. These perks help you along but reducing costs, use of people and time on certain parts, permanent boosts to XP and race winnings and a permanent increase to the amount of people you have. Working out how best to use these points is fairly important.
Of course, you could spend some real money to help you out. The shop option. It is where you can unlock all the F1 teams for use immediately in the F1 mode or you can boosts and extras. We were given some points to make sure everything was working fine. I just wanted money and there was some options for just getting a lot of money straight away. You also get XP or money boosts for a certain period of time or you could get extra workers or speed up production for a certain amount of time.
There is an achievement system too to see how you are getting on. Most of them are based on your team but there are a few F1 achievements like winning Monaco 6 times or driving over 300 races. There is no reward for these so it isn't really something that most people will bother even looking at I think.
One major drawback which led to a fair amount of debate was shunting. It was all too easy for people not to brake into a heavy braking zone and screw a lot of peoples races up, especially as a 3 lap race is not enough to make a recovery. Cutting corners will result in a reset and shunting can lead to that happening to you. There are also a few complaints about handling early on but that improves when you get better parts. Also, the camera placement on some tracks means that some environmental things can obscure the track. There is a friend system somewhere but there didn't seem to be any way to communicate with anyone in the game at this time.
Overall, I'm cautiously optimistic. There are things that need work and it will require time to get a certain amount of satisfaction out of it. It is probably as close to an F1 management game as we are probably going to get so there is that. Open beta will be available to you all soon if you are interested.
F1 Online is the browser based online game being made by Codemasters. I was invited to the closed beta in what I think was the 2nd week of invites. I had only seen a couple of screenshots of what the game was about and from what I saw, I expected something along the lines of Grand Prix Manager, a past F1 management game.
Immediately, I was surprised as the first thing I saw was a tutorial about how to drive the Red Bull car around the Abu Dhabi circuit. The steering is controlled by the mouse and you can use the mouse buttons for accelerate and brake or you can use the keyboard. The keyboard also has keys for the DRS and KERS.
Once the tutorial portion of the game is done, you are set free into the game. I'll start with the official F1 section of the game. In this section, you get to pick 1 of the 12 F1 teams from the 2011 season. Unless you spend Codemasters points (the real money based transaction part of the game), only 3 of the 12 teams are playable for a certain amount of time and then rotate to another 3, so you can play as all 12 teams but you have to wait as they cycle through.
All the 12 teams have objectives to complete. They are pretty similar for all teams but vary in difficulty depending on how good the team is. For instance, Red Bull would require wins, fastest laps and beating McLaren and Ferrari while HRT will want top 10s and beating Lotus (now Caterham) and Marussia. Completing the objectives gives you money in the other part of the game and completing all the objectives for the team gives you a cash injection and a mystery prize.
So, you select your team and you can also choose driver if you so wish and you get put in a race lobby. Ultimately, the goal is to have 24 car grids but I never got a race with more than 12 people in this mode as they were having some issues with too many spreading the players out. The reason is you can only have 2 of each car in the field so if everyone is picking the same teams then the lobbies keep getting created. They did improve it during the beta but there were still problems.
The most disappointing part is the fact that each race is only 3 laps. Maybe it is something that will change at some point or an option that you will be able to change but it is fine for a quick blast. With 3 lap races, it means that there are no pit stops, which is also a bit of a downer, especially as longer races could incorporate tyre wear and fuel if they wanted to go down that route.
The race you get thrown into is a random track from the F1 calendar. I didn't spend a great deal of time with this mode so I didn't see all the tracks. I found that my knowledge of F1 and F1 tracks gave me an edge as I was only off the podium once in 10 races and that was in a Lotus/Caterham when I finished 4th.
I spent most of my time with the other mode, which is where you create your own team. It guides you from the start about how things work. You choose your team name, you choose from a limited number of colour schemes, liveries and helmet colours. There are only a few options available but there are more available if you want to spend in game money or Codemasters Points.
Predictably, you start with the very basic car. There are multiple car classes and the races you enter will only feature cars of that class. The starting class is U and goes to C all the way to S. I only reached B class by the time beta closed but I wasn't too far away from A.
Certain parts of the car are only available to you when you move up a class. You start with just the front and rear wings and the engine at the start but when you get to B class, you can add brake, suspension and chassis parts and then A class allows you to build gearbox, cooling and KERS parts. At B class, parts can be upgraded to a Mark 2 for better performance.
You are fairly free to go in any direction you want but I worked out very quickly that what you will need a lot of is money. Anything you can do to get money is crucial to quick progression. Handily, the path is laid out for you in the objectives system they have. If you pass these objectives, you will be given an XP reward, which you need to get to higher levels and better equipment and sometimes a money reward. Focusing on the money rewards was my aim and it worked quite well.
So, you start out with just a car and a small team. To earn more money, you need to go racing. There is a quick race mode, where you will spend most of your time. There are 15 custom tracks to race around, although you will see a limited amount early on but if you want to, there is a time trial mode to get used to tracks and test parts. The race lobbies fill up pretty well and I was in races of 16+ most of the time. You are given a race target at the start of the race, achieve it and you get a cash and XP boost. The race target is supposed to be based on car and driver performance but I found myself a number of times with a tough race target with a car completely outgunned. There is also a Championship mode which features a multi-race Championship with 1 race a day and big XP and money payouts for your final placing. If you don't win it first time out, you can enter again but the payout scales to where you finished last time so you can only earn a certain amount from each Championship.
So, what do you do with the money? Once you are at C class level, things open up. To get new parts, you need to make blueprints. This costs money, time and uses people that you have working for you. While the work is being done, the people will be occupied and can't be used until they are finished. To get more people, you need to build up your factory.
Your factory consists of 4 parts, Research, Production, Commercial and Race Team. There are multiple buildings for each section and more become available as you level up. Also, as you level up, you get development points which can get you perks. These perks help you along but reducing costs, use of people and time on certain parts, permanent boosts to XP and race winnings and a permanent increase to the amount of people you have. Working out how best to use these points is fairly important.
Of course, you could spend some real money to help you out. The shop option. It is where you can unlock all the F1 teams for use immediately in the F1 mode or you can boosts and extras. We were given some points to make sure everything was working fine. I just wanted money and there was some options for just getting a lot of money straight away. You also get XP or money boosts for a certain period of time or you could get extra workers or speed up production for a certain amount of time.
There is an achievement system too to see how you are getting on. Most of them are based on your team but there are a few F1 achievements like winning Monaco 6 times or driving over 300 races. There is no reward for these so it isn't really something that most people will bother even looking at I think.
One major drawback which led to a fair amount of debate was shunting. It was all too easy for people not to brake into a heavy braking zone and screw a lot of peoples races up, especially as a 3 lap race is not enough to make a recovery. Cutting corners will result in a reset and shunting can lead to that happening to you. There are also a few complaints about handling early on but that improves when you get better parts. Also, the camera placement on some tracks means that some environmental things can obscure the track. There is a friend system somewhere but there didn't seem to be any way to communicate with anyone in the game at this time.
Overall, I'm cautiously optimistic. There are things that need work and it will require time to get a certain amount of satisfaction out of it. It is probably as close to an F1 management game as we are probably going to get so there is that. Open beta will be available to you all soon if you are interested.
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With the closed beta part over and open beta beginning soon (no specific date has been announced at time of writing), the NDA (Non Disclosure Agreement) is up and I can now talk about the experience I had with F1 Online: The Game.
F1 Online is the browser based online game being made by Codemasters. I was invited to the closed beta in what I think was the 2nd week of invites. I had only seen a couple of screenshots of what the game was about and from what I saw, I expected something along the lines of Grand Prix Manager, a past F1 management game.
Immediately, I was surprised as the first thing I saw was a tutorial about how to drive the Red Bull car around the Abu Dhabi circuit. The steering is controlled by the mouse and you can use the mouse buttons for accelerate and brake or you can use the keyboard. The keyboard also has keys for the DRS and KERS.
Once the tutorial portion of the game is done, you are set free into the game. I'll start with the official F1 section of the game. In this section, you get to pick 1 of the 12 F1 teams from the 2011 season. Unless you spend Codemasters points (the real money based transaction part of the game), only 3 of the 12 teams are playable for a certain amount of time and then rotate to another 3, so you can play as all 12 teams but you have to wait as they cycle through.
All the 12 teams have objectives to complete. They are pretty similar for all teams but vary in difficulty depending on how good the team is. For instance, Red Bull would require wins, fastest laps and beating McLaren and Ferrari while HRT will want top 10s and beating Lotus (now Caterham) and Marussia. Completing the objectives gives you money in the other part of the game and completing all the objectives for the team gives you a cash injection and a mystery prize.
So, you select your team and you can also choose driver if you so wish and you get put in a race lobby. Ultimately, the goal is to have 24 car grids but I never got a race with more than 12 people in this mode as they were having some issues with too many spreading the players out. The reason is you can only have 2 of each car in the field so if everyone is picking the same teams then the lobbies keep getting created. They did improve it during the beta but there were still problems.
The most disappointing part is the fact that each race is only 3 laps. Maybe it is something that will change at some point or an option that you will be able to change but it is fine for a quick blast. With 3 lap races, it means that there are no pit stops, which is also a bit of a downer, especially as longer races could incorporate tyre wear and fuel if they wanted to go down that route.
The race you get thrown into is a random track from the F1 calendar. I didn't spend a great deal of time with this mode so I didn't see all the tracks. I found that my knowledge of F1 and F1 tracks gave me an edge as I was only off the podium once in 10 races and that was in a Lotus/Caterham when I finished 4th.
I spent most of my time with the other mode, which is where you create your own team. It guides you from the start about how things work. You choose your team name, you choose from a limited number of colour schemes, liveries and helmet colours. There are only a few options available but there are more available if you want to spend in game money or Codemasters Points.
Predictably, you start with the very basic car. There are multiple car classes and the races you enter will only feature cars of that class. The starting class is U and goes to C all the way to S. I only reached B class by the time beta closed but I wasn't too far away from A.
Certain parts of the car are only available to you when you move up a class. You start with just the front and rear wings and the engine at the start but when you get to B class, you can add brake, suspension and chassis parts and then A class allows you to build gearbox, cooling and KERS parts. At B class, parts can be upgraded to a Mark 2 for better performance.
You are fairly free to go in any direction you want but I worked out very quickly that what you will need a lot of is money. Anything you can do to get money is crucial to quick progression. Handily, the path is laid out for you in the objectives system they have. If you pass these objectives, you will be given an XP reward, which you need to get to higher levels and better equipment and sometimes a money reward. Focusing on the money rewards was my aim and it worked quite well.
So, you start out with just a car and a small team. To earn more money, you need to go racing. There is a quick race mode, where you will spend most of your time. There are 15 custom tracks to race around, although you will see a limited amount early on but if you want to, there is a time trial mode to get used to tracks and test parts. The race lobbies fill up pretty well and I was in races of 16+ most of the time. You are given a race target at the start of the race, achieve it and you get a cash and XP boost. The race target is supposed to be based on car and driver performance but I found myself a number of times with a tough race target with a car completely outgunned. There is also a Championship mode which features a multi-race Championship with 1 race a day and big XP and money payouts for your final placing. If you don't win it first time out, you can enter again but the payout scales to where you finished last time so you can only earn a certain amount from each Championship.
So, what do you do with the money? Once you are at C class level, things open up. To get new parts, you need to make blueprints. This costs money, time and uses people that you have working for you. While the work is being done, the people will be occupied and can't be used until they are finished. To get more people, you need to build up your factory.
Your factory consists of 4 parts, Research, Production, Commercial and Race Team. There are multiple buildings for each section and more become available as you level up. Also, as you level up, you get development points which can get you perks. These perks help you along but reducing costs, use of people and time on certain parts, permanent boosts to XP and race winnings and a permanent increase to the amount of people you have. Working out how best to use these points is fairly important.
Of course, you could spend some real money to help you out. The shop option. It is where you can unlock all the F1 teams for use immediately in the F1 mode or you can boosts and extras. We were given some points to make sure everything was working fine. I just wanted money and there was some options for just getting a lot of money straight away. You also get XP or money boosts for a certain period of time or you could get extra workers or speed up production for a certain amount of time.
There is an achievement system too to see how you are getting on. Most of them are based on your team but there are a few F1 achievements like winning Monaco 6 times or driving over 300 races. There is no reward for these so it isn't really something that most people will bother even looking at I think.
One major drawback which led to a fair amount of debate was shunting. It was all too easy for people not to brake into a heavy braking zone and screw a lot of peoples races up, especially as a 3 lap race is not enough to make a recovery. Cutting corners will result in a reset and shunting can lead to that happening to you. There are also a few complaints about handling early on but that improves when you get better parts. Also, the camera placement on some tracks means that some environmental things can obscure the track. There is a friend system somewhere but there didn't seem to be any way to communicate with anyone in the game at this time.
Overall, I'm cautiously optimistic. There are things that need work and it will require time to get a certain amount of satisfaction out of it. It is probably as close to an F1 management game as we are probably going to get so there is that. Open beta will be available to you all soon if you are interested.
F1 Online is the browser based online game being made by Codemasters. I was invited to the closed beta in what I think was the 2nd week of invites. I had only seen a couple of screenshots of what the game was about and from what I saw, I expected something along the lines of Grand Prix Manager, a past F1 management game.
Immediately, I was surprised as the first thing I saw was a tutorial about how to drive the Red Bull car around the Abu Dhabi circuit. The steering is controlled by the mouse and you can use the mouse buttons for accelerate and brake or you can use the keyboard. The keyboard also has keys for the DRS and KERS.
Once the tutorial portion of the game is done, you are set free into the game. I'll start with the official F1 section of the game. In this section, you get to pick 1 of the 12 F1 teams from the 2011 season. Unless you spend Codemasters points (the real money based transaction part of the game), only 3 of the 12 teams are playable for a certain amount of time and then rotate to another 3, so you can play as all 12 teams but you have to wait as they cycle through.
All the 12 teams have objectives to complete. They are pretty similar for all teams but vary in difficulty depending on how good the team is. For instance, Red Bull would require wins, fastest laps and beating McLaren and Ferrari while HRT will want top 10s and beating Lotus (now Caterham) and Marussia. Completing the objectives gives you money in the other part of the game and completing all the objectives for the team gives you a cash injection and a mystery prize.
So, you select your team and you can also choose driver if you so wish and you get put in a race lobby. Ultimately, the goal is to have 24 car grids but I never got a race with more than 12 people in this mode as they were having some issues with too many spreading the players out. The reason is you can only have 2 of each car in the field so if everyone is picking the same teams then the lobbies keep getting created. They did improve it during the beta but there were still problems.
The most disappointing part is the fact that each race is only 3 laps. Maybe it is something that will change at some point or an option that you will be able to change but it is fine for a quick blast. With 3 lap races, it means that there are no pit stops, which is also a bit of a downer, especially as longer races could incorporate tyre wear and fuel if they wanted to go down that route.
The race you get thrown into is a random track from the F1 calendar. I didn't spend a great deal of time with this mode so I didn't see all the tracks. I found that my knowledge of F1 and F1 tracks gave me an edge as I was only off the podium once in 10 races and that was in a Lotus/Caterham when I finished 4th.
I spent most of my time with the other mode, which is where you create your own team. It guides you from the start about how things work. You choose your team name, you choose from a limited number of colour schemes, liveries and helmet colours. There are only a few options available but there are more available if you want to spend in game money or Codemasters Points.
Predictably, you start with the very basic car. There are multiple car classes and the races you enter will only feature cars of that class. The starting class is U and goes to C all the way to S. I only reached B class by the time beta closed but I wasn't too far away from A.
Certain parts of the car are only available to you when you move up a class. You start with just the front and rear wings and the engine at the start but when you get to B class, you can add brake, suspension and chassis parts and then A class allows you to build gearbox, cooling and KERS parts. At B class, parts can be upgraded to a Mark 2 for better performance.
You are fairly free to go in any direction you want but I worked out very quickly that what you will need a lot of is money. Anything you can do to get money is crucial to quick progression. Handily, the path is laid out for you in the objectives system they have. If you pass these objectives, you will be given an XP reward, which you need to get to higher levels and better equipment and sometimes a money reward. Focusing on the money rewards was my aim and it worked quite well.
So, you start out with just a car and a small team. To earn more money, you need to go racing. There is a quick race mode, where you will spend most of your time. There are 15 custom tracks to race around, although you will see a limited amount early on but if you want to, there is a time trial mode to get used to tracks and test parts. The race lobbies fill up pretty well and I was in races of 16+ most of the time. You are given a race target at the start of the race, achieve it and you get a cash and XP boost. The race target is supposed to be based on car and driver performance but I found myself a number of times with a tough race target with a car completely outgunned. There is also a Championship mode which features a multi-race Championship with 1 race a day and big XP and money payouts for your final placing. If you don't win it first time out, you can enter again but the payout scales to where you finished last time so you can only earn a certain amount from each Championship.
So, what do you do with the money? Once you are at C class level, things open up. To get new parts, you need to make blueprints. This costs money, time and uses people that you have working for you. While the work is being done, the people will be occupied and can't be used until they are finished. To get more people, you need to build up your factory.
Your factory consists of 4 parts, Research, Production, Commercial and Race Team. There are multiple buildings for each section and more become available as you level up. Also, as you level up, you get development points which can get you perks. These perks help you along but reducing costs, use of people and time on certain parts, permanent boosts to XP and race winnings and a permanent increase to the amount of people you have. Working out how best to use these points is fairly important.
Of course, you could spend some real money to help you out. The shop option. It is where you can unlock all the F1 teams for use immediately in the F1 mode or you can boosts and extras. We were given some points to make sure everything was working fine. I just wanted money and there was some options for just getting a lot of money straight away. You also get XP or money boosts for a certain period of time or you could get extra workers or speed up production for a certain amount of time.
There is an achievement system too to see how you are getting on. Most of them are based on your team but there are a few F1 achievements like winning Monaco 6 times or driving over 300 races. There is no reward for these so it isn't really something that most people will bother even looking at I think.
One major drawback which led to a fair amount of debate was shunting. It was all too easy for people not to brake into a heavy braking zone and screw a lot of peoples races up, especially as a 3 lap race is not enough to make a recovery. Cutting corners will result in a reset and shunting can lead to that happening to you. There are also a few complaints about handling early on but that improves when you get better parts. Also, the camera placement on some tracks means that some environmental things can obscure the track. There is a friend system somewhere but there didn't seem to be any way to communicate with anyone in the game at this time.
Overall, I'm cautiously optimistic. There are things that need work and it will require time to get a certain amount of satisfaction out of it. It is probably as close to an F1 management game as we are probably going to get so there is that. Open beta will be available to you all soon if you are interested.