EA SPORTS FC™ TeamYes, the current EA sports portfolio strategy seems to be focused mainly on pushing an enagement and transaction driven gaming architecture (here F1 world) with sports mechanics strapped on. Some of the bits are ok and yet, as @Ultrasonic_77 points out, weirdly broken in annoying ways, but can still be good when a quick hit or some gamified challenges are wanted. EA obviously has a bunch of data from this and PMs no doubt use it to show why this is the right approach. Same is true for PGA tour as I’ve pointed out before.
Braking Point is the attempt to cash in on the Drive to Survive rise in interest (and it was less bad than I expected TBH), F1 World is there to keep them going at it. The more hard core racing (or any of the other sports) enthusiasts who want to do the full up championship and similar stuff must not be the main target as their experience continues to be given the short end of the resources.
And TBH from a data perspective probably true - you have to be strongly into a sport to gain satisfaction from grinding out the full season or managing the team vs just getting a sugar rush from the game engine goodies EA thinks that’s needed to sell more games. So some stuff gets included as its needed as a checkbox but neglected due to low use, reinforced because of flaws.
Same with group competition, which would seem like an obvious thing to facilitate, but EA has pretty consistently failed at undertanding what people want. Cheating and bad behavior further limit interest and hence play through so more negative data trends.
But its the persistent lack of QA that really puts the t*d in the punch bowl. Which is a shame because there must be some serious racing (or other sports) nerds on the dev teams, as there are aspects that do shine. It’s got to be as frustrating for them (i hope) as it is for us to see those efforts short changed by such bad QA.
I was only expecting two things from F1 23 - better handling and the new tracks, so I’m not let down (much) by buying it. And as a Fanatec user they didn’t break my wheel so I lucked out enough to enjoy those things. The rest? meh. Can or will they improve the franchise? Not so sure how to gauge the future but was really hoping for more improvement this year.
