Driver career lacks immersion, narrative, and progression incentives

I’ve been playing the Driver Career mode in F1 25, and while the underlying systems have potential, the overall experience feels disappointingly hollow and lazy. The career unfolds almost entirely through menus, with very little actually happening on track. Rivalries, for example, are introduced via static UI elements, but don’t translate into any visible changes in driver behavior or radio interactions from the race engineer. There’s no evolving narrative that reflects your journey as a driver.

Cutscenes are another missed opportunity. Instead of being tailored to your team or your specific career moments, they feel like generic TV coverage — detached and impersonal. Why would I, as a struggling backmarker who just fought tooth and nail for P15, care about a generic podium celebration with three random drivers?

It would go a long way to reintroduce driver interviews and post-race interactions. Especially in an era where generative AI could easily provide dynamic dialogue, the lack of narrative-building tools feels like a huge missed opportunity.

There are also immersion-breaking details that hurt long-term engagement:

• The motorhome backdrop never changes from circuit to circuit.
• Key milestones — like your first points, first podium, first pole — pass with little to no fanfare. There’s no sense of progression, no climax, no contextual effort to make these moments memorable.
• Helmet options are bafflingly limited to just three for the entire career. Why not allow players to unlock or earn new ones through achievements?

Ultimately, the career mode seems to rely heavily on players filling in the emotional and narrative gaps themselves. But imagination alone can’t carry the experience — the game should do some of the storytelling for us. Right now, it simply doesn’t.