My quick initial thoughts
Warning: I play with full assists except for steering, DRS ad ERS on Xbox with a wheel.
I loaded the game and went into F1 World to do a Grand Prix. I had to endure not only the tutorials but also the pick a team and driver for Fan Zone. Personally I wish this would go away. I also hate having 3 random strangers loitering around my game lobby. I don’t ever play online so most of this is useless to me.
I decided to stop to look at the customization options- more than last year, mostly rubbish. One decent helmet I think, no good liveries, one good race suit and gloves. The store has more rubbish. Podium pass is still mostly F1 World things. Maybe eventually they will add decent things but based on the recent past, I hold little hope.
Off to Canada with even cars. In a 5 lap race using 75 AI, I was a little off the pace. In previous games Canada was a track I would lower the AI from my season average so it was as expected. I then did it in the rain and was 7- 10 tenths off the pace. Clearly EA did nothing to balance driver aids for wet racing. Also the AI looks to still be on rails in the wet. I saw more mistakes in the dry from brakes locking but it is a small sample size. I could, however, feel the understeer when following a car which I didn’t last year.
Off to my team. The customization options are very poor. More emblems but fewer backgrounds for them (gone are the shields). The emblems they have are meh. There is one that is supposed to be a raptor with the head bent forward but my wife thinks it looks like a headless bird. Same polos we’ve been stuck with for years, the pit crew have the same old helmets that look like the LA Rams from the NFL. So no effort here. The sponsor decals are not color customizable at level 1 so on my car they are all white, even though My Team colours are black and old gold- like the JPS Lotus. Not sure why 1 colour option was not allowed. Placing the decals is a good mechanic everywhere but the front wings. For some reason you have to place each wing plane separately instead of it being symmetrical. The numbers are more customizable but again the options given are meh.
The owner avatar has some options for customization but not enough to satisfy everyone. I found 2 I liked. Having the owner split from the driver is nice, but not being able to create yourself as a driver is a bit odd. Maybe the option to create our own driver as an “icon” so only we could sign ourselves would be nice; sort of a Papa Stroll and Son.
The play mechanics of My team seem good, although the development tree is the same as last year as far as I can tell. So you know that this part leads to that part if you’ve played a lot the last few years. Would be nice to shake that up every year so it is more of a mystery. Even season to season.
The development being separated from research is a great move, and the decision around which driver gets what upgrade is a nice dilemma. Since I managed 2 new parts 1 in aero 1 in power I gave each driver a new part.
The factory looks nice and I like the way there are 4 streams to handle in the calendar between races. One bug is that my car was invisible so I have an engineer peering at an empty spot in the middle of a room looking as if he is in some mental discomfort.
Picking one driver to be each weekend is OK, I would have preferred the option to hot seat like in the old GP series where I could do 1 driver for 25%, then the other, back again and finish. While I intended to flip drivers from week to week, I can see myself picking one and meshing with him.
There is no option to restart a session and change AI, still have to retire from a session to change AI, no way to disable weather or weather effect on grip so with the fore mention difference in competitiveness between rain and dry a wet/dry race leaves you stuck between picking a suboptimal AI.
At 50% race distance I saw no DRS train, drivers did some defence, a nice overtake of me by Piastri and a nice battle between Verstappen and Norris after the pit stops in Australia that I could only watch from my cockpit.
Overall the My Team experience is better than last year but the game is still far from where it should be. The inability to shut weather off has been a peeve of mine since at least 2019. Maybe I underestimate the work required to add that feature, but it seems a no brainer and miles easier than balancing the AI between wet and dry at all of the tracks.
Speaking of tracks, only the official ones are in the game (3 in reverse) which I find understandable though I miss Portugal, Germany, and France, maybe because I detest Miami, Las Vegas and Sudi Arabia.
As an aside my son drives with no assists and found the car very difficult to drive on his first try.
