Regarding AI and the Difficulty

Hi guys,

now this is an interesting topic, because several YouTubers and casual players like me touch it so often that I want to make a clear statement about it.

It's the AI.

As I have seen in so many posts, people keep reporting AI being ridiculously fast, and this was also the fact in F1 2021. But now, I need to quote a German F1 Player I've been watching for so long now: "[...] This AI Balancing thingie problem exists for so long, but, like, nobody cares about it. It's been a problem in [...] the last game too, and it still is now, and it feels like it's so much worse and it never gets changed, that's nagging me so much..."

To be honest, I think I have a workaround.

If Codemasters would say look up the laptimes of real life F1, the only thing that they have to do is to train the AI to hit the real life times with the best car in the field on level 100, and then drop or increase the time by 0.1 second for each increase or decrease in difficulty.

Let's just say the Ferrari is the best car, and the best lap in the race was a 1:20 something in real life. Train the AI to hit it on level 100, bam. This way, players who want a real life challenge can easily go for level 100, and people who love to challenge themselves further, can go for 110, cool. Of course, if you play Career Mode, things like increases in car performance, as well as higher ERS modes and open DRS can cut a few tenths off that time, so it's always tough to find the perfect AI level.

I'm just gonna say this - as of right now, the AI in Melbourne trail the real life lap time by a bit more than 1 second... ON LEVEL 71. Which means, put it 10 levels higher, and they almost match the IRL lap record, which means, the AI are 20 levels too fast.

I miss the F1 2020 AI. At least Codemasters made the AI deal correct back in the day, and I'm able to play on Master difficulty without too much trouble. Sure, my teammate is tough to beat, but you gotta live with it if you got an awesome teammate like Esteban Ocon, who drives a dominant vehicle.

See, I like a challenge. But I hate challenges caused by artificial difficulty because the AI are insanely OP. It honestly makes you feel worthless if you used to get so many championship titles in F1 2020 on Master difficulty, and you can't even match the AI's pace on difficulty 71 two years later. It almost seems like EA wants to attract more Esports players, meaning that this game is not user-friendly. Just imagine yourself in the shoes of a player who just got into F1 and started to play F1 22. Have them try Medium difficulty like I started out with, they get completely obliterated by the AI while they drive the Red Bull of "world champion" Max Crashstappen. That's not how it should be.

If I look back at F1 2015, the first F1 game that really made me love the franchise, I also first played it on Medium, but obviously, since I played with Nico Rosberg in the Mercedes, every race was a walk in the park unless I screwed up somewhere. When I started with F1 2017, I wanted to challenge myself more and went with Hard difficulty, which I usually go for nowadays if I play with Preset Setups. It was indeed tougher, but I also had the McLaren Honda, which was one of the slowest cars in the season. Matching with Mercedes in that is no easy task, let me tell you. And I can assure you, if I tried to match Red Bull with an Aston Martin in F1 22, I'd get completely destroyed. Then, when I played F1 2020, I felt like the game was far too easy on Hard difficulty, so I switched to Expert. And after DNF'ing in Spain, that was the first time where I looked up setups to give myself an edge, and it indeed worked because I won the race in Monaco. And after trying Master difficulty, I knew that I wanted to become a Master, so I looked up new setups, tried it again, and while I had starting problems, I pulled through and took so many race wins in My Team.

And look where we are now... Insanely overpowered AI that can do things the player can't, AI simulation that doesn't work properly... I don't know what to say. Really, I don't.

But what do you guys think about all this? Let's discuss about it in the comments.

- Nico

PS: If someone at Codemasters reads this, the bug with an AI randomly DNF'ing and getting an impossible fastest lap after a race session still exists. I'll give a detailed bug report about it soon.