F1 2022 Interview: Adding VR And Why F1 Is "The Cool Kid In The Room"
Sports games often get accused of being the same game every year with a new coat of paint. That's not always a fair criticism, but even so, this year's F1 title is more equipped to deal with it than most. As well as some quality of life tweaks and attempts to make the game both more accessible to newcomers and more challenging to veterans, there's a major new addition this year, at least on PC: the all-new VR capability.
"Racing [sims] are the perfect vehicle for it," F1 22 senior creative director Lee Mather tells me. "Because you're actually seated, you're stationary. So it feels natural to be in VR, as opposed to, say, a first person shooter where you're physically moving through an environment with your legs. Over the last few years, we've also worked on the audio, so we knew that as soon as you put a headset on, you'd get that binaural audio, to put you in the sensation of being in the car as well. Playing first person, when you're in a cockpit view, it's a totally different experience. It's way more intense, and it feels more hectic. It really does shift the experience."
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Of course, being stationary also presents a potential issue. In first person shooter games, you can turn around 360 degrees, and so can your avatar. In F1, it might seem realistic to have the players sitting down, staring straight ahead, but a player may decide to look to their left or right, to look behind them, or even stand up - all things F1 drivers cannot do. Mather explains that F1 players will be able to do all of these things, even at the cost of realism.
"We were told literally, you don't restrict what the player can do," he tells me, recalling the
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