F1 24 to Deliver the Biggest Career Mode Innovation Since 2016
The 2023 Formula One season yielded a grand total of three winning drivers over 22 Grands Prix. Just six rounds into the 2024 season and we’ve already seen three different GP winners, across three different teams to boot. Has this season just threatened to become interesting?
Well, it’s almost certainly too early to be hopeful of that. However, even if we are ultimately destined for yet another season of single car dominance, at least F1 24’s updated career mode will give us all a place where we can watch (and hear) the championship unfold a little differently.
F1 24’s key new hook is the ability to “be one of the 20.” That is, we can now take one of F1’s superstar drivers and play as them in a complete, multi-season career mode experience called Driver Career. Driver Career appears to be drilling down on an experience specific to the drivers themselves. This means the focus is on gaining recognition and improving your driver ratings over multiple seasons, dealing with the driver contract market with secret meetings, and completing a variety of short- and long-term goals. Senior creative director Lee Mather confirms the focus on revamping the career mode has been a “huge fan requested feature.”
“It still sees huge numbers of people playing it, but obviously we were starting to feel each year the build-up of players saying, ‘I love Driver Career, it’s one of my favourite areas of the game, but you’ve not done anything with it. Why haven’t you done anything with it? Why haven’t you moved it on? Why haven’t you changed it?’” says Mather. “So we definitely had that in mind.”
“The tipping point was we wanted to bring in the ability for the player to play as a Formula One driver because that’s now such a prominent thing; those drivers have now become super celebrities. They now want to be those drivers. That was less a thing back in 2010. It was more about the world of Formula One and driving Formula One cars.”
Described as the biggest career mode innovation since 2016,
Read more on ign.com
