The gameplay benefit of them is you can give your power unit team a lift by praising them on camera, or get your durability team buzzed by boasting about how much on-track torture the car can absorb. They’re a cute touch but the questions get pretty repetitive by the end of a 21-race season. Morale in each of the R&D departments can be impacted positively or negatively by your responses in post-session interviews, which play out like more informal versions of the press conferences that long-term fans may recall from F1 2010. This is good because my interest in running the same practice programs on the same tracks as I did in F1 2016 and F1 2017 is wearing dangerously thin, but I still wanted to engage in the R&D system. The performance parts R&D tree system is akin to the one in F1 2017 but the points you need to launch part development are awarded a little more liberally than they’ve been in the past – even if you skip the practice sessions. It’s a decent little flourish to inject into career mode to help illustrate your driver’s value and deliver handy bonuses to us for our careers.įerrari, huh? What's the retail on one of those? These include things like marginally faster pit stops, or speedier parts development, but whether or not your team will accept your terms is a mini puzzle game unto itself (you only have three attempts to push a contract through before you’re forced to accept your team’s original, lower deal). Throughout each season in F1 2018 your driver’s contract can be renegotiated and, depending on how well you’ve been meeting team goals and your overall value to the organisation, you may be able to propose extra perks. There’s a new contract system to wrestle with, team morale to consider (and manipulate), and also the threat of all your research and development gains being dashed by regulation changes from season to season. The 10-season career mode plays out in a very similar fashion to the those in F1 2016 and F1 2017, but there are more layers to it now. Halo From the Other SideThe juicier changes in F1 2018 are its massaged career mode and AI improvements.
F1 2018 is an excellent-looking racing game, make no mistake. Even gloomy, overcast conditions look fantastic as the sun struggles to beat through gaps in the grey clouds above. The spectrum of authentic lighting conditions in F1 2018 is great, from bright, blue days to low sun burning through the haze.
There’s more granular trackside detail than ever before with pumped-up tree foliage, plus surfaces that better display their years of high speed abuse thanks to improvements to the lighting system. Visual enhancements elsewhere aren’t quite as obvious – certainly at the speeds F1 cars tend to thread through these circuits – but they’re there nonetheless. F1 2018’s humans remain a rung below the cars and circuits in terms of fidelity but they’re an instantly noticeable improvement on F1 2017, with far more realistic skin, hair, and facial animation. “These people-powered sequences do look better than they ever have previously, though.