Today, Codemasters has announced new details about their upcoming annual release racing game, F1 2016, complete with new and improved features that were missing in F1 2015. Let’s break it down.
First up, is the announcement that player avatars will return in the game,overhauled with features such as the ability to pick your face on a driver, choosing your own number to appear on the player’s car and the ability to use custom helmets.
Coming back as well is the Paddock area,fleshed out along with Player Agent ,both absent since F1 2012. There will also be a “Time of Day editor” where players can choose whichever time they prefer for a session. Example of this is giving the usually Night Race Singapore a daytime race. And with the addition of the new team, Haas F1 and the new European GP track, Baku, this could be the most interesting iteration of the yearly series yet as the game’s career mode is stated to go up to 10 seasons if the player chooses.

Now,R&D plays a big factor in F1 2016 as it can make a slow car (i.e Manor aka Rio Haryanto’s car) match the pace of the more powerful cars on the grid thanks to the new upgrades system,during which the AI themselves would be competing and upgrading their own cars, akin to real life. The upgrades would be based on a credit EXP, which sounds quite similar to RPGs.
How do earn these “EXP credits” you say? By doing the Practice Sessions, where players earn EXP by doing laps set by engineers, doing “Track Climatization”,which sees players learn their tracks via hints given by the game and Tire test, where graphs help shows drivers how their tire would handle during the race. All of this is handled by the new R&D Engineer, who will update on the progress of the upgrades on the player’s cars and the AI’s progress of their upgrades.

Finally, the most fundamental and important thing in F1 is back, and it’s the Safety Car (SC for short). It’s absent has been noticed by Codemasters and they have added not only the SC but also the Virtual Safety Car, added in real life Formula One last year. Unlike past F1 games, where the game has partial control over the car, the player is in total control over their cars and doing stuff like passing cars and/or hitting cars is a no-no.

And that does it for the information blowout of F1 2016. To learn more, head over to Codemaster’s site to learn more.
F1 2016 is stated to come out this summer for PS4,Xbox One and PC.