The F1 game is taking a year off
Electronic Arts: EA Sports F1® Franchise Announcement
Today, EA SPORTS™ confirms future plans for F1® 25, with the game set to represent both the 2025 and 2026 FIA Formula One World Championships. This news drops alongside an announcement for the future of EA SPORTS F1® as 2027 will see the series return and mark the start of a new and more expansive F1® experience.
On the one hand, this is a bummer. On the other, I think this is what sports game should do more often. After all, it’s not like a ton changes from year to year anyway, just let me pay a bit to get the new rosters, new rules, and save the full new game for every other year. It sounds like this paid expansion will include the new drivers, teams, and calendar, but I wonder if it will have updated physics and car designs. It is a new regulations year, after all.
Also, as someone who plays a lot of the F1 games each year, I will say that their suggesting that the 2027 game will be a brand new experience makes me equal parts excited and nervous. The core racing engine in the games is quite good, and scales pretty well from sim fans to casual racers. Yes, the physics tweaks each year ebb and flow in quality, but the racing is always pretty good. That said, the rest of the game is a total mess, with a true low point coming in the 2023-2024 games where EA seemed to think what we wanted most from this game was to spend real money on couches and wall art for our fake driver’s digital home. They’ve since pulled that all back, but to me the series has felt like a very good racing experience that I was always afraid to see what needless thing they were going to add on top of it next time.
And all that said, compared to other racing games like Grad Turismo and Assetto Corsa Competizione, it was feeling a bit stale on track, and the visuals were solid but have always felt like really high res PS4 visuals to my eyes. The idea of a new game coming that looks better, plays more realistically, and has a better season/career mode sounds exciting! Then again, this is an EA game, and I’m also worried that we’re going towards something more like Madden or FIFA, games that I truly think actively hate their players. I get the impression that the F1 games flew a little under the radar at EA for many years, and they weren’t bogged down with all the bullshit they put in their other sports games. Now that F1 the sport is bigger, this franchise must have more executive eyes on it. Executives that say, “why isn’t this game making 10x as much money as it could? Optimize for that!” Given EA’s new private ownership, I’m not convinced their motivations will be to make the best F1 racing game they can.
Anyway, the F1 games have long been special sports games that I’ve enjoyed, and I hope that whatever comes in 2027 has more good stuff than bad. At the very least F1 25 was one of the best recent entries in the series, so if I’m going to have this core game do another year, that’s not the worst thing.