F1 Manager 22

[arknor]

Release date: 30th August
Devs : Frontier Developments
Price: £44.99
Official Website https://www.f1manager.com/

Steam Page https://store.steampowered.com/app/1708520/F1_Manager_2022/

 

[arknor]

As a long time player of Grand Prix Manager 2, Grand Prix World and Motorsport Manager I'm hoping this is good but I'm also a bit concerned that it'll be much more limited that I hope due to the licensing.

yea I wouldn't preorder or buy on day one
preorders get a 5 day head start so that's probably enough time to get some accurate impressions anyway

 

[arknor]

I'm starting to wonder how basic the game will be since I got banned from the sub reddit for the next 7 days.

Apparently for insulting people according to the reason cited by a mod.

yet none of my posts were removed or edited, I suspect they just wanted to silence me for questioning some of the design decisions and not being 100% positive..

Seems they are clamping down on anyone who might put people off buying their game and trying to create an echo of fanboys


I'm clearly against them seeing as I made this thread and pre-orerded the game which I'm tempted to just cancel and see how bad reviews are, it's 38% discounted on cjs cdkeys anyway so a big saving over steam...

I thought I would support the devs though and buy it on steam... foolish me



Engine specs are fixed for all eternity.
The devs had a stream from 2030.
All the drivers had ridiculously high stats and no regression of stats, which they claim to have fixed since people pointed out that's terrible... they would have launched like that clearly...
No driver traits.
Sponsors seem totally fixed
almost every driver from 2022 was still on the grid in 2030 :S

It seems like your basically playing the same game every season with minimal changes, the rule changes only seem to be really basic ones, no track rotation, no possibility of refuelling, no engine spec changes etc, only lazy stuff that takes 0 effort on the devs part.

all the effort seems to be going into how the game looks and sounds with as basic and bare backend as they think they can get away with.

in their live stream all the AI teams pitted both drivers at the same time too.... so seems they were running the exact same strategy for both drivers.

seems like it's all style and little substance and won't be as good as motorsport manager was

probably a game for casual f1 fans and not actual gamers

 

[arknor]

someone else made a post on reddit about how basic the game is, wonder if they will remove it

Main Concerns are the lack of depth in management:

• Only x4 staff positions,
• Only x4 options for drivers
• Drivers can be signed mid-season and teleport into the team; don't need to wait for end of season, really kills the realism.
• Engineering team, scouting team, and pit crew are 1-10 number sliders.
• Engine Supplier stats stay the same, forever. Community Manager stated you can win with any engine; so I guess changing it doesn't matter as it doesn't impact the players goal?
• No evidence of driver regression; making one of the few options the player has (hiring drivers) irrelevant. Gameplay demo 2 weeks from launch in year 2030, top 15 drivers are already on the grid today, and 12 of them are rated higher than today's Hamilton and Verstappen... They've said they've tweaked F2/F3 progression and retirements, which sounds like they've increased their progression to get to high 80s/90s, not added regression.

And lack of depth in gameplay:

• No sprint races,
• Hasn't been any evidence of smart/reactionary AI; from what's been shown and stated in interviews seems they have a few random strategies they'll implement, but it has no relation to the players actions.
• The race day itself; choose pit timings (game tells you the optimal times for an empty track), simply choose to undercut/overcut where appropriate; again with AI not reacting races could feel rather empty without the feel of a competitor attempting to really race you on strategy. Micro-Manage ERS, lower or increase pace depending on driver proximity and tyre wear, and that's about it.

Overall, I'm cautiously optimistic about their first iteration. Seems like so much more could've been done:

• Add staff slots for pit crew, full engineering crew, and scouting (20+ staff members),
• Have an actual F2/F3 season where you can follow the results and have in depth scouting.
• Have dynamic ratings and attributes that aren't artificially pumped up by the player/AI via XP with no relation to their actual ability.
• Contracts that reflect actual buyouts and options, as well as being able to do hiring's with start dates.
• Sponsorship and marketing departments to have player skill impact your budget, have money drivers be an option.

oh they actually bothered to take a screenshot of the driver ratings in 2030, (which apparently they changed after how negative people were about it, but it's how they were going to keep it obviously)

and how basic the driver negotiation is

 

[arknor]

Influenzas got the game one day early because they are special

Twitch

Twitch is the world's leading video platform and community for gamers.

www.twitch.tv

Some places have reviews now

"F1 Manager 2022": The RaceFans review of the official Formula 1 management game

The first official Formula 1 management game in two decades finally arrives on PC and consoles. Does F1 Manager 22 live up to expectations?

www.racefans.net

Qualifying sounds like a mess

your driver out to find them close to a slower car, there’s no way of telling them to make more space to give them a clearer run on their hot lap. Similarly, your drivers’ flying laps can be at the mercy of other cars that will not get out of the way as quickly as you’d like, leading to many ruined laps without any investigations for impeding.

Over taking sounds pre programmed and limited to set points

Similarly, drivers seem to be programmed to only overtake at specific points on the circuit. While this works perfectly fine the majority of the time, if your driver comes to a rival who is cruising seconds off the pace with damage from an accident, they will appear to wait behind them for corner after corner until they eventually find a straight or braking zone they can get by them on, costing you excruciating amounts of time which would never happen in reality.

I'm guessing all the crashes are pre scripted then and you will see the same ones play out if you play the game long enough


driver progression still crappy according to the review

There’s also the matter of the long-term simulation. Drivers do not appear to regress with age, meaning elder drivers like Hamilton or Fernando Alonso will continue to gain experience points and develop their skills as they age until they retire. Frontier have stated they are looking at this, but until they do, there is a risk that later seasons will be dominated by established veterans, leaving the younger drivers struggling to catch up. A shame, given how much effort has been put in to provide a full junior roster and add ‘newgens’ to the game to help replace the real-life drivers when they retire.

As players dive deeper into the game, it’s almost certain that they will discover details about F1 Manager 2022 that will not compare so favourably to past F1 management games, whether that’s the lack of ability to sign specific sponsors, or the lack of an option to simulate races entirely for faster progression. However, it is also important to keep in mind that this is just the first title in a franchise that is currently scheduled for three yearly instalments until 2024 – there is plenty of scope for improvement over the next two interations.

Still keeping my pre order but sounds like it will get boring fast.


From the little I've watched on twitch it seems like the cars are synchronised swimmers when they are 3 abreast and mimic each others movements perfectly, I think most the races are like "on rails" with scripted effects to reflect what's meant to be happening.

 

[arknor]

Damn, i was looking forward to this but you've properly killed all buzz for it with those last two posts

even some of the streamers are saying "temper your expectations" and they have the license until 2024, this is just the base game they will build upon.


It does look good though it's just a question of how much longevity does the game really have and hour many seasons are people really expecting to get out of it before it feels stale and any faults start to shine through the cracks.


Personally I've played just about every manager game going so my expectations of what they should deliver are likely unusually high compared to someone whos only been casual with them and will likely be really impressed no matter how deep the game actually is under the hood.

 

[arknor]

Everyone said that for Planet Coaster and Jurassic World and they both never got anything done right and built upon for depth and management side and they were a joke. I was going to do a list of the basics missing but tbf two of the posts above give a good basic overview of the minimum that is missing and will likely continue to be missing.

looks like driver development is the manager assigning points to what abilities they like too which is just so weird..... any driver can be good in the wet if you want it etc? what


why would they choose not to have driver regression, drivers that are good at some things and not others.... and traits that make the driver stand out from the rest.

it seems so generic and such a poor design choice.
Company that basically makes management games but then gets them wrong.

maybe they are only after the casuals and kids though like ps5 controller is designed for an 8 year olds hands

 

[arknor]

oh they banned me from the steam forums

You have been permanently banned from the F1® Manager 2022 Hub.​

You have been banned by a forum moderator.
Reason: "Encourage "cheating" the reviews"

I said people should give it bad reviews for treating streamers as special and treating people who actually bought the game as second class citizens lol


They shouldn't sell something as early access if a bunch of influencers get it even earlier, it's misleading surely?


I bet they would love to ban me from these forums for making this thread and pointing out the flaws too like they did on reddit...


I'll probably playing for a hundred hours or so but doesn't mean I can't point out the ridiculous design choices they made.



I noticed last night on twitch a lot of the "influencers" stopped streaming it as soons s their "promotion" hours for the game ended, and most of the time only 2-3k people were watching others stream it live anyway.
seems like trying to make it exclusive for streamers back fired on them and probably caused more people to cancel than to buy the game, especially when they see how weird and janky the crashes are.

No smoke effects seem to be in the game or my monitor is broken which is also bizarre

 

[arknor]

So basically buy it cheap then leave it on your steam library for six months and probably be a better game when get round to playing it.

you can already get it for 28.99 on cdkeys which I guess is kinda cheap

anyone buying at that price might wanna wait until people on reddit or here have said they started to send out keys though

theres a thread on reddit about them here which will probably get updates by someone

Reddit - Dive into anything

www.reddit.com

 

[arknor]

in the races it's a lot of clicking to find some screens and I'd imagine a lot of people won't ever find them like the "Team commands" and "temp/condition commands" screens

This is a lot of print screen + copy and paste into paint to get 3 different ui screens on the same image not how the game looks


It's a shame they are all kind of separated into their own section as I'm imagining all the clicking around will get old fast.
A simeple tick box on the main screen og each driver would have been better imo, also the different stances , standard, aggressive , attack etc could have been just a simple label with arrow like <-Standard-> without the need to clutter the screen

ultrawide UI feels huge too so I'm guessing it doesn't scale or anything


Compared to normal ( random image from google)



On ultrawide all they did is the basic add a bit more screen view to the sides the UI is still massive and covers the action :/


on the plus side I saw a smoke effect in the game from lock ups, never noticed any in actual crashes though.


I'm doing hard mode with Aston Martin, I wanted alonso but after like 5 offers he wouldn't talk to me so I just stuck with the normal drivers
so I guess singing drivers isn't as easy as it appears, the negotiation options seem too basic though.

I'm still on the first race almost doing it in real time, seems kinda fun for now


Btw the game seems to be basically one big pak file so likely they chose to make it impossible for mods

 

[arknor]

Does buying it now still count as pre-ordering ?

pre order seems to have been part of their "hype" it seems anyone who buys it before the 30th can play it before the 30th

 

[arknor]

I had a safety car

Xbox game bar seems crap at capturing footage, it's a smooth 30 fps (I limited it cos my card sucks) on my screen but in the video it looks like it stutters.
also doesn't capture at my native res the video is 1920 x804 but my actual res is 3440x1440 so if the quality looks bad blame Microsoft.

everything is maxed out apart from AA which doesn't really matter at my res anyway and I turned shadows down cos I only have a 980ti

all my races so far are pretty boring but I'm playing the second worse team on the grid so can't compete at all anyway, I guess it gets more interesting when you start to be able to fight with other teams for points

 

[arknor]

I noticed in AppData\Local\F1Manager22\Saved\Config\WindowsNoEditor\
GameUserSettings.ini

sg.ResolutionQuality=87.000000

I wonder if changing it to 100 gives better graphics, might already be 100 for people with better GPUS than a 980ti though?


I'm going to restart as Alphine, being at the very back of the grid just makes me want to skip races because you can't compete with anything as aston martin, williams finishes behind you buy 30seconds+ every race and schumacher is the only guy you can fight with in the first stint

On the tyre strategy screen. What is the horizontal line.

I'm guessing

"Tyres too worn below this line" even, I can't be bothered to redo the image for a missing o
I'm assuming when you go below that threshold your lap times drop off a lot

In the actual race when your mechanic says the pit window is open if you don't pit he will pop back on the radio a few laps later to tell you now is the optimal time based on your pre-set strategy (it doesn't take into consideration if you come out in traffic or not)

Is there anyway of seeing is you was to pit, where you would come out. Eg pit from 7th and with the cars out there you would come out in 12th.

I don't think so but you can probably calculate roughly since the game claims on average a pit stop will cost you 25 seconds, but some circuits will have quicker pits and some longer.

 

[arknor]

Some fool lost half of their front wing



Same race some laps later, this fool lost more of his front wing again! but not so much



If only you could turn the UI off, I don't think you can?



would make for some nice closeups

Loook at the detail on the right front tyre

 

[arknor]

Nope not related in slightest. Just seemed to have looked at that and went yeah that would do.

weren't all motorsport manager games kinda the same since the 90s.

Motorsport manager probably isn't that different to browser based manager games either.

most genres of games usually aren't that different and when it comes to sports games most of them haven't changed much since their original incarnations.
every f1 game has basically been the same since forever oddly enough mirroring real life


I'm still playing it and having fun, I restarted 3 times though and finally decided to try and take Williams all the way since it will likely take a long time :S

I'm over 20 hours already and the only other people on my steam friends list who has it is almost the same.

if your into management games it's probably worth it or wait for patches and a cheaper price

 

[arknor]

30% tyre is as quick as 100%

under 30% it does? overheating is a thing though your tyres will wear quicker if they are in the red.
the thing is the driver audio complains the tyres are hot when they only enter the red for 1-2 seconds on a lap so you can just ignore what they say.

if the weather is cool enough you can pretty much go flat out and struggle to hit the red so the tyres aren't sensitive enough

the devs obviously made a lot of weird choices to rush the game out.

the 5 days early access on steam I honestly wonder if it was because it means no one can write a review on steam until the 30th and they feared bad reviews.


it's not even proper early access for preordering anyone who buys it at any point before the 30th can still play.

I honestly enjoy the game enough and find it mostly acceptable but it does have flaws and barebones aspects to it.

If they don't listen to the community and sort this game out then I can see people not buying it next year or the year after.

they should probably just update this game to 2023 for free and sort out all of the mechanics to what people expect from a manager game if they want to stay in peoples good books.

 

[arknor]

someone made a website to help with setups

https://f1-manager-calc.vercel.app/

obviously you need to input 2 different setups before it can try and work out what you should try.
put your actual setup on the left side, then click under each item on the right side and select optimal, bad or whatever.
once you have 2 setups stored on their hitting Find Nearest seems to give good suggestions


I got 100% on driver 1 and 97% on driver 2.
weirdly it ran out of setup options for driver 2 and couldn't find me a 100% but I guess it got close enough and way better than randomly choosing stuff your own each time.

car setup in this game is annoying as hell and looking at it all that it determines is how many bonus attribute points the drivers get anyway so I doubt the setup in reality makes any different outside of the bonus points awarded.
seems the only point of car setup is to be some stupid minigame that can give you at most about 15 attributes point buff spread across control , accuracy cornering, breaking and reactions

so even a fairly poor setup will likely be minimal difference in actual performance.

it probably counts towards the exp your drivers get though.

but shows any bizarre design choice they went with that seems only to keep the "simulation" fairly basic

oddly enough I don't think anyone has picked up on it yet as being an issue


TLDR car setup doesn't actually change the performance of your car it only amplifies your drivers abilities.

The only thing that effects your cars actual performance are the stats of each car part, setup is irrelevant so there's no setting a car up for a wet race etc

 

[arknor]

Steam needs a policy where bans by game devs can be appealed, and if steam find it unreasonable, they give the dev a choice (refund the game whilst you keep the license or unban).

Steams a steaming pile of turd anyway and completely anti consumer friendly imo...apparently its against steams forum policy to manipulate reviews or something, so if a games crap and you say "this games crap people should give it negative reviews" you would get banned.


This game is basically F1 Manager 2023 early access beta test simulator which you pay £45 for the pleasure.

Everything is so simple and feels like placeholder so they can test the engine and get a stable product, it's now entered Beta but instead of fleshing everything out and sorting the simulation parameters to be realistic they just launched it instead.


Wet tyres are as fast as slicks in the dry with 0.0mm of rain they just wear incredibly fast,

Tyres from 30%>100% don't seem to lose any time
Tyre compounds are so close in performance that using slicks is a waste of time so everyone who plays the game goes hard> mediums unless a track forces a 3 stop strat and then you might throw in a soft to plug the gap...

Crash animations are about 3 per track and look like place holder crashes mainly and totally unrealistic.
Lockup animations are the same 2-3 per track.
Running wide animations about 2-3 per track some of which look ridiculous like cutting across a chicane but then stopping instead of carrying on to the track.

they are clearly place holder animations to test the game code and get a stable product, apart from a couple of them that actually look petty good.

Drivers don't regress and get worse so everyone gets high level, the only difference is some retire earlier than others, probably based on when they randomly lose a car seat and don't get another.

Fuel doesn't seem to make any difference so +14laps and you can still match pace.

Car development was bugged and people pushing all the sliders to max seemed to be like an exploit (but they seem to have fixed that in a patch today.

No driver traits is lame, drivers don't have favourite tracks etc where they perform better as in real life.

almost every race 18 or 19 drivers will finish, The highest retirements I saw in a single race was 4 and that happened once near the end of a season at shanghai, the race had 4 safety cars and it seemed pretty fun that way..
I don't think I saw any mechanical failures, and 0 punctures.


The game throws money at you even as Williams so you can upgrade a lot of buildings in the first season.

There's probably loads of other stuff I can't think of from the top of my head.
it feels like early access but when they will be releasing 2023 in probably less than a year you know nothing will really change in this game.

if the devs had any honour they would declare anyone who bought 2022 gets 2023 for free and consider this "early access" for 2023 based on 2022 season cars.



Bizarrely with how barebones the game is I still played 60 hours and find it fun still.... I Put a negative review on steam though if people put positive the devs will thinK they can get away with bringing out a bare bones game that's clearly in reality only just moved from "alpha" to "beta" IE feature complete but placeholder mechanics, doesn't crash but now should be fully fleshed out


If it cost £20-25 then sure it would be "okay" maybe but for £45 and when it's going to be a yearly release title it's basically paying for a half finished game.

I'm still carrying on with it though, I'm in season 2 with Williams, I didn't develop my 2022 car and just fully researched for the 2023 season currently fighting for around 13th place in races and having fun.

anyone who starts with a top 4 or 5 car probably gets bored really fast though as there's likely not much of a challenge

 

[arknor]

Someone figured out you can interact with the games database with some cheat engine because it's stored in memory

This is the tyre settings the game launched with


DRS makes acceleration 65% faster

Dirty air difference
0.98 in highspeed
0.95 in medium speed and
0.9 in low speed

 

[arknor]

You played it for 60 hours, found it fun, and put in a negative review?

...

*facepalm*

Why should I mark a review as positive when they are prepared to chuck an early access game on people at full price as a finished release?


buy it and see how broken most of the simulation aspects are for your self, and how few animations there are in the game for everything