Details For F1 2013 Weather System Revealed & More!
Thanks xboxer360.com and a nod from my colleague Alex at Push-Start, we have come across some information in regards to the new weather system that will feature in this year’s F1 2013. It may not seem a like a big detail to some, but the weather can play a huge role in a drivers success in that particular race. Not only will heavy rain change the racing surface, but it can drastically change tires and pit stop tactics.
Coming straight from the Codemasters blog, featuring in a Q&A style article, many questions were answered. Below is the question and answer given for the game changing weather dynamics:
The weather system has been a staple of our Formula One games since we launched back in 2010. A number of other racing games have tended to steer clear of weather due to the complexity involved, not just in the visuals but also in tying it all together with the gameplay experience too.
Last year we added localised weather, so that it can rain in a single section or corner of a track. This year improvements have been made to knit everything much more tightly together, both visually and from a gameplay perspective. We have a brand new series of weather scenarios, each tied in to the geographical location of the race as well as its place on the race calendar based upon historical data. These weather scenarios are much longer, around four hours, and the game randomly picks a scenario and a point on it so that players will rarely play the same weather conditions twice.
Even the Race Engineer doesn’t know 100% what is happening with the weather and sometimes calls it wrong! Gameplay-wise our focus has been on eliminating any disparity between what the player sees and what they experience when driving in the wet, as well as improving visually on the wet weather transition between light, medium and heavy rain, thus creating a more realistic wet weather experience. The track surface and a lot of the VFX we use to simulate the wet weather have also been improved.
The other questions that featured in the blog post including; How do the likes of Abu Dhabi and Singapore (twilight/night time) races affect the art team?, Will there be any extreme visual improvements over the console version when using ultra settings on PC? ,Now that we’ve had the United States Grand Prix has the Circuit of the Americas been changed/updated in anyway? And more.
You can check out the blog post from Codemasters by clicking HERE.
F1 2013 will release for the PC, PS3 and Xbox 360 on October 4th in Europe and then the 8th in North America.