Gaming F1 2011 Review

Forget Vettel; we re-write the F1 2011 championship, but is the game worthy of a podium?

http://www.bit-tech.net/gaming/pc/2011/10/10/f1-2011-review/1

 

Good review and totally agree although i havnt found any bugs at the moment after a full season.

 

How come nothing was said about how the online sections of the game handle themselves? Online Coop was one of the big features for this year.

 

I don't know if its just me but the graphics and textures seem a step down from last years. Feels like I'm driving around toy town. This has stopped me playing until racedepartment sort out the textures.

 

Bugs new and old...

Don't forget that along with the AI/gameplay bugs, F1 2011 has inherited a number of fundamental bugs from F1 2010. People clamoured on the Codemasters forums for those to be fixed from day one of F1 2010, but they never were.

Two of these were (in 2010 and now in 2011):
Save corruption: At any point in your career (remember that these races may take hours at a time) you may find that your save has corrupted. You lose all progress (not just the last race...). Unless you back-up your saves after each race.
Stuttering: A problem with writing the replay file means that some players suffer several seconds of almost zero-fps gamepay at random intervals. That can completely ruin a career race or online race, putting you at the back of the field or in a wall from a safe lead. I run a machine with a 160GB SSD and 1TB RAID0 data array and still get this problem.

There were other bugs like these but these are the only two I recall right now, since they're very familiar to me. I didn't get hit by the save corruption bug in 2010, but a housemate did. This has not affected him in 2011, but now my other housemate and I both have it. I was affected by stuttering in the previous version and again in this one. One housemate also has it now, the other doesn't.

People relented when Codemasters said the bugs wouldn't be fixed in 2010 because they were told 2011 was in development. The forum consensus seemed to be, "We'll play 2010 as it is, but please fix the game-breakers for 2011".

Its a bitter pill to swallow that 2011 has all those old bugs still, plus a raft of new ones.

On top of that, my high-end desktop (with ATI card) runs at less than half the framerate of my housemates' machines (I've tested in XP and Win7). In most other games I get much higher performance than one house-mate and a little less than the other - which is what we expect given how our hardware compares. I now run F1 2011 on my nVidia GT555 powered laptop, because I get a *MUCH* better framerate despite less powerful graphics hardware, less (but slower) RAM, no SSD and a newer generation CPU in the laptop.

I really want to love 2011. The driving model is much improved, there are more online options and it looks lovely. I put over 100 hours into F1 2010, despite its flaws. But my frame rate has nosedived and I can't play without save corruption and stuttering threatening every race and a race-FPS which varies enormously: from sometimes playable to unplayable (sometimes in different parts of the same track). I played 2010 on high detail. 2011 is set to low/ultra low and its still struggling at times.

I'm really disappointed that bugs carried over from 2010 to the new version. To get such a huge hit in performance has also been a frustration.

I've only got experience of this game on 5 computers. But ALL of them have had one of the two bugs I described above.

 

'It's still too flawed to be considered an essential purchase'

AND YOU STILL GIVE IT 70%?

That's the mark needed for a FIRST CLASS HONOURS DEGREE, the top end of the spectrum!

What does a game have to do to get 50%? Contain faeces in the box?

 

The thing is, when you look past the bug splattered veneer and lack of depth, the actual racing is brilliant. I'd say 75% is a fair score, but it's not exactly top class is it?

Also, its a little disingenuous to compare to a degree, as we actually award 90%+ scores - something that degrees very rarely do.

 

Is it a dual GPU card? or a xfire rig? disable crossfire. The game has negative crossfire scaling.

 

Are the save games in F1 2011 still those obscure file names, in those hard to locate folders? In F1 2010 I put in a lot of hours, only for me to suffer a corrupt save game, a similar situation also to Dirt 2.

Knowing Codemasters, it will be another case of a patch *again*.

 

I'm playing it on medium on the PS3 with a Logitech G27 and I'm finding it really difficult. Not sure what I'm doing wrong (although I'm not sure if my KERS button is working) but I can't get my Lotus out of last place at the minute!

 

Iv just graduated with a First Class Honours degree and yes you are absolutely right universities never give anything above 75, especially in the Arts. In the sciences or in numerate disciplines it may be possible to get something like 98% because the answers are clearly right or wrong, but in the social sciences it is very difficult to get above 70. So yeah, it was a bad comparison to compare your scoring method with that of uk universities.

 

Bit-Gamer uses the full scale when scoring. While a 70 per cent score is positive (because the benefits outweigh the flaws and it's good game on the whole) it is not equal in equivalent to a first class honours degree (for the reasons outlined above), as evidenced by the lack of award. 70 percent says "This is a good game. It's not OMG spectacular, but it's better than average and enjoyable for those who are interested."

50 percent is our average. I always find it funny when we give a 50 percent score as an overt "this is average, nothing more or less" and then have to face up to readers saying "Well, why such a low score then?"

 

Until this weekend F1 2011 had disappointed me, but now I'm totally won over. As mentioned above there are some annoying bugs, the most irksome for me being that the tyre simulation for AI drivers is broken when running on Inters in 50% length races - clue: there is none.

However, this game only comes alive when you start tinkering with the setups. If you stick to the 'Quick Car Setups' or merely tweak those, it's a waste of time. They're labelled very poorly, putting the emphasis on Wet vs. Dry as opposed to High vs. Low Downforce. Consequently I think a lot of people will choose low downforce set-ups when you should be using high, mainly in the dry.

Get it right and you can really see the difference. I slashed four seconds off my fastest time at Barcelona by getting the setup right, and went from competing 'in the teens' at Professional difficulty to up in points positions in a Team Lotus. My fastest lap was actually a few tenths off the leaders.

I've switch up to Legend now, and won't be going back.

If you don't want to fiddle with the settings yourself, go to www.racedepartment.com forums. They have a database there.

 

Are you playing as Team Lotus (the green ones)? They do not have KERS fitted this year, neither do HRT or Virgin.

 

I can only think he's talking Lotus Renault, as racing as Lotus Lotus means no Kers, so a 19th grid place at best!

 

How was the GFWL experience? Only thing stopping me purchasing.

 

I have not had any issue. Log in once, set it to auto-sign in. Done. However, I have the Steam version so haven't had a patch pushed though GFLW, so can't comment on that.

 

No I meant Lotus Lotus which explains why KERS isn't working. Doh!

But still I'm playing on medium (ABS on, TC medium) and cannot qualify in anything other than last!

 

Its a 6950 2GB. So shouldn't be having scaling issues. CPU, OC 8300 quad @ 3.2GHz. Not incredible, but no slouch and giving me about half the performance of my housemate's stock Q6600 with a 9800GTX.

@Kingsley, I believe a patch came through on Steam for me at the weekend. Something downloaded for me and my Rapture drivers updated the next time I started the game. That patch was with Microsoft early last week for approval. Patch 2 is also in development.
I have high hopes (I just hope they're not dashed), because if the game ran OK and the save-games were reliable, I could forgive a few weavy AI driver bugs and sometimes-bizarre penalties because its actually a beautiful sim with a rewarding driving model. Once you turn on fuel and tyre simulation it becomes really immersive.

As for GFWL... I fail to see why this is used. The only thing I've noticed I can store are car setups and I have a feeling (please correct me if I am wrong) that those don't appear if you install the game on another machine (desktop/laptop, I'm not talking naughty piracy). If your saves and controller config were stored in the cloud, brilliant. But they're not.

Yesterday another of the computers in our house suffered the save corruption bug. The good news is that the guys told me they found a community fix (check the codies forums, sorry, I don't have the link) which restores the save without losing your controller config and career history.

 

I'm surprised. I'm running a Q9650 @3.6GHz with a HD 5770 at 1920x1200. Vanilla CD install (no patches). Performance is nice and smooth and I've not seen any stuttering issues in the 2 100% races I've completed at Abu Dhabi (which also models the day-night transition correctly unlike the permanent sunset in 2010).

The obvious thing to suggest is to update Catalyst - I had weird glitches with DIRT3 (certain whites being displayed as red) which corrected with an update.Not sure what else to suggest.