I may be a year late with this, seeing as F1 24 has just come out, but the story mode in F1 23 is just awful. I think it fails in two key aspects. The first aspect is the characters. The story is based around a fictional Formula 1 team and some of their top personnel: the two drivers, the team principal, and one of the financial backers of the team. And without exception they are all quite unlikeable, poorly written, badly characterised, and don’t act like people that exist in the real world. This makes the story feel strangely detached from reality.
The second aspect is that they’ve tried to make a story-led experience with a bold narrative, and they’ve clearly put in a lot of effort, but this kind of thing doesn’t work in the context of interactive videogames. In the game there is typically one cutscene before the players involvement to set the scene, and then another one after it that plays out what happened after the gameplay criteria is met. These cutscenes are set in stone, and as a player, you don’t get to see the second one unless you successfully complete what is required of you in the gameplay portion. At one point the objective is to pass your team-mate and finish in the points; that sounds quite straightforward, right? The thing is, videogames have the potential to be pretty open-ended, with stories emerging from what happens in the gameplay. I passed my team-mate. Slowed down and let him pass me. Then passed him again. Then I stormed through the rest of the pack, taking everyone out as I went. My team-mate and I finished the race in first and second place. Watching the cutscene that came after successfully completing this short bit of gameplay was a jarring experience.
Rather than being over the moon that she had just won her first Grand Prix, not to mention being the first female winner of all time, she was complaining that her team-mate didn’t let her pass when they were in 14th and 15th position. And there was no mention at all that she had just, under my control, smashed every other racer off the track. I completely understand what the team were trying to achieve, and the story probably made perfect sense for those that played it properly, but videogames are pieces of interactive entertainment, and such shenanigans should be accounted for, or at least mitigated against. Sadly though we’re not quite at the level of creating procedurally generated cutscenes that make sense in videogames when players go off the script.
