With the new Formula 1 season upon us, it feels only right that we start preparing for this year’s F1 game. We joined Senior Creative Director Lee Mather and Creative Director Gavin Cooper for a breakdown of EA Sports F1 25’s newest features and updates before the game’s official launch on the 30th of May.
My Team 2.0
While My Team was introduced in 2020, it’s been a relatively stable yet safe experience over the past few years. Sure, it’s a great way to get stuck into the finer details of the sport as far as driver management and overall team development goes, but F1 25 is about to take things one step further. It will scrap the “Owner Driver” concept, where you would play as a driver and run the team, in favour of being the overall owner of a team, where you will now manage two drivers.
In a bid to create a more realistic, authentic experience, players will now need to consider their decisions more carefully, where you may need to prioritise one driver over another. This might include contract disputes and offers, and even choosing which driver gets a particular upgrade.
Your overall performance will still determine your XP points, and you will be able to spend them across the three teams within your team: Engineering, Persdonanel and Corporate. Players can also manage their Fan Rating, a feature that has been brought over from F1 24, where drivers will be able to boost their fanbase by completing things like Accolades or simply with clean driving.
This will also tie into your current form, which the team refers to as Sentiment. Sentiment will also impact where your team sits in the overall rankings and can determine which drivers want to race for you in the future.
F1 25 will feature a Team HQ and will break down the number of people working within the aforementioned Engineering, Personnel, and Corporate teams. A facility improvement system will allow you to increase the size of each of these three teams, which could yield certain benefits but also come at a cost. Certain teams can offer their unique benefits, and you’ll generally have to choose how to expand and bolster these teams in any order you see fit. For example, the Engineering team could grant you better upgrades for your car.
R&D will also see a few interesting tweaks and has now been split into two separate systems. Research will allow you to spend Resource Points to purchase upgrades, in which you can build parts to upgrade your car. However, you can now choose how to develop those parts. You can choose to develop two parts at once, which might be cheaper but take longer. You can also take the easy road and develop one part quicker, but now you’ll have to choose which car to add it to. It presents an added layer of depth and choice from what was otherwise a single, straightforward system.
Sponsors also return, and you can now progress these relationships further with new reqrds based on your loyalty to them. Finally, Dirver Icons will now feature across My Team and Dirver Careers, with AI teams being able to recruit drivers for the first time. You can now even add an eleventh team to the grid with Team Icons, but we’ll touch on that a little later.
General Advancements and Customisation
F1 25 will feature certain LIDAR scanned circuits for greater authenticity and realism. These circuits will include Bahrain, Miami, Melbourne, Suzuka and Imola. These scans will also allow additional shading for greater track detail, even going as far to include the correct species of foliage that feature around the track. Silverstone, Austria and Zandvoort circuits have also been added as reverse tracks.
Declas were never a focal point of customisation, but I feel these advancements will go a long way to make them popular again. An entirely new decal editor will allow you to create more detailed logos and decals, which can now be put anywhere on the car. These can now be put in place of existing logos and spoisoir decals. Decals now have various coloured letters and gradients, which will allow you to create more realistic decals. New base liveries will also be themed around existing sponsors.
For added realism, engine noises will also be determined based on the suppliers and parts you pick, while special edition loiveries will now be available on official cars across Driver Career, Grand Prix, Time Trial and F1 World.
Improved viuslas will also include Path Tracing, a feature that utilises ray tracing to bounce light off additional objects in the environment to give you a more detailed view of the track. However, it’s worth noting that this feature is exclusive to PC and only for supported GPUs.
Braking Point 3
Braking Point returns, and I cannot contain my excitement. Introduced in F1 21 and then again in F1 23, Braking Point 3 essentially continues the story of the fictional Konnersport racing team. This mode is relatively linear, but it has always been well-acted and incredibly engaging, especially for a game that is set on creating an authentic experience.
While the experience doesn’t cater to minute changes in difficulty like the other modes, there are now four difficulty levels instead of three. Players can also now choose to play between two of the Konnersport drivers, each with their unique perspective and objectives. We’ve even been told that some choices could influence the end of the story.
Braking Point will now transition directly into the main Career Mode to help the more casual fans get stuck into some of the deeper and customisable experiences, with the same characters and team they’ve spent most of their time with.
F1: The Movie
Hitting theatres June, the official F1 movie starring Brad Pitt will feature in F1 25. Players who purchase the Iconic Edition of F1 25 will be able to access the fictional APXGP team at launch and earn coin rewards based on the movie. The Team Icons feature will allow you to add an eleventh team into My Team and Career Modes, which will also allow you to add the APXGP team and its drivers into the fold.
Post launch, there will also be several specific scenarios based around key events from the film. These events will cut between real footage and gameplay, and gameplay will also be colour-graded to match the look and feel of the film. Players will get Joshua’s helmet at launch, while players can unlock Brad Pitt’s character, Sonny’s helmet, for completing all scenarios. It’s worth mentioning that this portion seems locked behind the Iconic Edition of the game, at least for now.
Collaborative Play and Invitations
F1 World will no feature a new system called Invitationals, which can be gained from siompley racing around each track. It essentially acts as a one-time key for a particular race with its unique combination of track, weather setting, and even gameplay mods that can make the experience more difficult. These events will then create a lobby for you to invite your friends to help score a certain number of points and share in the available rewards. Invitations can range from uncommon to rare, each with its own rewards and available points.
A new Driver of the Day system will now regularly point out and reward clean driving and fair play, which can help you add new friends for future races. A new Flashback system will also follow you back as you rewind in time, instead of popping you back in that spot.
Thoughts So Far
EA Sports F1 25 seems to be throwing everything but the kitchen sink at us as far as new features and modes are concerned, and with a new F1 film on the way, it is a great time to be a fan or a great time to jump on board at the very least.
While general gameplay took a backseat this time around, players are surely set to get a more robust and varied experience with new ways to interact and experiment with pre-existing modes.
EA Sports F1 25 will launch on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S and Windows PC on the 30th of May, 2025. Stay tuned for our full review closer to release.
