As the release date for F1 24 got closer a few weeks ago, a vocal part of the community for the official Formula 1 game jumped on a criticism that is common in current games. The game engine that Ego is based on has been around for a long time; it has been used in every Codemasters Formula One game since the first one came out in 2009. People usually say that the games’ yearly similarities in look or gameplay are because of Ego’s legacy. Still, the truth is that technology has come a long way in fifteen years, and the developers have yet to make plans to stop using it any time soon. According to Lee Mather, Senior Creative Director of F1 24, EA Sports’ official F1 games will continue to be built on Ego for the immediate future. They will not switch to third-party technologies like Unreal Engine while they are in the Miami Grand Prix paddock. We switched to a new version of Ego in 2015, but we’re not using that version anymore, which is probably why most people don’t know about it. Since then, we’ve gone through hundreds of different versions,” Mather said, pointing out how far the brand has come just in terms of images. If you compare what we had back then to what we have now, [Dynamic Diffuse Global Illumination] would not be around. There were no ray-cast shadows or ray-tracing shadows. The whole list has new, cutting-edge items. The Xbox Series X and PS5 both had 4K graphics, as well as 120 Hz and 60 fps. Since Codies began, Mather has been making Formula One games. He says that F1 2015 was advertised as running “Ego 4.0,” and that’s the last time the version number was raised. This made it seem like the base the game was built on was stable. This doesn’t seem right for anyone who loads up 2015 and compares it to F1 23 from the year before. During our short conversation outside in the hot Florida sun, Mather said he couldn’t remember the exact number but that someone on the development team had kept track of how many lines of code had been added or changed since the 4.0 release. The head of the company said the difference was “important.” Fans of the Ego series should be glad that Codies is still supporting it. We’ve all seen what happened when EA Sports WRC switched from Ego, the engine used in Dirt Rally 2.0, to Unreal Engine 4 to make stages longer. To make matters worse, the game looked and played much worse, but it was still very easy to control. EA Sports WRC couldn’t be played on PC when it first came out because of the sadly rare case of Unreal Engine’s shader processing delay. Codemasters has been making racing games that work well and regularly for a long time. Formula One is able to keep this image because it uses the studio’s technology, which is only used for open-wheel circuit racing at the moment. He told me, “Ego gives us a lot of options.” We have to decide which technology helps Formula One; buying technology that doesn’t do anything is a waste of money. We want things that will help the game since it’s the F1 engine. The same is true in physics: we can only pick the parts we need for Formula 1 and not for other formulas we don’t need to worry about. Yeah, that’s what you’d expect from any computer game, like iRacing or the real Formula One game. Gran Turismo and Forza Motorsport don’t use Unreal because they have engines that are made just for those games. The rules for these games are very strict and hard to understand. Just look at the exact changes that Codemasters says will make F1 24’s physics better. “We immediately began refining [the handling approach] after the release of [F1] 23,” he said. Also, we had to replace big pieces of technology instead of just making the ones we already had better. Because of this, the DRS was totally redesigned, the aerodynamics were changed to reflect the car’s ride height better, and the suspension was redesigned to include kinematics. If you need to figure out what’s really new in a game like Formula One 24, it’s because it comes out every year and simulates a competition that, like any other big sport, stays the same from one year to the next. Ego has changed over time to deal with the new technology problems that come up with each new version. I can’t wait to see how F1 24 plays with those physical changes when it comes out on May 31.
