F1 22 launch in your time zone: Start playing ASAP on all platforms

Here’s when you can expect the digital versions of F1 22 to unlock in your time zone so you can start playing ASAP.

Formula 1 fans rejoice, for F1 22 is shooting onto consoles and PC very soon. Early access players will already be enjoying the game, but the rest of us mere peasants will get to play very soon. The game brings everything up to date with the real sport, with redesigned cars, new tracks, and more customization than ever before. Get hype. 

The game launches on July 1, but if you want to play as soon as possible, you’ll need the information in this guide. Here we’ll outline exactly when F1 22 is available to play in your time zone, so make sure to pre-load your digital version, if possible, and get ready to play.

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F1 22: tips and tricks for beginners

Whether you’re a newbie or a seasoned pro looking for a refresher on the fundamentals, we’re here to help you with some F1 22 tips and tricks.

F1 22 introduces a new era of Formula 1 to a new generation of players. Whether you’re a newbie or a seasoned pro looking for a refresher on the fundamentals, we’re here to help you with some F1 22 tips and tricks.

Some of these tips may seem obvious, while others are little details that will help you in the process of approaching the game – you’ll need a bit of preparation before jumping on a race weekend, and you see a huge difference if you really do. Once you’ve read our F1 22 review, it’s time to put your foot on the gas.

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F1 22 with a racing wheel is transformative, but you need lots of room

Playing F1 22 with a racing wheel is a completely different experience.

As a kid, I had this racing wheel for the Sega Dreamcast. You plugged it in and you were away, careening down hills in Crazy Taxi. Pedals on the back of the wheel represented the brake and accelerator. Start and stop. It was a simple time.

These days, it’s not so simple. I’ve been trying out the T248 Wheel from Thrustmaster, which is an entry-level wheel that’s presumably for people who don’t want an entire cockpit in their living room. The thing is, you probably still need an entire cockpit in your living room. 

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It comes with a wheel, a base to attach it to a table, and foot pedals. Let’s start with that first bit. Once you’ve got the wheel, you can’t just plonk it down on a flat surface and start driving. Force feedback allows you to feel like you’re fighting against a real car, but it’s also a good way to make your steering wheel somersault off a coffee table. Don’t ask me how I know that. 

The pedals feel like the real thing – sturdy metal footpads attached to pistons. Push down on the accelerator and away you go. Apply pressure to the brake and you’ll come to a stop. Use the clutch in conjunction with the back paddles on the wheel and you can shift gears manually, too. It’s also relatively easy to set up on Xbox and PlayStation, and once it’s plugged in, it calibrates itself (warning: this is where it might somersault off your table). Lovely stuff. 

But unless you’re planning to screw the pedal base into a lump of wood, you’re probably going to flip the unit over whenever you put your foot down. There’s not enough counterweight for it to just sit on the floor. It’s cool tech, but the reality of using it is cumbersome. 

Then there’s how it performs with games. I was hoping the experience would be transformative, despite the discomfort of my atypical setup. For Forza Horizon 5, that wasn’t the case. Your car constantly oversteers, and there’s no amount of fighting the wheel that will correct it. It’s great if you want to do donuts forever, but this isn’t a good demonstration for racing wheels. Not at all. 

It’s not the wheel either. There are endless Reddit posts about Forza Horizon’s wheel support, which has been notoriously rubbish since the series first graced our consoles. 

F1 22 is a completely different story, thankfully. Every minor adjustment of the wheel registers here, and using the wheel brings you much closer to the action on the track. You feel the rumble strips as you bank wide to come in tight around a corner, and the wheel fights against you in the same way a real car would when driving at these speeds. 

If you have the setup for it, a wheel and a VR headset are probably the ideal way to play this game. It makes even the Xbox Series X Pro controller feel prehistoric. Thanks to a whole face full of buttons, it’s easy to navigate menus and do all the fiddly bits outside of the racing, too. 

The only thing holding it back is the amount of setup you need. If you have a dedicated gaming room, absolutely get a racing wheel. If you’re like me and your gaming setup is in your living room, which also houses your partner, your kids, and your cat, probably hold off for now. Unless you’re blessed with a living room large enough to house a pretend cockpit at the back. If that’s you, go for it. Don’t let anyone tell you how to live your life.

Written by Kirk McKeand on behalf of GLHF.

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F1 22 hands-on preview – glamor and safety cars

With the full game releasing on July 1, we had one more chance to give EA Sports F1 22 a try before launch.

With the full game releasing on July 1, we had one more chance to give EA Sports F1 22 a try before launch. Our newest look at the racing game is all about F1 Life hub and the Pirelli Hot Lap mode, where you can drive expensive and charming supercars.

It might sound weird, but the biggest change we’ve noticed as we got access to this new build is the EA Sports component. This is the second Codemasters-created F1 game under EA, of course, but last year EA’s influence was just a logo animation before the main menu. This year, Electronic Arts is written all over the place, right down to the signature menu music, something you’ve seen happen in FIFA, Madden, NHL games in the past. Previous Formula 1 games never had anything like that before.

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F1 22 lets you live an F1 driver’s lifestyle, drive safety cars

F1 22 wants us to live the life of a superstar, on and off the track.

Way back when Codemasters first acquired the Formula One license in 2009, it used the following tagline for its debut multiplatform effort F1 2010: “Be the driver. Live the life.” And it fulfilled that brief as best it could, for the time. You took part in press conferences, attended meetings, generally watching the Formula One world in first person. But after the race was over and you were done fiddling with the menus, the lights went out. 

We’ve gone on all kinds of diversions with the series since then, delving into classic cars, R&D and team ownership. We’ve followed a quasi-cinematic story of a young driver making his way up through F2 and into the big leagues, in a series of playable vignettes sandwiched by cutscenes. But this year we’re going back to the original brief: F1 22 wants us to live the life of a superstar driver, on and off the track.

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As far as I’ve seen so far, that doesn’t involve posting problematic Instagram posts, walking through other drivers’ interviews while screaming or establishing vegan burger restaurant chains. Instead, F1 22 introduces several new components that give you some downtime, away from the adrenal overload of F1 racing. 

F1 Life is the most significant of these. It’s a new hub area, on first impression similar to NBA 2K’s Neighborhood, where players can customize their surroundings, hang out with other drivers, and show off their bling. And drivers at this level aren’t strapped for cash: when they do bling, they go big. Like, supercar big.

This brings us to the next major area of novelty for the series, the introduction of driveable road-legal vehicles. Inspired by the Pirelli Hot Lap events at real F1 race weekends, in which drivers take journalists and celebrities out for five of the more troubling minutes their gastrointestinal systems will ever experience, the new game brings in various handling-based challenges in vehicles such as the McLaren 720s, Mercedes AMG GT Black Edition, and Aston Martin Vantage. 

The latter two, of course, are the 2022 season’s official safety cars, and while that doesn’t mean you can drive the actual safety car in a race scenario, you can at least take the very same vehicles out onto the track and enjoy their handling for its own sake, away from lap deltas and porpoising. Although it wasn’t spelled out by developers at this stage, the implication is that these vehicles, like the furnishings around the scenes of F1 Life and the clothing your driver wears, will be bought using in-game currency, which in prior installments has been earned either through completing in-game objectives or paying for it with real-life cash. 

Speaking of porpoising, the latter aerodynamic phenomenon doesn’t feature in the new game. Like the teams themselves, developer Codemasters was blindsided by the new regulation cars tendency to bounce along the straights at high speed as the aero parts on their floors intermittently made contact with the ground. Perhaps the designers will have sorted out the problems before we even play the game on 1. July – either way, we won’t be bobbing along on our way to virtual victory. That’s good news for VR fans, who will be able to play F1 22 across all modes, including multiplayer with their headsets on. And their spew buckets close to hand. That’s thanks to Codemasters outsourcing the VR development to a third-party studio, Climax. 

We won’t see another cinematic journey like Braking Point this year, though. Creative director Lee Mather says the development time involved in turning around those stories means a two-year cycle. I doubt anyone will be taking to the streets in protest at the omission of such a mode this year, but it’s unusual to hear. FIFA’s The Journey and NBA 2K’s various MyCareer ‘joints’ as the kids call them both managed to bring new stories on an annual cadence, albeit with wildly different budgets and dev teams involved. Milestone just introduced an innovative playable documentary, Nine: Season 2009 with help from documentary maker Mark Neale. One suspects, now under EA’s stewardship and considerable budget, the F1 series could have rolled out a narrative mode if it really wanted to. 

Instead, the focus on the track is revamped handling behavior. In part that’s brought about by the dramatic 2022 regulation changes, which have introduced heavier, radically different-looking vehicles and shaken up the hierarchy of teams. You’ll feel that extra weight through the corners thanks to the force feedback in your wheel or the rumble in your controller, says Mather. Historically the F1 series has been outstanding at this, conveying incredible subtlety of feeling with just a couple of rumble motors, so it’s not simply hyperbole.

This preview also granted us hands-on access to a handful of tracks including the new Miami circuit however, so we didn’t have to take Mather’s word for it. Many laps deep into it, it’s clear that the characteristic subtlety of force feedback has been retained, and there are some noticeable differences in car behavior, particularly at race starts, where everyone moves off at a much slower rate and with low traction, producing great clouds of rubber smoke. Trackside kerbs are no longer as deadly, either, upsetting the ground downforce much less and, in our experience, hardly ever sending us into a spin as they used to in F1 2021

This doesn’t feel like a transformative step forward, though. Two longstanding bugbears remain, whatever the cars look like, and that’s disappointing to observe from a game that’s taking a year off doing the big grandstand story mode to focus on the driving. The first is that there’s something artificial about the way cars lose traction, and it’s not particularly enjoyable to manage. Whereas other racing sims give you a sense of where the car’s weight is and why you might be losing grip (ie your suspension has bottomed out on one side because you’ve thrown the chassis into a corner too aggressively), here there’s no such feedback. And on a pad especially, it’s very unforgiving to try and correct. The sensation’s especially noticeable on high-speed corners, of which the new Miami circuit has in great supply.

Secondly, AI is still very timid about passing you even if it has the pace advantage. This has been a problem for ages now, and it means you often end up with cars packed into a concertina behind you, ten of them separated by about 1.5 seconds, so when you pit in you lose an immersion-shattering number of positions and all sense of race strategy feels arbitrary. 

These impressions are, of course, generated by a work-in-progress build, and we hope our concerns are either rendered redundant, or sidelined by how pleased we are with the new additions. The off-track lifestyle components look genuinely exciting, and we’ve all been wanting to drive the safety cars for years – but F1 22 needs to secure the fundamentals if any of the rest is to hold value. 

Written by Phil Iwaniuk on behalf of GLHF.

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F1 22 Miami GP hands-on preview: breathing new life into Formula 1

Ahead of the race weekend, GLHF had the opportunity to take an in-depth look and play the brand new Miami Grand Prix in F1 22.

With Formula 1 entering a whole new era, we’re about to find out how video games will simulate the many innovations introduced by the new regulations. New cars with sexier designs, the return of ground effect to facilitate head-to-head during each race, significantly larger tires, and even a new track. In short, all the ingredients to ensure that F1 22, the official Formula 1 video game developed by Codemasters, becomes one of the most anticipated games of the year, are there.

Ahead of the race weekend, GLHF had the opportunity to take an in-depth look and play the brand new Miami Grand Prix, which is set in the already iconic Miami International Autodrome. Next week, we’ll have more details about how F1 22 looks and plays overall, as well as the new cars and the new dynamics they bring to the game. For now, though, let’s focus on Miami, as the new F1 game is our first chance to see the track in action.

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Looking at the layout of the track, I was a bit worried that the Miami GP would be some sort of Western Jeddah and, in fact, it partially is. Not that I dislike the Arab track – it’s not the best in safety, but the very high top speeds in such a tight circuit are certainly unique. In F1 2021, however, Jeddah was some sort of nightmare, since you could easily compromise your entire race by approaching one of the first super-fast turns slightly wrong.

The track does a nice job in mixing that feeling with parts from Abu Dhabi and Mexico City. The result is a less technical track than the latter, but equally full of overtaking spots.

The first turn is rather tight and slow, but from there you can jump in a series of quick corners to be tackled in fifth gear, barely touching the brake or taking your foot off the accelerator pedal. A left-right that precedes a long swerve to the left, with the grandstand on the right and a row of boats clearly reminding of the Monaco GP on the left – this also looks like decent overtaking spot, even though it looks a bit bold of an effort.

The following three turns look more like a straight than real curves, with Miami Dolphins’ Hard Rock Stadium on the left, and you speed across that at more than 320 km/h. A right-hander here seems to recall Mexico City’s turn around the Foro Sol (you’ll notice the infamous fake marina on the side), long but with a tight closure. Your temptation to overtake here should stay just that, a temptation.

And here you get to potentially the most iconic point of the track, some sort of Laguna Seca’s Corkscrew-like, a Baku styled left-right on a slight slope. Instead of having the Baku Castle’s walls, though, the chicane features grass on both sides. Still, it’ll be interesting to see how the new cars pass through such a tiny space. At the opening on the left, cars tend to lose the rear a bit, at least from these first tests, so that will also be something to keep in mind during the race.

Get out of this passage and you’ll find another straight where to travel at slightly more than 320 km/h on F1 22. Fans watching from their TVs will have a great time at this point of the track: cars will have to crawl under the Turnpike highway, which is less than 25 meters from the track itself. Together with the stadium, this is perhaps the only section that clearly signals the street track nature of the Miami GP.

Speaking of the stadium, speeding through the straight you find it on the left, and here you can appreciate the new F1 game’s level of detail: the Hard Rock Stadium’s structure is reproduced in its entirety, with the 3D model visible from the outside and the Hard Rock logo on the front. It’s just amazing to see it almost at the side of the road, but moving the view to give the architecture a quick look is not exactly recommended at those speeds.

At the end of the straight, after passing another tight left turn, you approach another slight left-right without braking, leading to the atypical straight. Here you can see the stadium on the right, above the paddock, with some spectacular ray-traced glass structures all over the place and, on the left and very close to the track, the grandstand. The atypical start of the straight and the following, tight right-hand corner means it’s not impossible to defend here, even under DRS, so you should expect some good challenges with fun outcomes.

If you were to describe the Miami International Autodrome with just one adjective, it would be “fast”. As you could easily see in this first press-exclusive demo, the circuit has 3-4 points for overtaking, including the two straights that will really stress those engines out (that’s good news for Ferrari fans, maybe? Thinking of Red Bull reliability…), so there will be plenty of room for spectacular maneuvers, even if we are talking about a street circuit.

While we’ll have more in-depth coverage for you in a week, you can’t really discuss F1 22 without touching upon the new Formula 1 cars. Aesthetically, they’re just delightful: the rounded lines of the cars already made them look like they were inspired by video games, and in the video game itself they do not disappoint at all.

TV-pod cameras allow you to appreciate the details of the new wheel covers, while the Chase near and far ones give you a proper look at the now much bigger 18″ tires, and all of that feeds into a noticeable visual impact. Much of this impact is dictated more by the design and regulation changes of Formula 1 rather than by the actual game – and, if you want, you can play a Sprint Race here too, even though it isn’t included in the real-life calendar. F1 22 also features some less washed out graphics, compared to last year’s iteration.

In that sense, the Miami GP helps the game pop. Palm trees, the luxurious structures, and the visual effects of the warm Florida sun on the screen, together with those light blue materials at every corner, give a pretty good idea of ​​how this track was designed – as in functionality, so in aesthetics – for a new generation of Formula 1 fans.

Will the new Miami track and the game leave a lasting mark on the world of motorsport, both real and virtual? We’ll have a clearer and more in-depth idea about that next week. In the meantime, F1 22 is out on July 1 for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S.

Written by Paolo Sirio on behalf of GLHF.

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F1 22 launches July 1, introducing VR, Life hub, Sprint Race, and Miami GP

EA Sports F1 22 has is coming!

EA Sports F1 22 is coming July 1, 2022, for PC, PlayStation, and Xbox consoles, Codemasters, and Electronic Arts have announced.

The game is based on brand new cars and regulations that have just kicked off a new era for Formula 1, with bigger tyres and the return of ground effect for more action-packed races.

On top of that, Codemasters is also adding for the first time ever the Sprint Races, a new qualifying format set to be hosted this year in Imola (Italy), Red Bull Ring in Austria, and Interlagos (Brazil).

The Miami International Autodrome in Florida will be the only new track included, even though Australian, Spanish and Abu Dhabi’s circuits will reflect their revised real-life layouts for this season.

F1 22 introduces F1 Life, a virtual hub that players will be able to customize with new luxury items, accessories, and supercars. 

These items will be earnable through gameplay, Podium Pass, and an in-game store. Champions Edition will provide fans with a three-day early access, and items inspired by Miami.

The title is also adding the highly requested virtual reality support, even though VR will only work on PC, across Oculus Rift and HTC Vive families of devices. No word on whether this option is coming to PlayStation VR along the way.

On track, new options called Immersive and Broadcast will serve as difficulty settings and accessibility features, as the latter will assist players with formation laps, safety cars, and pit stops, while the former will be a more risk-reward experience for veterans. 

Speaking of accessibility, the new Adaptive AI will allow less experienced players to stay competitive throughout the entire race, even though it’s not entirely clear how that’ll work right now.

Finally, My Team will feature new settings determining players’ budget, as they choose to build a Newcomer, Challenger, or Front Runner F1 team.

While the ten-year Career mode is back again, with two-player co-op still available from last year, there’s no mention of the Braking Point story mode, which has seemingly been cut for the moment.

Written by Paolo Sirio on behalf of GLHF.

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