F1 25 Unveiled: Creative Director Gavin Cooper’s Race To Reinvent The Formula One Games

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How much did working with LIDAR scans for select tracks differ from the “conventional” method used for the others?​

The LIDAR models in EA SPORTS™ F1® are uniquely built using data scanned during actual F1® race weekends. It took a lot of work to adapt each circuit to have sub-centimetre accuracy to every bump and curve on the asphalt. Also, F1®-supplied data includes extra detail that is only present during an F1® weekend, from additional safety barriers, TV cameras, marshal posts, advertising boards, fan areas, and more. We’ve even paid attention to the placement and species of trees and updated the asphalt textures to make them more accurate than ever. Players will be able to experience the most detailed circuits ever released for an F1® game.

Could you describe the non-LIDAR method?​

The tracks are built using a combination of 2D and 3D CAD drawings, supplied to us directly through F1®. This ensures that everything we create, whether it’s the track, kerb placement, or circuit buildings, is based on real-world, measured data.

We also undertake regular track photography sessions whereby we capture everything we can see for each circuit, from full 360 degree imagery along the entire length of the circuit to detailed shots of kerbs, buildings, asphalt, grass and gravel surfaces. On top of this, we refer to the latest race, practice and onboard footage, drone photography, geospatial imagery and even aerial photogrammetry to ensure all of our tracks are as precise as they can be.

With five tracks having received the LIDAR treatment, are there more coming? If so, which ones?​

We’re definitely seeing these LIDAR updates as the start of a process. We received our LIDAR data from scans that were taken during the 2024 championship, so for F1 25, we focused on circuits earlier in the calendar, in order to finish the tracks for the game’s release. Now we have all the circuits scanned, so for any future updates, we can focus on the tracks we think would most benefit from an update. And part of figuring that out will include listening to our fans, seeing which tracks they’re most excited to see updated.

Would it even be feasible to change a track that’s already in F1 25 to a LIDAR version?​

All things are possible, but it throws us some potential challenges. For example, catering for existing save games so as not to destroy players’ progress is complicated. Do we keep both versions of a track in the game to ensure players don’t have their mid-session saves nuked? In that case, what architecture do we need to put in place, what logic to support having two versions of the same track in the same game at the same time? Everything is possible, but it’s an extra complication that means we can’t spend time and effort somewhere else. And that has to be balanced against everything else we want to do not only in 25, but in future titles as well.

With how other EA Sports titles handle player rosters (FC, NHL, NFL), would you consider letting players create custom “driver rosters” to reflect real-life driver changes as quickly as possible, possibly with online rosters that are the same for everyone regardless of their custom changes for online modes?​

It’s definitely one to consider for the future, but there’s nothing I can talk about on that subject right now.

As the community keeps asking about them time and time again, what’s the status of classic cars and tracks? Could circuits from the younger past be a good way to introduce more variety to the calendar?​

Classic tracks are something that we’d consider in the future if the opportunity to do so presented itself. As for classic cars, while the sport’s most dedicated fans are keen for them to return, we know that despite the large effort that went into delivering them in older titles, they weren’t very well engaged with by the community overall. If we were to look to bring them back, we’d want to do so in a way that made them more fun and interesting to play with – it wouldn’t be sufficient to just throw them into our existing game modes like Grand Prix and Time Trial.

While our most vocal players tell us that they want classic cars, they also wanted My Team changes, better customisation, improved tracks – and these are the things we chose to focus on for F1 25, features that benefited a broad swathe of our playerbase. Then we also focused on features that appeal more to the more casual players such as Braking Point, reverse tracks, and the opportunity to work on F1 The Movie content.

Community Questions​

What made you decide to make reverse tracks a relatively prominent focus of F1 25’s new features, and were the few reverse tracks chosen for any specific reason(s)?​

Our game is enjoyed by a wide variety of different types of players, and we want to make sure that we’re serving up something for every member of our audience. If you’re not interested in My Team, maybe Braking Point is more your thing. Maybe you’re the kind of player who could spend as much time in customisation as you do on-track, or the decal editor is the most relevant feature this year.

For a game founded on the racing experience, reverse tracks were a nice, easy-to-understand feature that we could talk about, that offered value to all kinds of players – they add variety to your career, new challenges for those who want to master every circuit, and they offered a fantasy F1 experience that you could only really enjoy in the official game.

For that reason, they were definitely an element we wanted to make sure didn’t get lost amongst the multitude of features/bug fixes/quality of life improvements that we also strive to deliver each year.

As for why these tracks? Ultimately, it was a subjective call based on which we thought worked best (a lot of tracks would be quite problematic to adapt in this way, for example, if their pit lane entry/exit isn’t sympathetic to it), and which ones were the most fun. We feel these were a good set – but if players think we missed a trick and desperately want to see other tracks given the reverse treatment, we’ll be listening!

What are the dev team most proud of/excited about for F1 25?​

The dev team is a lot like our audience – we’re a varied bunch, so it’s hard to pinpoint one innovation. What I do feel confident saying is that we’re proud of delivering a game that has resonated so strongly with our community. It’s been great to see players getting to grips with all the different aspects of this year’s title, and having fun doing it.

If I have to pick one feature, it would be Braking Point – seeing our characters grow and evolve over time, seeing players continue to engage with their trials and tribulations, and seeing new players come on board. That’s been a really fun journey for both our protagonists AND for the team who deliver it every other year – adding to it with this year’s improvements such as letting you choose which driver to play as, the new difficulty level to expand the range of player skill levels who can enjoy it, improvements to the press sequences and so on. It’s very much a worthy new chapter.

What was it like integrating the F1 movie into F1 25, and how did you approach doing this?​

We were lucky enough to be approached to be part of the film long before it was named/announced. Given that chance, we were excited by the opportunity to create an experience that extended beyond the film, allowing players to recreate these thrilling on-track set-pieces in the context of putting themselves in the driver’s seat. That was something that Apple/Warner Bros. really liked, and they gave us the space to explore it.

In addition to the above, I have to shout out the designers who took all their expertise from designing and balancing the on-track scenarios in Braking Point, our existing narrative mode, and leveraged it to recreate those memorable racing moments from the film. Telling a story as a filmmaker is hard enough when you’re in control of every aspect of what the viewer sees and how it’s presented, but turning those heavily scripted beats into something interactive, something you can play, is a real challenge.

Are there any features or elements that the dev team have a strong passion for but for whatever reason never made it into any of the F1 games?​

Always! We’re a passionate bunch! We always tend to start out by going big, then over the course of development, we start to trim stuff until we hit a feature set that we know we can deliver to the level of quality that our players expect. So there’s always stuff on the cutting room floor. Sometimes that’s a painful process, and sometimes (quite a lot of the time) we get to the end and we realise we didn’t really need that stuff anyway – the process forces us to focus on the elements that are most important to the experience we’re trying to create.

But I can’t really speak too much about the painful cuts because we keep them all, and there’s always a chance we may have the opportunity to try again in the future…

You have always done a great job in rally games when it comes to engine sounds, but in the F1 series, the engine sounds are nowhere near real. Why is it so hard to get the engine sounds to sound real?​

Engine sounds are something we work on every year, but while we’re very lucky to get to see the cars in person and directly record them, there are a number of impediments our audio folks face that they haven’t necessarily had to deal with in other Codemasters games. For starters, we can only record audio during winter testing, where the cars tend not to be running at full performance.

That means that at the top end, we have to use audio manipulation to extrapolate what the cars sound like at that level from the rest of the engine audio.

We also have to account for the fact that we’re not currently able to place the microphones on the car in the exact physical location as those placed on the car for the broadcast audio (which is obviously what we’re compared to). Despite that, we iterate on this process as much as we can and are constantly seeking ways to improve this in the future.

Will mouse support be integrated for PC players?​

For a game as menu-heavy as F1, implementing proper mouse support and updating all those screens is a significant undertaking. So it’s not a “no”, but more a question of finding the right time to do it, where doing so aligns with features in such a way that we can offer it to PC players without compromising our ability to deliver a compelling feature set for the rest of our players, for whom mouse support has less relevance.

Why is the official TV graphics package that is used in real race broadcasts not included in the game?​

The game UI and the broadcast graphics are very different systems—our UI is interactive in a way that the broadcast graphics don’t accommodate, and information relevant to a spectator can be different from that which you need as a player.

Broadcast graphics don’t need to show gamertags or platform icons. They don’t need to worry about ERS, or the MFD. They may sometimes show a track map, but spectators don’t need that map to be permanently visible in the same way that a player might. On the other hand, broadcast graphics throw up elements such as those used in qualifying that are perfect for spectators, but might be quite intrusive if you’re trying to drive the car at the same time.

Sometimes there are awkward overlaps between systems – instances where we actually do want to show a given piece of information that you’d see in the broadcast, but we can’t do it the same way as the broadcast does because it would negatively impact gameplay, so we have to find a different solution.

Ultimately, we must advocate for the playable experience because that’s what players are primarily here to do—they want to drive the car and have the information presented to them in a format that’s sympathetic to that point of view.

What is your stance on improving VR support on PC, and could VR be supported on PS5 in the future? How about triple screen support?​

VR’s awesome, it’s something that really lets players immerse themselves in the fantasy of being a Formula 1 driver. It lets them appreciate the huge amount of detail we put into the creation of our cars, and the sheer scale of the circuits from the perspective of a single-seater racing cockpit. To that end, we’ve made a number of improvements to VR in F1 25, and the player response to those improvements is feeding into internal conversations about how we might take those improvements further in the future.

In terms of PSVR2, that’s still something we continue to discuss internally, but there’s nothing we can report at this point. Likewise, triple-screen support is something we’re keenly aware would offer real value to many of our players, but there’s nothing we can discuss right now in that area.

How do you reflect on the entire catalogue of F1 games under the Codemasters/EA banner and their evolution? How far would you say they have come?​

I feel it’s often difficult for me to gauge that, given the nature of an annual sports title. If I try to think back to where we were three games ago, I’m looking at F1 22. For some other gaming franchises, I could be looking back 15 years!

So if I force myself to think in those terms, I think there’s undoubtedly been a significant evolution throughout Codemasters’ tenure. Part of that is obviously the sport itself. Formula 1 is a dynamic sport compared to others, with its ongoing changes to regulations and the rapid pace of technological advancements that apply to these amazing feats of engineering. The way the audience of the sport has changed has also had an impact on how we innovate.

We’ve seen the rise of Drive to Survive, a new, younger audience coming in, and the rise of social media. All these things have impacted the game, it’s driven us to embrace things like narrative (such as in Braking Point and F1 The Movie content) and live service. It’s pushed us to open the experience to newcomers and let them define their identities in multiplayer and My Team – something that we started back in 2019 and continue to improve on with this year’s decal editor.

Career modes have changed and grown. Graphics technology has grown year on year – you can see the benefits this year, especially in terms of the improvements we’ve made on PS5 Pro, and with Path Tracing for high-spec PC players.

I don’t know how you quantify all that, how you say “we’ve come precisely this far” but I think it’s clearly a profound difference between where we started, and where we are now in 2025.

Interview Ends​

What do you want to see in the future of F1 25? Is it a title you are going to continue to invest time into throughout the year? Let us know in the comments down below!