There's a little more excitement than usual around next year's Formula 1 season, even among seasoned car enthusiasts like myself. You see, the series brings some new rules control how its cars will look and how they will perform, meaning that on paper there is more scope for major changes to the established hierarchy. With that in mind, I'm a little unsure how to feel about EA and Codemasters announcing that they won't be making F1 26, but will instead move on to 2027 with DLC to fill the gap.
Codemasters Senior Creative Director Lee Mather wrote that the call was made as part of a “strategic reset” of the studio's F1 games, and emphasizes that they and EA are “fully committed” to moving F1 games forward. The latter is likely due to the fact that fans of rally simulators saw this ad and initially thought: “oh no not again', especially after Codies released annual F1 game since 2010.
Instead of a new game in the first year of these new 2026 rules, F1 25 will receive paid DLC for the 2026 season, which Mather wrote will “bring players closer to the major changes to the sport for 2026, which include new cars, sporting rules, teams and drivers.” Then, in 2027, a new Formula 1 game will be released, which “will mark the beginning of a new and more extensive Formula 1 experience.”
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On the one hand, I was on the receiving end of the annual iterations of sports games that often ended up being pointless for years. Unless big changes are planned, skipping a year and simply updating the list to the latest entry often seems like the best option for all parties, except perhaps the accountants. Formula 1 is a little different from ball sports, but spending a year just seeing how the new rules would affect real-world racing may well result in you being able to simulate it better without having to struggle too much to react to something unexpected right out of the gate might be just as good a decision.
On paper, on the other hand, it might have made more sense for Formula 1 25, the final year of the current rules in place from 2022, and a season in which many teams are skimping on development of current cars to concentrate on the entirely new challenge of 2026, making it a year without a new game. Give the developers a year to really dive into the new rules and see if they can create a new simulation pack in time and update the series with them. Naturally, this assumes that this pause was planned in advance and that I did not take into account any factors other than what sounds good from the outside.
Let's see how it turns out. As of now, next year will be the first year in a long time that I won't be spending some of my time learning about the latest Codemasters racing game.
