No F1 2012 on Wii U this year because of “tight deadline”, Brighton team could make future entries
Codemasters says that its “tight deadline” has forced the studio to decide against making F1 2012 for the Wii U and PlayStation Vita. Instead, the company wants to “keep maintaining the quality” of the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions.
According to F1 2012’s creative director Steve Hood:
“The internal Birmingham team is doing the 360/PS3 versions and that stretches us, to be honest. Year-after-year we’ve got that tight deadline of trying to get the game out, and so we can’t take on another one internally if we want to keep maintaining the quality or push for [F1] to be ever-improving.”
F1 won’t be releasing on the Wii U and Vita in 2012, but Hood believes that the series could hit both platforms in the future. Codemasters could ask a team in Brighton, a studio that often produces the PC editions, to handle this task.
“We work with a team in Brighton who do a lot of the PC work and work on some of the console elements, so we’re trying to expand that team. So as we’re doing that, I suspect that brings the likelihood of doing Vita or Wii U versions back onto the table as a discussion because you’ve got scope to deal with it. Whereas I think a lot of developers are often trying to cover every single format known to man without really increasing their teams sufficiently.”
This news does come as a bit of a surprise. Game director Paul Jeal recently indicated that we may not see the main F1 games on Wii U – at least on a yearly basis – due to the console’s potential audience. Jeal felt that F1 Race Stars may be a more appropriate title for the system.
