Hands-on with F1 25’s new Braking Point 3 story mode

F1 2019 featured a novel story mode with fictional drivers, cut scenes and playable scenarios. It also marked the first appearance of the devious Devon Butler as your main rival.

Since then, Codemasters has established a two-year cadence for its F1 game story modes. F1 2021 renamed it to Braking Point, with you playing as rising star Aiden Jackson battling to defeat Butler.

F1 23 switched things up. After racing as rivals, Jackson and Butler found themselves working together as teammates for the fictional Konnersport team. It also introduced Butler’s sister, Callie Mayer, as a new protagonist and the first female driver to win Formula 2.

Two years later, Braking Point is returning in F1 25 with a few noteworthy changes. Picking up from where F1 23 left off, Aiden Jackson, Devon Butler and Callie Mayer return, and the stakes are higher than ever for Konnersport as they fight for the World Championship. A new trailer gives us a deeper look at what to expect in F1 25.

Raising the stakes

“When we introduced the characters of Braking Point in 2021 and Konnersport in 2023, it was really important to us that it felt authentic and didn’t feel realistic that those characters could come in and start winning championships right from the outset,” explained F1 25’s Creative Director, Gavin Cooper.

“But the time we’ve spent and invested in them over the last five years or so has brought us to the point where we can tell that story now.

“We can tell a story that puts them in contention for the championship against the official teams as rivals, which brings us closer to the sport but also gives us plenty of opportunity for the drama and theatrics that we’ve come to enjoy from Braking Point.”

“In the [F1] 25 story, it is very much about that championship battle. But at the same time, behind the scenes, there’s a key event that happens early in the story that throws the team into chaos. It’s very much a story about those characters coming into their own.”

We played the first two chapters in our hands-on. Like before, each chapter drops you into a race scenario with objectives to complete before you can advance the story.

Driving as Mayer in our playthrough, the first scenario sees you catch up and secure third place or above after being taken out in a clash with Max Verstappen. Another has you trying to overtake McLaren’s Lando Norris before a certain lap.  

Previous Braking Points were often criticised for being too linear, something deliberate according to Cooper. “At its core, we know Braking Point is a linear narrative mode. And that’s intentional. We have a career mode where players can tell their own stories. You can win every race, DNF every race and everything in between. It’s all about you and you making your own story.”

“But Braking Point was always intended to be something different for a different kind of player who wants a tightly scripted narrative. That said, we’re always looking for ways to increase the impact the player can have on that story.”

Choose your driver

Bonus objectives unlocked from on-track actions and answers to press interviews helped make the narrative less linear in Braking Point 2. Braking Point 3 takes this a step further by letting you choose which Konnersport driver to play as in key scenarios. This results in different objectives, narrative elements and even an alternative ending.

“That can have a number of impacts, particularly on how you view the story. When you finish the event, you’re going to be going back to that driver’s room,” Cooper explained.

“You’re going to be interacting with the characters that are important to them. You’re going to experience the phone calls, the social media stuff. It’s very much based around their perspective on what’s going on in the broader narrative.

“It may even impact the objectives you get in some races. You may get different objectives if you pick one driver over another. Ultimately, it can even influence what happens at the end of the story.”

Whereas other modes let you change the AI difficulty across a 1-100 slider, previous Braking Points featured three set difficulty levels. By introducing a new, higher difficulty level, Braking Point 3 should cater for a broader range of skill levels.

“Because it is such an authored experience, we can’t support a 1-100 difficulty slider. There’s a lot of work that goes into authoring these scenarios for every difficulty level we have,” said Cooper.  

“We’re conscious that in previous Braking Points, because we only had three difficulty levels, people at the top end of skill were underserved and they found the mode quite easy.”

“We’ve made a number of improvements to the efficiency of the way we can author these events. That’s allowed us to introduce a fourth difficulty level, which gives us a much more challenging, top-end difficulty level for players who felt underserved.”

“It also means we’ve been able to rebalance those other three difficulty levels in that range for players across the board. Hopefully, it should make it easier to find a difficulty level that’s closer to your skill level and give you a fun experience.”

Motion-captured cut scenes between scenarios look as slick as they did in F1 24, with impressively detailed character models. Press interview scenes are also markedly improved thanks to new driver facial animations.

“We’ve done a lot of this year working with Nvidia’s Audio2Face technology, that’s allowed us to do a lot more with facial animation,” highlighted Cooper.

“We’ve moved away from the old style of presentation where we used to hover over their shoulder and awkwardly watch Natalie Pinkham’s face as your character moved their head around and played the VO.”

“Now we can go for a much more authentic-looking broadcast interface where you can see your character delivering the lines you directed them to speak.”

These facial animation improvements also extend to My Team, with managers represented as 3D characters with animated faces.  

“We have a very high completion rate for Braking Point”

Braking Point is a natural starting point for many new players. To help ease players into the deeper game modes, the Konnersport team can be imported into Driver Career or My Team to continue progress.

“For a lot of new players, Braking Point is a natural first place for them to visit. We wanted to help ease them from the end of Braking Point into the rest of the career,” said Cooper.

“We have a very high completion rate for Braking Point. Out of the number of people who start it, the number who complete it is really high. We wanted to make sure they had a way to transition into the deeper modes. Players who complete Braking Point will be given a bespoke flow that lets them take Konnersport directly from the end of the story, directly into either career mode.”

Are you looking forward to Braking Point’s return in F1 25? Let us know in the comments below. 

For more on F1 25, check out our preview of the revamped My Team mode and roundup of everything you need to know about this year’s F1 title.