F1 2011 developer "probably" doesn't want extraneous visual effects

Serious simmers aren't interested in distracting sops to realism like blurring, cockpit view and bobbing driver heads, according to F1 2011 designer Stephen Hood.

"I often feel as though [cockpit view is] chasing a particular market that's potentially popular at the moment saying, 'oh I really want crazy g-forces on the camera and my vision being blurred,'" Hood said in an interview with CVG.

"But I'm still sitting in front of a games machine and some people like that and some people don't.

"What we hate doing is having all these scalable options where people can say, 'I'll have the head bobbing on but I won't have the blurred vision on...' they kind of create their own weird game and we can't be sure of the quality of that at the end of the day. So we've tried to create something that's quite defined, that everybody's going to enjoy."

Hood seemed to suggest that options usually considered realistic are actually better off in arcade-like experiences rather than sims.

"When you get the drivers in, the first thing they turn off in those games is all those kinds of effects - they absolutely hate them. What I like to do is take their extreme of, 'this is what it's like to drive the car', and, 'this is what the player wants' and find that core middle-ground where things are quite subtle.

"We have got the camera movement under breaking so you get that sense of g-force, but they're quite subtle, where as I think other racing games at the moment are dialling up to 11 to go, 'look what we've got!'

"It looks really good in a five minute presentation but when you sit down to play it... do I want all of that? Probably not."

F1 2011 is due on 3DS, PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in Septmeber, with a PS VIta version to follow.

Thanks, GoNintendo.