EA Sports F1 24 preview part three - get ready to hear Max Verstappen's actual voice convey just how boring winning all the time can be

You know that thing that happens about 20-something times a year at the moment. Yeah, Max Verstappen winning a race. Well, EA Sports F1 24 is set to simulate that dominance in more realistic fashion than the series ever has - by letting you hear Max's real voice convey just how bored he is by his success over the radio just after he crosses the finish line.

As part of a hands-off preview that also saw us learn about the handling changes the game features, as well as get a rundown of its totally revamped Career Mode, we also learned about some of the more general updates that've been made to the likes of drivers, tracks, and teams. The biggest one? The addition of radio voice over from the actual drivers on today's F1 grid.

During the preview, Codemasters' senior creative director Lee Mather outlined that this real driver VO, which will see you talk using the voice of racers like Verstappen, Lando Norris, and Lewis Hamilton when you're playing as them during races, is something that'd been in the works idea-wise for a little while.

"It's something that we started a conversation with Formula One on a few years ago, and [there] was an opportunity for us to do that for quite a while," Mather explained, "but we didn't really feel it [fit] with what we were doing with the title. It didn't really gel and make sense, but as soon as we opened up the opportunity to race as the real Formula One drivers [in Career Mode], it just made perfect sense to have that voice over."

"So, the guys at Formula One have got years upon years of footage," Mather continued, "thankfully we've only had them trawl through the previous year for us at the moment, but they're going to keep going back and back, so we will get all of that footage and voice over from those key moments."

Naturally, one of the points when you're most likely to get a bit of this voice over is when you cross the line to take a win or podium - if it's at a venue like Monaco you might even get a line or two speficially refrencing how simply lovely it is to have achieved such a result at such an iconic venue. Or in the case of Verastappen in real life this year, sound like you're about as enthused about winning at this point as most people would be about having to eat only Spam for the rest of their natural life.

Track-wise, both Silverstone and Spa have gotten substatial revamps this year, which you can get a glimpse at in the gameplay video above, while Losail and Jeddah have gotten some visual updates to ensure they look like their real-world namesakes. Drivers and cars have also apparently recieved some render improvements, too.

While the game'll feature just the 2023 version of the F2 grid at launch, it'll be getting the 2024 version of the feeder series' lineup via a post-release update at some juncture, as has become the norm over the past few years or so.

Oh, and there's a feature called Fan Zones, which'll seemingly see you pick a favourite driver, see your drivatar chill out with them virtually in a weird little hangout area, and compete against fans of other drivers to register the most progress across the game as a whole. Rise up, Logan Sargeant gang, we wil taste sweet victory, even if we don't know what a kilometre is.

EA Sports F1 24 is set to be released on May 31 for PC, Xbox and PlayStation.