New pictures! Nobody else hyped?
I expected more discussion...
Eh, I sort of expected more from the games by now, to be honest. It looks like Codemasters have taken the Call of Duty approrach and decided it's in their best interest to market a slightly-repainted version of the same game over and over each year--which wouldn't be a bad idea if the game they were repainting was the best in its class. Unfortunately, it isn't--apart from DRS and a co-op championship online, I didn't see anything in F1 2011 that would've warranted the purchase of a completely new game over F1 2010. I feel the same way about F1 2012.
F1 2010 looked and felt like a beta version of an upcoming game when compared with something like Forza 4 or even Forza 3. In comparison to Forza, the game is lacking a photo mode, an option to save replays, an option to view complete results history, and a forgiving 'rewind' function. In comparison to past F1 games, it's lacking a 'challenge' mode that lets you take the role of certain drivers and attempt to match or better their real-life results in certain circumstances, and it's also lacking a 'real events' mode which simulates the specific races as they happened. This is stuff that's all been done before, and I can't see how it would hurt the average player to include these features in the game. Not to mention the fact that the lighting and physics engines are a step behind Forza's, and visibly so.
As for things I'd like to see--apart from the obvious motive of reaping huge amounts of cash from the use of the F1 name, I've never understood why they feel it's better to put out a brand new game every year. I would've much preferred it if, instead, they looked back over the last ten or so years and modeled every one of those seasons into a single comprehensive F1 experience, for use in career or free-race mode. Driver swaps and team changes would occur as they did in real life over the course of a player's career, and rather than putting out a new game each year, they could release each new season--track updates, driver swaps, new cars and all--as DLC, and extend the length of career mode by one year each time.
You could select the years you wanted your career to span or you could do an 'unlimited' career mode with a specific car/driver lineup from a certain season, as career mode currently is. In free race mode, you could pick any year of cars, any driver (or your own driver), and race on any track that was used in the seasons available in the game (e.g. 2006 cars at Singapore or 2012 cars at 2002 Hockenheim). You could even do a custom race between cars of different seasons, if you wanted, too.
This is just the tip of the iceberg--I've written a ton of ideas for the game across different threads here already. All of the stuff in this post is perfectly possible with a little bit of effort and a properly-built physics engine like the one used in Forza, which allows for competition between three different decades of Le Mans Prototypes (not to mention everything else between a Nissan Micra and a Ferrari F40). I wouldn't mind the graphics remaining as they are now if the gameplay was good enough, but as it stands, F1 2012 doesn't have the edge in either deparment. Don't get me wrong--I'm a huge fan of F1 and I'd love nothing more than a smooth-running, well-developed game, but I feel that Codemasters have quite honestly failed to deliver on the potential they have available to them with today's computing power.
When you consider everything an F1 game could realistically be and then look at what we have instead, it's a small wonder a lot of very eager buyers lost interest after Codemasters' second release.