The Downfall of Forza Motorsport

Forza is known for its photoreal beauty and state-of-the-art immersion this is Dan Greenwalt creative director of the Forza Horizon and Motorsport franchises and to his right is Chris oaki creative director of turnon studios and I want you to listen very closely to what he's about to say built from the ground up this phrase would go on to be widely mocked and ridiculed by many players in the racing game Community but why is that well it all has to do with two games 6 years of waiting and a whole lot of poor decision making this is Forza Motorsport the greatest disappointment I've played all [Music] year [Music] to get a clearer picture of how this happened we need to look at the situation turn 10 the developers of Forza were in at this time since 2005 turn 10 had made a new Forza Motorsport game every 2 years which probably worked all right during the sixth and seventh gen console eras but going into the 2010s that became increasingly difficult to maintain this was directly shown by the reception of Forza Motorsport 5 which combined with being developed for a brand new console at the time and the short development period meant that fm5 felt like it underd delivered to many fans of the series although this was also the last Motorsport to feature Clarkson so I guess it's probably the last good one while they did improve it in notable areas with fm6 which is why I probably would rate it as my favorite in this era it still was a a bit behind where it should have been and that wasn't helped by the fact that its main competitor in Gran Turismo hadn't released a game in 2 years and had yet to release one for the PS4 but that would change in 2017 with fm7 coming out in late September and GT Sport coming out just 2 weeks later both of these games had major criticisms against them but almost in the exact opposite ways for GT Sport it felt like a completely different type of racing game than what longtime fans of Gran Turismo were used to not having any single player campaign at launch instead focusing on the multiplayer sport mode experience and making the game online only although over time pfy did start adding content and campaign elements back into a game that had a great Baseline of graphics and physics to build upon meaning that within a few years people generally started looking more favorably towards it that is until pany announced that that GT Sport would have its servers shut down at the end of January 2024 to encourage players still on sport to switch to the newer gt7 and I'll get back to gt7 later for Forza Motorsports 7 instead of trying to innovate but going outside of where many hardcore fans were comfortable turn 10 decided to strictly stick to the path they had paid with the last two games and as a whole many players weren't that impressed with this lack of development between titles turn 10 seeing this reception from the public as well as likely realizing how unsustainable their production schedule was for a game with this large a scale as for a motorsport decided that this next game would have several more years of development time and would be a complete reboot of the series and then they for the most part went dark for about 3 years on what the next Motorsport was going to look like that was until this was the first glimpse of what the next Forza Motorsport was going to look like and although very pretty and featuring the greatest corner to ever be put on a racetrack it didn't really tell us much about how the game would actually be so we didn't really have any expectations for the game until in 2022 when we started getting the first look at the actual momentto moment gameplay and this is where the complaint started at one point in the developer direct while talking about how the customization for the cars was improved on from the previous games they showed Boll of a Miata being upgraded with the same Parts it had had available since to my knowledge Forza Horizon 1 on the Xbox 360 now this may seem like a small detail but it'll be more important later a couple months after the developer direct we got our first taste of what the career mode was going to be like and even though the game was still 3 months away from launching they managed to already rub people the wrong way by introducing them their new quote car Mastery system which basically means instead of you have the money to buy the car and then you go and buy the upgrades for said car you now buy the car but instead of being able to upgrade it you now have to drive around for let's say 40 minutes just to be able to take the passenger seat out of your car or stick the same Wing we've had since fm3 on it all in the name of building a stronger bond with your car cars in the new forts of Motorsport are built not bought your bond with your car is earned it's the work you've put in to find its limits which is cool and all but this is a motorsport game with over 500 cars and although most people aren't going to use all of them they will want to use at least a good few dozen of them and especially if you're already a decent amount of time into the game and don't want to spend 2 hours just to see what an all-wheel drive Civic feels like this hits tuners especially hard because it means that if they want to test and tune every car to see what's competitive and how to tune it best they'd have to dump hundreds if not thousands of hours into driving each car individually On a related note around the time the new upgrade system was being shown off they also made a video showing off their new blind driving accessibility improvements which as a whole I don't see as a bad thing to include in the game but one of the new features that came with it was a assist that allowed the player to complete a race without ever touching the controller at least after the race started so what many players started doing to counteract the PO design car XP system was they would just go to a large track like spa or Lal set the game to the maximum lap count and leave the game running overnight there was a preventative measure in place for this that being a popup that would ask if the player was still playing however that could be bypassed by opening the Telemetry but Forza in their Infinite Wisdom instead of properly addressing their widely malign system decided to Double Down by fixing the Telemetry too players are already looking for a way to get around it as I'm writing this part of the script as a whole when I talk with people about the new upgrade system we usually come to an agreement that the system isn't the worst idea ever but there are so many ways it could be improved one big one I've seen floated is instead of having every car's level tied to each individually owned car that's right not even two of the same car have the same level if they're in your garage instead having it be based on car categories so basically like when you drive say a GT car you'll level up your GT car skill and because most GT cars drive more similarly to each other than they will to any other type of car in the game then you shouldn't have to drive every GT car just to know what it feels like and therefore upgrade them same with classic muscle cars modern sports cars classic exonics Etc personally I could also see Forza taking a page from Need for Speed in this regard I would combine the car categories idea with having them unlock in tears because at the moment you unlock all tiers of an upgrade but the order you unlock them in is purely random outside of fundamental changes like engine and drivetrain swaps being locked until higher levels how I would do it is allow all upgrades to be unlocked at the very beginning except engine and drivet train because of how important they are but only in the lowest tier what Forza calls Street or what Need for Speed would usually call stage one then when you beat a couple races you can get stage two and so on so you still keep the need for players to learn how their car behaves before modifying it all the way while still giving anyone the ability to immediately personalize their car to make it really their own instead of following the upgrade path the devs laid out I think I've gone on long enough about the upgrade system so now let's look at one of the other major sticking points for people even though it really shouldn't be that important the [Music] graphics now normally I would say that Graphics are one of the least important aspects of a modern game well technically by definition they're the most important because they're the only thing you see in the game but what I mean is the quality of a game is rarely tied to the Fidelity of its graphics and notice how I said Fidelity because how good a game looks often has more to do with the stylization and art Direction rather than attempting to look look more realistic however realistic Graphics have basically become the standard for racing games as they are often used as showcases for the strengths of new computer hardware like to me it seems like every time lonus Tech tips Gamers Nexus or Hardware unboxed as a GPU review you'd be hard pressed not to see the Forza Horizon code Masters F1 or dirt benchmarks in their testing and Forza Motorsport in particular really made a big deal about how good this game looked even the earliest showcases were displaying the incredible R tracing technology back when that was just starting to be a thing in home computers and how they touted how it was all built from the ground up and would look incredible on Modern Hardware and they absolutely fumbled it let's start at the ground level which I guess is where they want us to focus on the cars obviously in a racing game the cars are the bit you're going to want to look the best everything else is is going to be secondary because when you're going that fast the only thing you can see with near 100% Clarity is your own car and the cars of those around you and they did not do a good job this is mainly chocked up to the in-game car models which despite the often repeated tagline of the game were not just not remade for this game but in some cases are over a decade old example being cars like the S15 Sylvia Skyline R32 golf R32 and others for a while people were saying these models dated back to the very first Forza Motorsport but really the earliest they can be traced back to is Forza Motorsport 3 from 2009 and many cars in this game have been the same since either fm3 4 or fh1 when they were really introduced although there were about 100 new to Forza cars with up-to-date models that do actually look quite good also I've seen a few people say that this game looks way better than its main competitor in gt7 there's two reasons why that's off one is the aention car models as well as the fact that the AI and opponent car models look way worse than your own do in Forza but not in Gran Turismo and two the fact that to get the game to look as good as it does is I either need an Xbox series X or literally the best PC money can buy because the PC optimization on this game is absolutely abysmal for those who know anything about PC specs here's a list of what I have but for those who don't basically to make a PC with similar specs to an Xbox series X would cost about $7 to $900 as of recording although it gets even worse when you realize how well optimized games are for consoles when compared to PC so you would usually have to spend more than that just to get a comparable experience there is more Nuance to PC versus consoles but as someone who's used and researched both usually around when new consoles come out they smash PCS for price to Performance until faster PC parts start getting cheaper again this is just cyclical it's it always happens the first year or two after a new generation of consoles launches they are Untouchable in terms of price to Performance ratio and then Sony and Microsoft just sit there and let the hardware stagnate and become obsolete PCS catch up and then a new generation of consoles comes out at leap frogs and so on and so forth this is what happens when you ignore all the historical context and focus only on the moment at hand that is unless you're in a time like we are in now where one the economy and two the fact that PC Hardware is sort of stagnating in performance and especially priced performance anyone who's looked at the 40 series performance graphs knows what I'm talking about but anyway basically I have a high-end gaming computer not the top end sure but a solid $ 122 to $1,500 computer and this game barely wants to run on this after watching a recent video by digital Foundry on optimizing this game I found out that this game is heavily CPU limited which made more sense when I tested various settings and noticed anything with rate tracing brought it down to about 55 FPS average even with the lowest settings but with it off it only ranges by about 5 FPS like look here is high settings at 1440p with no dlss and no rate tracing and here is 640x 480 with ultra performance dlss and no rate tracing and the difference between them 4 FPS yeah now this is an area that should in theory be improved upon over time this was even shown by the at the time of writing recent update that improved performance slightly I think I saw hoky hosi say it brought him from about a 73 FPS average to 77 with the same settings so if they make that kind of improvement every update so every month we might see good frame rates in a year and the thing is averaging about 60 to 70 FPS doesn't sound like the worst thing for a modern AAA game just look at Starfield or maybe don't look at Starfield but it's even worse in a racing game because any kind of momentto moment real time reactionary game needs to run smoothly to be played at a competitive level the example often used for this are FPS games especially ones like CS go so to give a more direct comparison I'd say a good start would be Halo infinite now I know I'm certainly not the first person to compare the launch of fors and Motorsport with the launch of infinite but I think they share a significant amount of similarities both being first party Xbox games that were tied to the lineage of Xbox Classics both games took years to develop after their not necessarily awful but certainly below expectation predecessors both were released to about 3 days of rapturous Praise followed by everyone taking a step back looking at what they had and realizing they did not get what they may have paid for because both games were also heavily boosted by Xbox's Game Pass and both were fast-paced games where a mix of strategic planning and quick momentto moment decision- making were the best ways to win actually to tie it back to how the game runs both this and Halo infinite didn't have the best PC performance at launch although a big difference here is that if you did want your game to run as smoothly as possible regardless of visual quality Halo would still let you do that and would actually dramatically increase performance and still look pretty decent while I can make Forza look like this and it still won't crack 100 FPS average and there are plenty of people I know who would take the visual hit to get that better performance including one of the drivers turn 10 themselves brought on to show players how to actually overtake instead of ramming and I know this because he used to do it back in fh4 and 5 speaking of competition this is where I actually have to give Forza and turn 10 some credit because there is one thing that this game properly built from the ground up and that is the multiplayer instead of using using the hopper system that Forza had been with the last few releases or even going back to the player created Lobby system they had before that they instead took after iRacing and Gran Turismo in making a rolling scheduled race system which means you have a certain category of car you can use and races that will start with different tracks every so often usually about every 20 to 30 minutes I will say when you get into a match with fairly balanced cars and with drivers who are both near your skill level and drive fairly clean and all the in-game systems work in Tandem and don't get in the way of each other or your driving experience it just feels [Music] [Applause] [Music] like [Music] when everything works Forza can deliver some of the best semi-realistic racing I've had as of late when everything works being the operative phrase there because there's so many factors around the racing that can bring the experience as a whole down the most obvious being that Forza still suffers from the same online connection issues as literally every other modern racing game because apparently we just have lower standards in racing games for good online services although they are improved upon from Motorsport 7 and especially Horizon 4 and five there is another major problem with the online racing however this isn't exactly for's fault and this is just plainly the players yeah the meme of the average Forza player has still not gotten any better in Forza Motorsport Forza probably should start implementing some kind of test to see if players have at least the the most basic level of competence before letting them online similar to how Gran Turismo does it with their license tests actually they did take one of GT's most important online features that being their driver and safety rating idea and put them in the new online mode although they made them practically useless because remember those blind driving assists I mentioned earlier well they can also be used to just farm driver and especially safety rating points because the assisted steering drives just like the in-game AI does that is to say Ultra conservative and with very little variation or quick overtaking so dirty drivers who want to race with the best drivers can just set all their assists on let it run for a few races then jump into the top lobbies to Ram the players so the rating system basically doesn't mean anything when you can just skip straight to the top they also tried to encourage players to drive cleanly by integrating a new penalty system although that has its issues as well sometimes you can barely tap a player coming out of a corner and be given a several tense penalty sometimes you can slam straight into someone breaking too early and get no penalty at all and sometimes you can get taken out of the race completely by another driver and then get a penalty while they get nothing they also introduce track limit penalties the track limits are a really good way of preventing players from cutting over the track completely until they aren't because like the Collision penalties they are incredibly inconsistent sometimes you can cut large portions of the track and be barely given a penalty or no penalty at all and other times you can just barely clip the outside and get [Music] this we've so it could definitely use some work actually while we're talking about the racing there is another area where the game was built from the ground up that being the physics and the physics are fine they're about where they should be for a modern Sim Cade style track racer although it is a bit on the under steer side for my liking although this is mainly down to the game being optimized for controller players where it's much harder to handle realistic over steer especially for beginners since I'm a more exper controller player I could definitely use some more over steer because over steer is quicker in most cases that and the pi system not the car Mastery system but the pi system itself isn't built from the ground up the game still incentivizes putting all your cars grip towards the rear meaning that most competitive upgrade setups cause even more under steer this has been a thing since about Motorsport 3 but outside of that the physics generally feel good and they were way ahead of where they were in fm7 which basically had two modes with its steering normal which felt super numb and didn't give the player good enough feedback on how their car was dealing with the road and simulation which was super Twitchy and didn't give the player enough feedback from the road often causing what the competitive fors the scene has dubbed Sim twitch now you still have normal and Sim steering in fm8 but now normal just feels smooth and geared towards controller players while still providing enough feedback to drive at a competitive level in simulation is now actually viable for controller players and although Sim twitch is still a thing it's much easier to tell when you're about to lose the car and also much much easier to recover the car I'm going to go ahead and add a small addendum here to the physics section because although the physics engine is very good especially when compared to the older games in the series it does have one major issue in cars that have significant amounts of downforce or even really any downforce at all they added a weird property where all cars are affected by what the community has dubbed Arrow wash you know the properties of slipstream right where when two cars are front to back with each other the tailing car will actually have a bit faster acceleration and top speed due to the fact that it doesn't have to cut through as much air as the front car does meaning that it can usually use that to overtake the front car that's a common technique used in pretty much all Motorsports this also can have a negative impact though because in cars with significant amounts of downforce the air that would normally be needed to push down any wings or Splitters on the car with downforce is now much less dense so there's less air to actually push the car into the track Forza did something weird though which is that whenever two cars with significant downforce are front to back the car in front will experience a lack in downforce similar to that of being in a slipstream so basically that means that the front car has less down Force because it's in front which sounds dumb I know it does but it has been demonstrably proven through various examples in racing which is a bit weird because the properties of arow wash are technically a real thing because of how air works but it has such a little impact that you basically already have to have the car literally on the bumper of the car ahead which at that point the inertia of the cars being one piece has more of an effect than the aash properties themselves people have speculated that this was either done at best for realism but just taken to an insane extreme and at worst to make the racing seem more interesting because what that ends up doing is during races when two cars are battling whatever car is in front will both not not have as much top speed or as much down Force as the car behind meaning that at pretty much any point the car behind can either overtake on the straight from slipstream or just take a better line through the corners due to having more downforce this was addressed during the 2.0 update and was supposed to be fixed however it was just dialed back some it still exists up to the 2.0 update although it could be removed or toned down more in further updates the game also changed how races work now having tire and fuel wear play major factors in all Races especially online races this means now you can't just be fast you also have to be able to manage the tire wear adapt to the changing track conditions adjust your driving accordingly when the tire wear starts increasing and strategize when to change tires in longer races I do like this element but I'm also glad the game features many shorter races where I don't have to deal with it as much because sometimes I just want to hop straight into a race and drive rather than trying to deal with a bunch of Tire strategy and driving adjustments I would also like to mention the campaign if there was anything really to talk about yeah Sim Racers as a whole have been lacking in the single player Department over the last decade and since GT Sport Sim Cades have been following soon although fm8 is particularly disappointing because it gets beat by both its predecessor and its competitor handily in this department because FM 7's campaign at least has more than a dozen hours worth of actual racing in it not counting practice sessions or all the loading and transition screens than the new Forza in GT 7's campaign while similar to Motorsports in length is just plainly more enjoyable FM somehow manages to both feel too short and like a slog at the same time mainly due to the poor pacing lack of any events outside of basic racing in the aention upgrade system while gt7 at least feels like it had more than 3 days worth of work put into it and they actually tried to teach the player about the history and Artistry of cars while fors and Motorsport ain't got none of that actually speaking of gt7 another point for it over Forza Motorsport is in its visual design remember earlier when I said how good a game looks usually has less to do with its graphical fid it and more to do with its stylization and art Direction well even if you don't think FM looks worse on a realism level it undoubtedly has a more boring and simplistic aesthetic GT has always been good at making a cozy and inviting environment for the player to navigate through during and between races especially in the music sound effects and visual design and while it's not my favorite in the series in this department gt7 does still do a good job with this because even though this isn't the most important part of the game which is why I'm bringing it up towards the end it does add that little something extra that I'd say brings like a 6 out of 10 experience up to at least like a 6.5 out of 10 but fora don't got any of that either there's basically no music the sound effects are super generic and the mini design is not only boring and very reminiscent of overdone corporate design but it's also basically the same as it was in Motorsports 7 but with even less going on on another thing it shares with Motorsport 7 is the bugs except these are even worse I would list out all the bugs in the frankly impressively long bug report list but neither of us wants to sit through that if you do it'll be in the description but here are some of my favorites plus some generally poorly designed parts for good measure as mentioned before the game has very poor performance across the board on PC it also has plenty of issues with crashes although they have got less frequent with subsequent updates wheel support was botched to the point where you have to screw with the in-game settings for about 10 minutes before you can actually use it properly unlike gt7 and most other Sims where it's basically Plug and Play they had an issue with the online replays where they wouldn't start or if they did start some or all of the cars on track would start floating into the air and come crashing down when unpaused they said in the 2.0 update that they fix this with their fix being to just remove the ability to save online replays but not actually tell anyone so everyone was just confused when their games would say they had downloaded the replays only to find nothing in their replay Gallery many players reported losing single player save data some up to a dozen hours of gameplay cars like mating in the pre-race online menus as well as falling through the floor sometimes when changing Tunes in online races the game will soft lock requiring a restart sometimes tracks will completely unload in front of the player the simplified multiplayer was actually so simplified that it removed all the special game modes like King and infection and despite having both drift suspension and drag tires no events making use of either exist in the game many cars that were in previous games but not in this game at launch are seen being driven in both trailers and by AI opponents in the game meaning they are going to be added back in likely DLCs and updates one guy had his game switched to a replay camera during a race after starting an online race if the person in Pole Position leaves or disconnects from the race the race immediately ends which leads to moments like this wait why is the race ending I'm in Fe I'm in six I'm going to lose so [Music] many what the man Dustin Eden a popular racing game content creator who I've collaborated with in the past had an issue with the steam version of the game wherein it was unplayable without a Microsoft Edge extension called Web view2 runtime this had recently been removed when he used a Windows utility tool made by the tech tuber Chris Titus Tech to clear out everything relating to Microsoft Edge you might think it sounds like you should have expected issues when he uninstalled Edge I disagree because as far as I can tell no other Microsoft related game has these issues and the only example I could find of something actually breaking from doing that was the Xbox app itself however this fact was lost on very cool Forza fans who decided to harass and belittle Eden because he just wanted to play Forza without a browser made for the elderly and mentally deranged this car has a disconnected Wing this car doesn't have an interior roof and this car doesn't have an interior at all actually actually that Porsche with the broken roof they actually did say they fixed that in the 2.0 update they did not the number of bugs in this game is actually so large even the official page has typos it's honestly baffling the state that this game is currently in but what's more baffling is how it was even released in this state to be clear this game with all the problems it has wouldn't be getting a fraction of the backlash if two things were were true one if nearly every promotional material for this game wasn't touting how all the individual elements of the game were quote built from the ground up built from the ground up built from the ground up designed from the ground up built from the ground up built from the ground up built from the ground up from the ground up and two if it wasn't in development for over 6 years and I want to make one thing extra clear I do not blame the Developers for the state the game is in in or at least not the bulk of them because the thing about AAA games is the bulk of the game is built by a bunch of practically no-name developers who do serve very important roles but who often go unnoticed by both players and Publishers and they aren't the people making the decisions that lead to a game like this they're just the overworked and often underpaid ground floor devs that have to implement all the ideas coming from the top as asinine and poorly thought out as they may be and even then do not go out of your way to message or harass anyone who had a hand to play in making this because that literally doesn't fix anything or help anyone while I can't confirm this for sure I did hear some speculation from various community members saying that the game was actually going to be very much built from the ground up but due to some complications either with the engine turn 10 themselves or even Microsoft most of the game was scrapped at some point roughly 3 to four years into development meaning all they could really do was take what assets they already did have whether that be for fm8 or from a previous Forza and work with what they could to create what we ended up getting and that would actually make a lot of sense because this game doesn't feel like it took 6 years to make gt7 took 5 years and was optimized for the same kind of hardware and although it has its own issues you can tell it wasn't thrown together in just a year or two unlike Forza which is a lot more questionable in order for us to see progress in this industry which in many ways we haven't as of late we have to let developers know directly and that doesn't happen even through videos like this it happens when people stop buying their games and that is already happening while I can't look at Microsoft store sales directly which is where most of the player base is because of Game Pass I can look at steam sales where it is not looking good currently the game is being absolutely smashed by even Horizon 4 a 5-year-old game that was released on Steam 2 and 1/2 years after the fact it was also review bombed on Steam with it currently sitting at mix to mostly negative as I write this and it's somehow even worse on the Microsoft store showing how many players are rightfully aggravated with the state the game is in and now we just have to hope that Microsoft listens and either actually fixes the game which will still take another year or two seeing the state it's in or knowing Microsoft abandoning the game entirely I just got to hope that whatever happens we get something better than [Music] this [Music] n [Music] a

Channel: Fastminer07

Views: 339,943

Keywords: memes, forza motorsport, forza, forza horizon 5, forza motorsport 8, fm, fm8, fm8 gameplay, forza motorsport review, fm7, forza motorsport 7, fh5, fh4, xbox series x, forza motorsport 2023, aero wash forza motorsport, aero wash

Id: 9m674JhrPEg

Length: 37min 34sec (2254 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 05 2023