After a week to give Forza Motorsport a chance to win me over, I feel I need to address a few more things that I've noticed in the most divisive racing game of the last few years...
NOTE: If you're reading this and haven't seen the first review, please do so here; I will be addressing a few things talked about there but for a more comprehensive review I suggest checking out last week's review.
There are a lot of sayings related to time. Time heals all wounds. Comedy equals tragedy plus time. Time is money. Lost time is never found again. Time waits for no one. I could go on and on about time, but the point is that I've consciously waited to see if giving Forza Motorsport some more of it would change my opinion. Maybe I'd discover some interesting new features or make a breakthrough in the never-ending struggle to calibrate the steering wheel controls properly. So have I changed my opinion? Not really, no. At least, not for the better.
There are two things that have negatively impacted my opinion on Forza Motorsport: discovering pretty much nothing new over the last week despite not having explored everything in the game at the time of the first review, and loading up Gran Turismo 5 on the PS3 for 10 minutes. I'll get into GT5 a bit later on, but first let's address the lack of discovery of new things.
That's all, folks!
To examine the scale of why this is disappointing to me, I have to contextualize the game with the fact that this game took three times as long to develop as any previous Forza Motorsport game since the first tile in 2005. With any serialized media a substantial delay between installments often raises expectations for the newest one; and this is especially true for video games. If the player base knows what the developers are capable of creating in two years, logically giving the same developers six years would lead people to think the next product will provide a substantial improvement. And so, when the game or media releases and is half-baked or least clearly not the step forward that was expected (or promised, as will be discussed later), the disappointment is made even worse by a strong sense of "we waited how long, FOR THIS?!" and the like.
Forza Motorsport claims to be a sim racing game but is lacking so many basic features that I, as someone who has played a lot of sim racing and "simcade" racing games, can't help but feel legitimately angry at some of the omissions. I've already talked about the completely inexcusable lack of steering wheel calibration and the control scheme. But my gripes go beyond that and include gameplay features, basic quality of life features, and even entire game modes. So, apologies if this comes off less like a formal review and more like a list of grievances, but here, in no particular order, are some things that are mind-bogglingly not present in Forza Motorsport at time of writing.
Virtual Rear View Mirror
Racing games dating back to at least the freaking PlayStation 2 (so, um, at least 20 years) have had the option to display a small rear view mirror to enable a player to see cars behind them and/or along side of them without having the need to use the third-person "chase camera" option. Games often include this option alongside the "standard" mirrors that are found on real cars. Forza Motorsport inexplicably does not include this feature, and the field of view of the interior camera is so bad that the "standard" mirrors are useless in most cars. This means you cannot see who's behind you or along side of you without using the "look back" function which turns the entire camera around 180° which means you can't see where you're going. It's like nobody at Turn 10 Studios has ever heard the term "peripheral vision" before.
Functional Radar/Spotter
Instead of giving you a rear view mirror, Forza does give you the option to use F1 game-style proximity arrows to highlight the relative position of other cars around you. The problem here is that unlike any other racing game I've ever used, the proximity arrows also highlight cars in front of you as well. Not super far ahead, but to the point where the arrow is still there even if you can physically see the car along side you and slightly ahead of you from cockpit cam. Which means at times like race starts—where cars are all bunched up and it's very important to keep or gain track position—you realistically have no idea who is around you. This means you run a severe risk of crashing because you can't tell where other cars are or you drive too cautiously and run the risk of getting overtaken leaving space for a car that isn't there.
Lacking a rear view mirror or effective proximity arrows is inexcusable in its own right, but this is compounded by the fact that there is not an optional radar (as in the Gran Turismo games) showing the relative position of other cars) and no spotter (like there is in iRacing). Either of these options would have been a huge help in allowing the player to hone their racecraft and improve their spatial awareness. But alas, I guess this is something "the most technically advanced racing game ever made" just can't make do with.
Strategist or Engineer
The lack of an engineer in particular is something that feels wrong; for a game called Forza "Motorsport" there seems to be little in the way of actual motorsport practices and features. Sure, each race has you do a practice and a qualifying session (poorly structured, where the practice and qualifying are not necessarily distinct), and there's a lot of dynamic factors in each race which can impact the outcome; you can have dynamic weather, you have multiple tire compounds, you have a customizable fuel load, you have variable rubber buildup on the circuit. But unless you're Carlos Sainz and you make your own strategy up independent of the team, analyzing most of these variables is handled by an engineer or a team of engineers and strategists.
So, does Forza Motorsport have any way of formulating suggested strategies (like the F1 games have had for at least 5 years) based on your observed tire and fuel usage in practice? No. Does the game formulate a race simulation using certain tire compounds or present a comparison based on lap times from practice? No. Does the game give you a way to see the predicted weather changes and plan a strategy accordingly? No. Does the game communicate to you in any way the condition, strategy, or pace of any of your competitors throughout the race? No. The only interaction you get from your engineer, who sounds about as passionate about racing as someone who works at the DMV is about their job, is a mind-numbingly basic, un-skippable monologue upon loading into a track, and a readout of you position at the end of the race. That's it!
Now, other games are lacking one or a couple of the features I mentioned above; Gran Turismo doesn't really have an engineer (but it does give you a weather radar to help with that), iRacing doesn't really have good practice simulation data, etc., but no game I have ever played has lacked all of these features. And that's just about the driving experience. I haven't even mentioned basic quality of life features. Speaking of which...
Menu Control for Wheels
Hello, Forza? Why can I not control the menus on the screen with a button, d-pad, or joystick on my steering wheel? There's not even the option to bind menu controls to the steering wheel; you have to use the mouse and keyboard. Not just the mouse, because sometimes things like the "return" button aren't available as on-screen prompts, which just feels like a glitch or a complete oversight. But hey, I noticed all of this in the first week of playing. The developers only had six years to discover this.
Default Controls for Wheels
This is another minor one, but it comes up a lot—more on that later—but each time the game reboots it resets your controls to the default option. So, you have to go into the menu and manually re-select your control scheme (that you had to create from scratch because god forbid there is a functional pre-set scheme available) in order to drive. What the hell? All it would have taken is TWO restarts of the game during development to notice this and correct it. It makes you question whether or not anyone actually beta tested this game because it feels like it should have been caught in a pre-alpha build, let alone the actual launch version.
Online Lobby Browser
Imagine releasing the most-anticipated racing game of 2023 and failing to include a feature that allows players view player-created lobbies in online multiplayer. Oh wait, you don't have to imagine. You just have to play Forza Motorsport. Yep, it seems like, at the time of writing, players cannot simply create a custom lobby and host races for anyone to join. Instead, you can create a private lobby for friends and whoever you invite but that's it. I'm glad to see Forza Motorsport has learned from Codemasters' own "next-gen" disaster, F1 2015, that restricting players to use preset hopper lobbies is not the way to go. Oh wait.
I could go on about things that this game should have had from day one, but I think you get the point. The game is remarkably incomplete and unpolished for a game that took this long to make. What were they doing making this game? I guess everyone was trying really hard to get a perfectly ray-traced reflection off of the taillight of a Supra to actually drive a single lap in a race, connect a steering wheel, or play online.
Career? Oh Dear...
With a lack of an online browser you'd probably think there's be a heavier emphasis on single player modes, right? Wrong. When I last talked about the game I sort of brushed the career mode aside and dismissed it as I hadn't gotten to it at that point. Turns out I wasn't missing anything.
The career mode consists of a bunch of series, each series having a handful of races in it. Across each series you have to upgrade your car in order to maintain your competitiveness with the cars around you (we'll talk about the joy that brings with it in a moment). That's it. The races are all about the same length, the AI never get more balanced, there is no need to understand even the most basic concept of strategy, nothing. Oh, and did I mention that there are NO RACECARS used in the entirety of the career mode? Not very "Motorsport" that, is it? Perhaps the name "Forza Pimp My Ride" was already trademarked and so they had to default to "Motorsport" as a fallback.
The Steep Grade of Upgrades
A big part of any Forza title is the ability to tune and upgrade your car beyond the base version. This can range from adding in a roll cage and some sticky tires to massive weight reductions, aerodynamic changes, and engine swaps. Now, I haven't played any of the other Forza games long enough to know if this is commonplace, but in this game it takes a really long time to upgrade a car to max level. That's because each upgrade for each car is individually unlocked, and each car has to be levelled up individually. Even if you own two versions of the same car, you have to do both individually.
To give you an example of how long this takes to do, a friend and I spent two and a half hours pounding around Lime Rock Park in an MX-5 and Lotus Emira, respectively. After that, I was around level 30 having started more or less at the baseline level 1. With that rate of progress, it would take probably 4-5 hours driving a single car to take it from the base to the maximum level. Let's be optimistic and say it takes 4 hours. There are roughly 500 cars in this game. Therefore, if you wanted to own and upgrade each car it would take approximately 2,000 hours to do so. That's insane. It's inexcusable.
The consequence of this process is that most players will probably end up racing just a handful of cars out of the possible 500. So why have 500 cars? Great question. All I can say is that a game that is all about cars and supposedly the passion we have for them more or less discourages the player from actually enjoying many of these cars because a lot of us have better ways to spend our time than trying to get an improved clutch for a four-year-old Camaro.
Ol' Reliable?
One thing I didn't really cover during my previous review was the performance of the game. For reference I have a decent, albeit not top-of-the-line PC, with an RTX 3060 and an i7-11700, and I run the game at the settings the game set automatically using the benchmarking test built into the settings (which is a nice feature). The game, for the most part, runs relatively smoothly at around 70 FPS. The only exception is the cutscenes when loading into and leaving races, which bizarrely run at about 20–35 FPS and are visibly stuttering depending on what the game feels like at the moment. But during actual gameplay, the game runs pretty smooth.
When it doesn't crash, that is. Which happens a lot, or at least a lot more than you'd expect for a game that took six years to complete. And so far, I haven't really noticed a pattern. I've had the game crash loading into races, I've had the game crash while browsing the store, I've had the game crash while in the tuning menu. Hell, I've even had the game crash on the copyright screen that appears even before the Turn 10 and Xbox Studios logo at startup. I'd say there's a fairly good change of the game crashing at least once every time you play it for more than ten minutes, which is very often. Combined with the fact that you have to re-select your controls each time this makes for an understandably annoying experience. Future patches may well stabilize it more, but that only reinforces that the game was not finished at launch.
Let's Play Detective!
I just want to take a moment out of this extremely professional review to do some light investigative work. Specifically, I want to talk about two bullet points the game's creators and marketing really pushed during development. Both of these quotes come courtesy of the Creative Director of Turn 10, Chris Esaki. Although they may have originated elsewhere, at the very least both appear in this article posted about a year out from the game's release, of which Esaki is listed as the author.
"Forza Motorsport has been built from the ground up..."
For legal reasons I must insist that I do not know the details of the game's development from start to finish and what percentage of the code is new, refurbished, or reused completely. But I will say that it is possible to build a game, a house, a piece of IKEA furniture, or anything really "from the ground up" if you spin the words correctly. Oh look, I built this new house from the ground up! It's just a coincidence that it happens to look exactly like my previous house. But trust me, it's all new.
That's the vibe I get from Forza Motorsport. As I talked about in the first review, the feeling of newness is fairly limited and fairly sporadic. Some cars look great, while others would not look out of place on the PS3 or Xbox 360. Likewise with the tracks. But let's suppose Turn 10 is really telling the truth, and everything is new. Surely the point of making something new is to improve it, not to just make the same thing again with no changes.
"Forza Motorsport is the most technically advanced racing game ever made."
No. Again, I'm not legally qualified nor technically capable of backing up my assumption that this is false, but off the record I would be willing to stake quite a lot on the fact that this is false. Could you imagine even the most advanced racing simulator developers at iRacing, Kunos Simulazioni (the team behind Assetto Corsa), the developers of rFactor, and others reading this quote? I hope none of them were drinking anything when they saw this, because the spit take would have covered the entire room. This may be the most technically advanced racing game that Turn 10 has ever made, but if anyone actually thinks that Forza Motorsport is more technologically advanced than the games I listed above they might need to see a doctor right away. How about achieving technical parity with your primary competitors at Polyphony Digital before making such bold claims, Turn 10?
A Quick Comparison
Here we have a simple head-to-head of Forza Motorsport compared to Gran Turismo 7 on the PlayStation 4. Not the PlayStation 5, but instead a machine that is ten years old. for each case I did my best to match the car, livery, time of day, track, and angle of the shot. Basically, I tried to make things as fair a fight as possible. How Does Forza stack up?
First up, let's take a fairly standard car—a Toyota Supra—and a well-known track in Spa-Francorchamps. I think that Forza's track model is better, but GT7's car model is better. The track in GT looks a bit too dull from a reflective standpoint even if it is more vibrant from a saturation standpoint. I do appreciate that the Forza car doesn't have the stupid front license plate that the GT version has, though. I'd say Forza looks a bit better here, even if it has the advantage of being newer and on considerably better hardware than my version of GT7. Maybe on the PS5 it's a different story, but I'm not going to spend $500 to test this theory at the moment.
In this instance, I'd have to say that Forza beats GT7 more handily than before. As I noted in my previous review, Laguna Seca is one track that looks great on Forza and it shows here. The car looks better than GT here as well. It's interesting to see the reflections in the car so clearly defined here in contrast to GT's abstract ball acting as the sun, although in the Supra comparison above I would argue that the reflections on the GT model look better. There's some of that patented consistency I mentioned creeping in.
Speaking of which, let's talk about this. To my eye, there is no debate; the Gran Turismo version looks much better here. The lighting is better, the car model is better (look closely and you'll see the Forza version is lacking a lot of details), the track looks better, the kerbs look better. Nearly everything looks better. I want to not that this is the second version of this picture, because when I first took the Forza version and compared it I was sure I had made a mistake. That's how bad it was. The second picture was only marginally better, as I changed the time of day to make it later in the version above.
So, on balance I would say that Forza can go head to head with Gran Turismo 7 and come out on top, at least graphically. On the PS4 at least. The PS5 version of GT7 is a different kettle of fish, and most certainly would mark a step forward from the PS4 version. But again, all I can do is speculate on whether it would actually beat Forza. But I think I would expect the most technically advanced racing game ever made to be undisputed in this, and nearly every other, department.
The MVP
Let's talk about the MVP. No, I'm not talking about the Most Valuable Player, I'm talking about something far less impressive but possibly equal parts interesting and depressing at the same time. The "Minimum Viable Product" is what I'm referring to. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term "minimum viable product" refers to "an early, basic version of a product (typically a computer program or piece of technology) that meets the minimum necessary requirements for use but can be adapted and improved in the future, especially after customer feedback." I can think of no more apt description for Forza Motorsport than this.
I have a fairly robust belief that by the end of 2024 this game will probably be pretty good (unless the developers or publisher decides to bail out early and gives up). But that's the problem; the game should have released in 2024. There is absolutely no reason why a flagship game released and published by a multi-billion dollar company in Microsoft/Xbox should have less than half the content of a 13 year old game in the exact same genre. NONE. At some point someone has to be held accountable, but they won't be unless the game tanks financially; in which case a bunch of people not directly responsible for the poor quality will be fired and newer, even less qualified, people will come in and likely repeat the same mistakes.
What's in a Name?
The game is a perfect microcosm for everything that I dislike with AAA gaming at the moment, right down to the title. The days of producing the most realistic or most enjoyable game for the consumer and letting positive reception, quality design and execution, and overall goodwill result in profits and a continuous cycle of improvement are long gone. Now, it's all about algorithms, marketing spin, and milking the consumer for time and/or money in search of maximum profit at the cost of everything else.
We all know this game should be called "Forza Motorsport 8" and not just "Forza Motorsport," but somewhere someone said, "oh, but will consumers be tempted to avoid it if they haven't played Forza Motorsport 1–7?" and here we are. I don't like when movies try to do this with the "soft reboot" strategy often employed nowadays, but I can somewhat understand it from a cinematic perspective. In a movie you have a story you want to tell, and maybe different actors, a different style, or advances in technology can allow you to do something new and interesting. I may not like it, but at least it makes some sense.
Nobody is buying Forza Motorsport 8 hoping it continues the "story" of Forza Motorsport 7 (I know this because Forza Motorsport 8 has no story). Do you really think more people would have bought Mario Kart 8 if it was just called "Mario Kart" compared to the actual sales numbers? Since Mario Kart 8 Deluxe (arguably an even clunkier title) is the best-selling game on the Nintendo Switch, which is the best-selling video game console on the market today, I doubt it. But alas, here we have "Forza Motorsport" which is a "soft reboot" of the series. Sigh.
Look at This!...Not That
Getting over the stupid name, we have a marketing campaign hinging heavily on graphical prowess and "realism" rather than one focused on features, gameplay, and innovation. Just take a look at nearly any AAA game today; it's all about how "real" everything looks rather than how it feels. A fancy coat of paint on a dilapidated shack, if you will. Everything is geared toward wowing you visually to the point of distracting you from the lack of actual features. And that brings us back to the MVP.
Pick Your Poison
A video game is a luxury item; one not needed for survival and not needed even for basic entertainment. Players are buying and playing these games either as a means of escapism or because it is their hobby; something to do outside of a monotonous job or away from the gloom of reality. So to treat the players with such little respect and as nothing more than glorified beta testers would be nothing but a slap in the face, right? Well, pass me the Tylenol because my jaw hurts after playing Forza Motorsport for a week. Not because I'm physically injured; but because I feel like I've just been slapped in the face by paying a not-insignificant-amount of money to essentially do the developer's work for them. What the hell am I paying them for?
In gaming, there is a balance that must be struck between user experience and user retention. A great experience that is not worth replaying or is comically short is equally as bad as a mildly frustrating experience that forces a user to grind away for hours with little reward. Forza Motorsport falls far more on the latter side of the scale, and at times it feels like a mobile game in this respect. Mobile games are designed to be fairly mindless or monotonous tasks that are short but offer enough gratification to keep a user playing for hours on end while ads roll or the player gets fed up and pays for a premium subscription to improve the experience. Where's the fun in that? Where's the passion? It just feels like you're being emotionally and mentally manipulated to provide a company maximum profit. Disgusting.
Blast from the Past
Way, way back at the start I told you that there were two things that made me lessen my opinion of this game; one was the lack of content, the other was briefly playing Gran Turismo 5. All I wanted to do when opening GT5 was to see a couple of replays and check something. What I got instead was the red pill from The Matrix. Suddenly it became clear that my desires for a modern AAA racing title were not far-fetched. In fact, many of them were there 13 years ago!
You want to go upgrade any of your cars? Once you've reached global level 25, you can do whatever you want. Want to see what online rooms people have made and join them? Just click right here. Want to do single-player missions to improve your driving at a driving school rather than being talked down to like an idiot? Click right here. Or don't! You don't have to do any of that if you don't want.
Want to see behind you in the race to know where other players are? Just look in the mirror! It's that simple. Want to buy a classic car that may be a recycled model from an old game? Look no further than the "Used Car Dealer" where you can get these simpler cars for cheaper and the game doesn't pretend they're built from the ground up. Want to do the full Indy 500? Why not? It's there as part of the career mode if you want it. Want to do the 24 Hours of Le Mans? One click over. Same career mode where you have to do a 3 lap race in a base Fiat 500. Witchcraft! The career mode uses both road cars and race cars, tuning and all, throughout. Some tracks even had dynamic weather! Oh and the groundbreaking concepts of tire and fuel strategies were there too.
That doesn't even include features that I wouldn't even expect from Forza, or really any game for that matter. Want to have a full-blown track creator where you can create a course and save it, racing against AI or even other people on it? Well there's a whole Course Maker that allows you to do so. Want to manage your own race team and use downtime to make some in-game credits while not racing yourself? Try the B-Spec mode! You can even do the entire 24 hour races to get money overnight or while you are away. Magic.
This was all included in the base game of GT5. Updates added things like the Special Stage Route X test course and a handful of DLC cars. Oh, and I haven't even touched elements from Gran Turismo 6, which is 10 years old and included things like being able to draw a track on an iPad and export it to the game, or doing a rally stage on the moon in the Lunar Rover. Yeah, that's right.
In Conclusion
With all of this in mind, was I wrong to expect Forza Motorsport to be a feature-rich and enjoyable experience? Was I wrong to expect a game that functions at least as well as a game from 13 years ago? I guess so, but hopefully this sheds some light on why I have been so critical after a fairly balanced review the first time around. I'm not coming at this from the perspective of some delusional person who just wants to see the world burn. At least I don't think I am.
I just want an enjoyable, stable racing game where I can have just as much fun going online to race with friends as I would racing online by myself or in the offline modes. I want the handling to be satisfying; I don't need it to be 100% realistic. I have iRacing for that. I want the game to feel like someone has crafted the experience out of love and not because it's something they want to put in the trailer and nothing else. Most of all, I just want to have a racing game that makes me happier when playing it, sadder when it ends, and want more of it. And unfortunately, as of October 2023, the eighth installation of the Forza Motorsport series doesn't do that for me.
Comments