So Forza has come up in a load of threads but there’s not an active Forza thread yet to discuss the game, prepare for FM7, and generally hate on rammers for basically ruining the online experience for everyone (the last time I properly engaged with the online racing was back in the FH1 and FM4 era).
So Motorsport 7 is coming up soon and I’m pretty excited by the changes being made. VW and Porsche are back at launch day, part of a roster of 700 cars over a range of vehicle types that all come with the base game and make the expensive vehicle DLC look like terrible value (for an extra 42 cars) - still amazed they don’t do a season pass that also includes any expansions/new tracks or even try the DriveClub model of giving the new tracks away for free to keep the community active and more eager to buy the car packs). Auctions etc finally go back into FM since leaving after FM4 with a new focus in the game on being able to collect a huge garage (the opposite of the measly progression they walked back after trying in FM5); the career progression is completely reworked into racing cups; and at least some classic tracks are back (Mugello, Suzuka, & Maple Valley) with the Jebel Hafeet Mountain Road joining them (I still want a reimagined Fujimi Kaido hill climb but at least there is something coming to fit that slot). All of it kept more dynamic by changing weather and conditions (something I’ve really missed in games that don’t include it now).
But I really think the thing that could make FM7 an amazing game, if they get it right, is working out automatic penalties (hopefully feeding into matchmaking tiers) for bad sportsmanship. The eSports side is looking at enabling actual stewards, which is cool but clearly doesn’t scale to normal players. But even an automated system that can flag people lapped and not offering a fair overtaking, definitely flagging intentional rammers causing spins and ruining corners - that sort of thing could go a long way to making the racing actually somewhat like racing. Rather than… well, here’s how a typical lobby goes even with some serious team racers in it:
Are you excited, would rather stick to FH3 (new assists coming to FM7 may make it a better game to just cruse in), something else caught your eye, or do you just want to wax about previous entries in the series?
I haven’t looked at a confirmed track list yet, but Mugello, Suzuka, and Maple Valley all being back is great news. Suzuka’s my favourite track, and Mugello/Maple Valley are both really good (now just to get Tsukuba, Twin Motegi, Rally di Positano and of course Fujimi Kaido!).
I don’t really play pub matches in Forza (have a ‘race night’ group that I stick with), but allowing penalties in more serious lobbies would be nice. In Forza 4, I’d always run the “B Class Rally” playlist just because collisions were turned off.
This feels like a series that used to be mainstream popular but is now not the hottest ticket and in a sub-genre that’s also contracting. Games like Forza Horizon, modern Need for Speed, and even The Crew are providing similar (towards the arcade end/assists always on) semi-sim handling with an open world wrapper rather than making it about the circuits. Then you’ve got more sim-friendly series making a push on PC and even things like Project Cars taking over from Shift, now slicing ever so slightly closer to sim than semi-sim. (I recently went back to the Shift and TOCA games and the former does not hold up that well - good on the team that made those games for finding solid footing with PCars.)
I’ve been having quite a lot of fun with the FM7 demo and these three tracks / fixed cars on PC. The FM7 system to auto-upgrade all the vehicles in a standard race to be about your equal is an interesting choice that’s going to be different for upgrading your car purely to jump into another class or because you feel it needs the handling tweaks - certainly something I’d kinda pushed at in earlier games (upgrading only where I wanted it, while staying inside the budget to just come under the class limit) but now I feel like I’ll be free to upgrade exactly where I feel the car needs it and my opposition will all join me at whatever line I want to draw.
Is anyone else playing the demo or looking forward to the full game? It seems like there’s probably not enough interest here to get a car club for Waypoint community going but if other Forza drivers want to friend me (to turn up on leaderboards) then I’m Shivoa on Live.
Edit: Hang on, car clubs not confirmed for the game? This is not sounding like a great thing to be missing after they worked so well on the 360 and finally came back for FH3. Wow, I really hope they realise that this would be something to at least patch into the game (as it sounds like a lot of the online stuff won’t make launch or possibly even the XB1X patch) to make sure it keeps a strong community going.
I always preferred PGR as the best racing series MS have done. But I’ve been playing Forza from the first. And it’s had a pretty fascinating evolution (And devolution if you count 5). And from the Demo of 7. They are making enough improvements to justify it’s existence. Weather and tyre models are updated. But the thing is, they don’t really want to deviate from the comfort zone even though they are trying to be a bit more playful by having cars like the BMW Issetta and the Mercedes Racing truck. The familiarity is very strong. Though it was very unusual for them to showcase a very difficult car to drive as the Showcase car. That Porsche is very heavy and turns in really tight yet it’s still very easy to slide out the back end. It’s rather curious.
I still have no idea what’s up with Toyota though. If you aren’t caught up. Toyota pulled a VW and removed most of their cars in the game There’s a few Dirt trucks and Kyle’ Busch’s #18 Camry from NASCAR but Supra, AE86, Celica? All gone. NFS Payback will not have Toyota either and GT Sport only has 3 models (One being the GT86 which is sold globally as the Subaru BRZ). I think PCARS 2 has the most and all are racing models. And WRC 7 has the Yaris WRC team with, get this, the Microsoft title sponsor (The only Rally cars in FM7 seem to be the Stratos Group 4, Ken Blocks WRX Ford Focus and Tanner Fousts GRC VW Beetle)
From what I can gather from Car blogs. Toyota got very insulted their brand was called “boring” so much that they killed the Scion sub brand and are apparently planning a major rebrand in the next few months. But it’s a very curious story that no one really has followed up on. VW, that was easy cause it was Dieselgate that stopped them. But Toyota? They are featured incredibly heavily in NASCAR Heat 2 to the point where their sponsorship of the game is almost overbearing. So it’s rather insane thinking. I’d love to hear the rationale or if they are planning to wait for the Rebrand before renewing licences.
I was surprised by this too, but I suppose they probably have data that says something like, “80% of people who play this demo will leave all the assists on”, so they can get away with it.
The Toyota stuff is also very disappointing, as they have so many great cars. Maybe since there won’t be a Porsche DLC pack this time around, we’ll get a Toyota pack in 8 months time.
For what it’s worth, I really enjoyed the demo. The rain track didn’t look too amazing on the plain Xbox One, but I was impressed by the visual fidelity at Dubai. The ‘simulation handling’ mode felt very good, though it’s taking me a bit to get use to how much camera bob/weave they’ve added.
Ye the Toyota thing seems to be more a step back everywhere (some stuff in GT Sport, mainly racing team; only racing team in FM7; nothing in NfS at all; nothing announced for The Crew 2) than a deal specifically with MS that fell apart. I’ve seen a bit of talk about it but mainly from the YouTube shows (again, I feel like mainstream media coverage is leaving the subgenre as the popularity recedes). Subaru’s involvement doesn’t seem to have been blocked by their partial owner so we’ll still get stuff like the BRZ here but it’s a shame that we finally have Porsches back in the base games (not just premium DLC to pay EA for the license), VW have come back after hiding from the world for a year, and then we lose Toyota. That’s a pretty major brand to miss but also it seems they’re not renewing their deals with any of the video game publishers.
As to why the cover 911 is in this demo: I think it’s because Porsche have been gone for so long (and the premium DLC deal seemed to also mean RUF had to go later on so there’s been nothing 911-like in any game post-360 unless you paid for it) and they want to make it clear that they’re back. Including the 911 and a race-spec GT-R plus a truck does seem a bit odd that there’s not really that much of the “normal” cars to demo a package that has a lot of normal cars in (and for some reason a load of the Horizon 3 cars that don’t seem at all suitable for circuit racing - I guess it was easy to just copy them over without needing to do any work to boost the car count).
So the blog post about Homologation was put up today explaining how it’ll work and I may have missed this or it might be new info:
all the homologation-necessary parts are automatically included in the price of the car at purchase, meaning you won’t need to spend extra credits to go racing in your new ride.
Basically you’ll always have a part list with a car to bring it up to the generally competitive standard level for the car class/type that are used for the solo events and some of the big multiplayer buckets. More than just Performance Index, it’s also looking at HP caps and so on to avoid edge cases that happened for previous PI/class only boundaries.
We’ll have to see it in action but I hope we’ll see some more interesting stuff from the upgrades part of the system, and everyone having at least one set of parts unlocked will be nice (even if you might want to tweak it with moving away from some of those parts to upgrade higher elsewhere). TBH, at some point they should just remove the credit-sink entirely and just make upgrades free (at least outside of the huge changes like full engine swaps etc).
Since I got into Forza 4, I couldn’t stop playing Forza> Easily the most I’ve ever played of not only a single game, but also a series. But I’m a little cold on 7. Even though I can play it on my PC now, it hasn’t really grabbed me. I’ll be following this thread closely to see what everyone’s impressions are.
So the only circuit (driving around fixed tracks) version of Forza on PC that’s a full game is the upcoming FM7 (out in the next few days) as they’ve been xbox only before now. There is also an open world Forza (Horizon) and the 3rd game in that series came to PC last year (demo is up on the WinStore which can show you the opening hour or two of that game - imagine Forza but your tyres magically work on grass and sand for no realistic reason).
For me, Forza really lives by the difficulty options - assists mean you can play it as a slightly less arcade-y NfS game (actually they’ve even added in extra assists which make it even easier than an arcade game, but I’ve never quite seen the attraction of playing a game that’s playing itself outside of a11y needs - eg auto-braking makes sense if you can’t use two triggers or doing so would cause RSI etc issues). With everything off then it’s not a simulation game but it’s close to it. I call that semi-sim because it’s not really about simulating actual cars but it’s getting close to that sort of area (it nods to real simulation). Every corner is about the braking point for that model of car with that set of upgrades and getting there to hit the apex and then ease onto the throttle. The assists almost always reward you turning them off so an automatic will be worse at accelerating than if you do it yourself and pick the right point in the power curve to shift up (also using engine braking and smart gear choices for corners gives more control as well as just making you faster around a track). Some of the really fast cars do sometimes need traction control or something switched on but generally the sharp end of the leaderboards show assists off is where you should be.
Forza Motorsport slowly took me from enjoying the stuff like TOCA (also not really sim, because so few games back then could afford to model everything in enough detail to be sim-like, even if they wanted to) and the explicitly arcade stuff like MSR/PGR into always using cockpit view, turning off all assists, and enjoying a game that’s a lot more interactive than how I was playing driving games previously. I am in no way a top tier player, but I can have some fun and generally do quite well. I like to have some fun with the AIs on the early laps of a race and make my way through the pack and then have a couple of laps at the end where I can set some clean times for the leaderboards. That’s my general preference for the game’s loop (and I’ll go between Pro and Unbeatable AI difficulty to make sure I have a chance to break into clear air before the end of most races during career mode).
Hopefully FM7 can provide that experience. The demo is at least quite a bit of fun (download that for access to 3 new track you’ve not seen in Apex, although it is fixed to 3 fixed vehicles so it’s not going to give you the replayability of Apex). It doesn’t look like they’re as focused on clean laps and leaderboards as I would like in the career mode (acting more as a way of unlocking all the cars and learning the tracks) but hopefully I’ll be able to make do (and lots of the games have not been ideal for this stuff, leaving leaderboard chasing up to a post-career activity).
Edit to add: I will say that the systems in career mode do give a lot to think about in FM7 (from the early coverage - we can see how it actually feels in action in a few days) which switches things up from previous entries. The 3 challenges for each event in Apex are replaced with a slot-in mod system in FM7, where you pick up to 3 cards to slot in when you start an event that offer boosts or restrictions and rewards. So you could slot in “must finish 3rd or better” which also gives a 50% boost to credits at the end of the race or “no corner cutting”. So you’re adding your own challenges rather than them being part of the event specs. The only issue I have is that those mods have limited uses (1-4 charges typically) and come from crates which you buy with credits and this all seems like loot box gambling stuff when really I’d love mods to be extremely plentiful for you to configure events with extra challenges (and corresponding rewards if you achieve them). If you’re spending 50k credits on a mods crate, do the mods inside recoup those costs when slotted in and how does that maths work out? There are a lot of these small changes that seem like they could be really exciting but also could feel exploitative (and it really depends how everything is tuned).
I am quite excited for Forza 7 too, but I am not sure if I am going to pre-order yet. Might wait a few days to make sure nothing major is wrong with it.
I had a chance to do the intro races before work this morning. It’s the same three from the demo, but only 1 lap of each, so nothing too exciting. Turn 10 finally learned their lesson however, you can change the assists at any time! One of the worst parts of Forza has always been having to suffer through the intro with every assist on.
I also managed to get a couple of racing suits I like through the 3 free VIP boxes, so that was a nice bonus.
Been playing Forza since FM2 and while the latest entries had me left somewhat cold I am already having a lot of fun with this one. Really happy that my two favourite tracks from back then, Maple Valley and Mugello, made it back to the game. The career is very nicely done, love that I am kinda forced to try different cars and classes.
Having said that the introduction of this “car collection” thingie leaves me completely puzzled. Basically you have to progress through the game, buy cars (or get them for levelling up) and with every car you own, your collection score rises, eventually taking you from one tier to the next. The cars are sorted into different tiers as well. The problem here: you can’t buy a car of a tier you haven’t reached yet yourself. For example I am currently sitting at tier 3, would love to buy the Nissan GT-R '17, but this one’s part of tier 5, locking it from a purchase until I’m tier 5 as well.
It’s a really, really odd design choice and I can’t help thinking that it’s a result of the loot boxes, which offer mods to help you gain money faster, thus buy more cars faster, thus climb through the tiers faster and thus get the rare cars you really want faster…and of course you’ll be able to buy these loot boxes in exchange for real money at some point as Turn 10 explained to Ars Technica.
It’s really sad that in a 60-100€ game (depending on which version you bought) they still feel the need to “motivate” people to throw cash their way. Gaming in 2017, I guess…
I was really big on Forza through the 360 days but fighting games made a PS4 a necessity and I don’t have a gaming PC so it’s been a while since I had an chance to play one. Couldn’t tell you how much time I spent in Horizon just driving up and down the canyon in the car from Initial D
I’m not as cold. I really like how they curated career a bit better so it’s less grindy and I think some of the weather effects are really nice.
After playing it a bit though. I think what Turn 10 was trying to do was get around the issues that made FM6 single player way too easy and had no real sense of progression while also adding a lot more risk/reward. The wheelspin was great but it could really unbalance the game super early and since mods were permenent, you could just unlock a real good Dare mod and then get cash for an feature you use normally like cockpit. So having a more controlled credit system than flinging cash at wild abandon. Loot boxes are an extension though I don’t think they are essential. It’s just more to spend on (Which was a huge problem in FM6 because you ended up with huge cash surplusses even when having hundreds of cars).
At the same time, there’s a lot of ways to break the games economy already. I know people have given out about the assists having no bonus but that’s transfered to difficulty (Which now Credit boosts up to 100% on unbeatable level) and you can stack it with mods, which now have a way bigger credit boost than 6 at the cost of being a one to five shot mods. Then you have Forza edition cars. Which have a Credit bonus % and an objective that gives a bonus if you hit it during the race). I did a 10 lap race on Maple full in one of the early Seeker races and scored 50,000 off a single race when I factored in a mod I burned (Top 5 for a 40% Credit boost. 30% for Highly Skilled difficulty) from a 25,000 payout on the race. I could have stacked it more if I had a Forza Edition car. EG I have a BMW M3 FE that has a 40% payout boost and gives me + 10,000cr every time I run at the Nurburgring with it. It’s actually a bit more configurable and I don’t lose cash if say, I put a GT3 class car on factory spec assists and lose the assist bonus. Then you have credit bonuses when you level up or car discounts/freebies, Drivatar Bonuses, ForzaHub, Forzathon etc.
It’s an interesting fix. I can understand the backlash. But it’s surprisingly easy to game so far.
If I had to pick a single thing that really made me like this series it was finally having a racing game where placing fourth or worse didn’t stop your progress. That aspect of Forza 3 combined with the driving and tuning mechanics being robust enough to provide a fun challenge to master gave the game a lasting appeal that no other racing game had ever had for me.
I like your thinking about how the mod system allows them to be more generous (and also allow this career with a clearer progression than just everything unlocked to start with, no hours into the game).
I do wonder (not got Ultimate so still not played it myself to feel the progression curve as I drive it) if the exhaustible mod system just needed a better intro. What if? Start out with some free standard mod crates to seed your collection (rather than expecting players to all have eg Forza Reward crates from previous games). Plus at every level up you could get the current choice of credits/car/gear but then you also get a second selection between 3 randomly selected mods (again, giving you some choice) which slowly ramp up as you get higher level (greens with only 1-2 uses at the start of the game). That way, mods would be less of a point where you’re having to spend credits to make credits from the outset and more something you get to sample a bit of and can dive into via the store to boost your range. Also I think they should have a card recycling mechanic (burn a mod card you don’t want to get some raw material that you can combine to buy selected - possibly only mid-tier rarity, limited stock and replenishes during the career/over time - mods) rather than always rolling the dice on them. That way there’s some random chance that pushes you to experiment (as the requirement part of mods being fixed for events did in Apex - you get challenges to push you to try new things) but also it’s not purely just up to chance and you can at least maybe get one slot filled with a mod you pick for many career events.
Speaking of, does anyone else think the depleting mods system has an interesting interaction with being able to pick event length? The rewards scale, so a longer event rewards proportional to how much longer it is (the plan is to keep credits per hour about the same whatever length you go for) but mods, AFAIK, don’t burn faster from longer events. So if you’ve got a really good mod, it boosts more from longer events because they have more base reward for the fixed percentage. Basically, I’m wondering if they intended this system to also push longer events because that way you’ll be rolling in mods and can slot only the very best you have for each event.
Edit: one thing I’ve noticed while skimming Reddit to try and find theorycrafting stuff (drop rates, calculations on reward efficiency - always interesting to see if the result of the mechanics are to reward certain play styles like picking harder AI and doing ok vs sticking to a tier easy enough you’ll consistently beat) - there sure do appear to be angles to this. If Pay2Win is extremely bad then removing VIP doubling rewards should be good (it is purely paying real money and getting bonus in-game currency) but that’s being rallied against. But then the rest of the F2P-ish stuff is being called bad because it’s got hints of Pay2Win in the premium game so looks to be pushing people to spend more. Maybe it’s because I’m not buying VIP (and generally don’t, the DLC car packs are much lower value vs the base game’s roster & you don’t even get extra tracks etc) but it seems like they should find other rewards for that than F2P-ish boosting.
So, I think this was a legacy reward (my Forza Rewards rank is 11), but I got 20 crates to start (on top of my 3 VIP crates). I’m in the third tier of events now, and I’ve hardly used any crates. I assume their thinking is that people would set them up while waiting for each track to load, but I tend to just leave them off all together unless I’m doing a longer race. Even though I know I could be making more credits per race, the suggested mods option they have is always too keen to use my best mods, and I just can’t be bothered to set all of that stuff for a 2 lap race.
The two things that would make me more likely to use mods would be: give me a mods crate every time I level up, and change it back to only the boost mods being consumable. Even if that meant I was setting 2 mods each race instead of 3, it’d make me more likely to interact with the system
Extending the event length definitely makes me more likely to use mods, as I know the payout will be worthwhile. The disappointing thing for me yesterday was finding there was an endurance race in the second tier, 100 miles at Spa, only to realize you can’t use mods on those one-off events. Doing a 50 minute race on Unbeatable pays out pretty well anyways, I think I leveled up 6 times from that race alone, but that would’ve been when I’d normally use a 100% payout boost mod.
Where I will end up using the mods, is in self-created endurance races through the free play mode. I’m happy to drive around the same track for a couple of hours, and you can use your boosts in Free Play. The only reason I wouldn’t, is if it turns out there’s some reduction for using them in Free Play instead (haven’t tested yet).
So I’m generally really enjoying Forza Motorsport 7. It feels good, it plays just like I remember it playing (there is a reason to drive even the [relatively] slow cars and refine your form during the campaign events), and I quite like the more classic progression (that countless other series have had, a selection of race events with restricted car series and you don’t even have to do half the series to progress to the next tier, plenty of free cars as you level up) even if I understand why people enjoy the more freeform event bucket system (“pick something from this selection of a million” being the FM4 way that meant you’d play ten seasons in the career and barely scratch the total event list) of previous Forza games.
But I’ve got some issues. I know this seems like a niche ask but… this game needs checkpoint saves (at least for emergency recoveries). Early on in the career an achievement tells you to try a 3 hour endurance race. This is all cool, podcasts at the ready and let’s see if we can push the top AI then do some serious hot lap iteration. Only… if the game crashes for no reason (system is otherwise totally stable) two hours into that showcase then you’re kinda two hours lost when there’s no checkpoint to recover. And what if it crashes again before you finish? It makes it hard to pick back up and restart the event. It doesn’t even save how long you’ve been driving during a race so crashes erase your total time played counter, not to mention no actual leaderboard submission of your best lap.
If they’re going to push 3 hour races (and the FM7 event length system means you could choose to do a lot of really long races even outside Free Play, where you can define them however you want) and they’ve got a PC build that apparent didn’t get a load of soak testing then they really need to include some kind of emergency save/load checkpointing so people can resume after a crash.
Seems they are backtracking on the VIP pass. Which is good news as they are listening. I think the underlying game is really good in of itself. Where they seem to be going wrong is trying to add structure and a reason to have a single player campaign. Forza 6 was way too easy. Especially if you got lucky and rolled a million credits in your first 10-20 levels. That meant you were good for basically everything up to tier 5 in career mode and even then it was likely you would have rolled a car for a tier 5 championship by then and it would have been boring trying to slum it out in SUV’s. Adding the collection aspect and having a brief lockout so players would have to play other classes seems like they wanted to make it so that there is a feeling of earning your way up the ranks. I’ve already hit the final tier, hit over a million credits even while buying cars before the T10 Gift and I have something like 4 hours in the game.
The one thing I realised, and what I think really reflects in the reviews and backlash against lootboxes. Is that the lootbox and earnings system is horrible for those who only want to run 3-5 lap races. 10k Credit payout and no mods means you will progress slow as molasses and it seems like a huge uphill struggle… Meanwhile, if I switch career races to “Long”, start manipulating mods to max out my payout and XP, then push up the drivatar difficulty. I start pushing up credits to where a 10 lapper at Sonoma is giving me 100,000 credits from only a 20k mod crate. And those cards still have 2 more uses so my return is 300,000cr from 3 races in a series. The system benefits those familar with the series and if you are top tier, you can near quadruple your payouts with mods before you even get into Forza Editions adding even more credits on. So I really get the backlash now as while the metagame is going to suit Forza veterans fine. it’s totally univiting for new players. And it’s the misguided attempt at “Depth” that is really irritating to people who just want to race some cool cars.
Now that there is backlash and some change. Hoepfully T10 adresses what they are going to do with micros. Halo 5’s reqs at least had a dual purpose of funding the Halo e-sports series and massive updates. Same with Gears 4. What are T10 going to do with it? Another expansion ain’t gonna fly with series fans after this farce. Are we going to get new tracks? Tracks in game updated with more weather conditions? (Road America, COTA and Daytona in particular. Daytona’s infamous for Rain during the Rolex 24). Really, I wanna know.
My concern about the VIP thing being patched back into the game is…
The Auction House is coming. Right now, it seems like the game is balanced ok for car collecting (credits are plentiful and if you’re not getting 100% extra from the mod system then you’re losing out from not engaging with that bit of the loot crate system - it’s the only bit that you should definitely use). But here’s my thing: people who paid MS $20 extra are about to get a permanent credit doubler. Their playing is going to throw extra credits at them.
How does someone who hasn’t paid extra compete with the on an open market like the auction house? “Pay $20 or you have to play longer to be able to compete with the auctions for the few vehicles that have artificial scarcity attached” is extremely bad Pay2Win design. This is the first Motorsport title which is going to have both an Auction House and VIP acting as a coin doubler (the rewards on the 360 games for VIP didn’t include a doubler from what I remember and can google about how it was announced). Those coins are the currency people will use to bit for anything rare.
This backtrack from Turn10 sounds very bad for the state of that online system.
