Driving this car in stock dress brings about a few issues in game development.
The 73 Trans Am would have had a TA handling package that included anti roll bars front and rear. A fairly stiff and well handled package that worked well in corners. I know about these having experienced the very same car in my youth.
On driving the Forza version, it must have been developed without any consideration for modeling the handling of the original vehicle. The car slops from side to side. There is obviously no anti-sway bar in the stock suspension. The nose dips drastically on braking, a trait os a soft suspension. Much to soft to emulate the original TA suspension.
Changing the Forza package to the sport suspension package front and rear completely alters the car handling. Making it more closely matching the original TA handling. The side sway is tamed down and the nose doesn’t dive nearly as bad as the standard suspension.
It would be really nice if these cars could get better modeling for the base versions. Adding parts like sport handling packages then should further improve the handling characteristics rather than simply bringing the vehicles up to the actual original stock handling characteristics.
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This is some great insight and it seems like a massive oversight from PG to not even get the basic handling characteristics right. Very odd. But, this is Forza, so I’ve honestly come to expect it.
It ain’t Forza without them screwing something up, just like it ain’t an F1 race if Ferrari doesn’t do something stupid.
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Yes, I first noticed this with the Challenger and other cars. But with this car I just felt compelled to test and report.
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If I’m not mistaken the blower hood option is also bugged on this car. The vents don’t open like they should when you hit the gas.
I wasn’t paying attention to the hood. But it should also be a shaker hood.
Since the car originated in Motorsport 2 and was only ported into every new game it’s no wonder it lacks the attention to detail new additions tend to have.
That’s why it drives like it does and why it’s in general pretty easy to estimate the performance of returning cars quite accurately before having access to them.
Only a very small number of cars were manually altered for new games. Why and how they choose these cars, no one here knows.
I drove the TA yesterday and it feels like it always felt. It got a few new engine swaps though.
Wasn’t that handling package just an option you could buy?
It was part of the Trans Am option on the firebird’s list of option codes. When you looked at the window sticker in the showroom (if you were around in '73) The Primary option would be the “Trans Am package, which includes radial tuned suspension, yadda, yadda, yadda…”
Here is a pretty good website that runs down the RPO codes as well as what the standard parts each model came with.
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And since this is not an option in the game:
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73 engine compartment; 90% pollution control 10% engine. I owned the fastest US built quarter mile vehicle for 1973. The 3/4 ton Chevy pickup with the 454 4bbl. Yup, quicker than the vette, the TA, or anything Mopar had on the streets that year. That year, the 3/4 ton got to bypass all the pollution controls and just got a pure engine.
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The sway bars are buggy in this game anyways. Their defaults are about 25 - 30% stiffer than they should be. Put some adjustable sways on. Set their defaults to 25% less. Profit.
Most adjustable upgrade parts, when you upgrade to them, come with heavy amounts of understeer tuned in.
It doesn’t make much sense until you realize that the average Forza player goes full monkey brain and upgrades everything to max when building a car, and is probably not great at driving.
Ironically the one thing that doesn’t default to heavy understeer are race brakes, which also have the added wrinkle of the slider being backwards (moving the slider to the back brings your braking bias forwards and visa versa).
The sports upgrades however are usually well tuned to the car. I’ve rarely complained about the understeer situation in a car with sports suspension and sports ARBs, especially after properly adjusting tire pressures. Sports brakes come with a forward bias built in, which is usually ideal for front engine cars.
But yes, tunable ARBs tend to be too tight, along with having an understeer bias. Probably a combination of accounting for the average Forza driver and the fact that drifting is very popular in this game.
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As I seem to find with the game vs reality. Tuning a car for handling performance is pretty much opposite of real world tuning. Would you tend to agree @TheWarmWind76 ?
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I’ve only tuned cars within the context of video games, so I can neither agree or disagree.
I do chat a lot with someone who actually does know what they’re talking about, but I can’t promise I’ve absorbed it all. Besides, his joy in this game is building as silly and ridiculous of builds as possible. His favourite car in game is the Toranado.
He likes to make things difficult on himself, though he does trip across the meta on occasion. For example, he knew the Lola was meta on dirt well before the majority.
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It’s not just the sway bars, either. The spring weights are off on many of the cars. They seem to follow a racing formula for weight per corner of the car, which would be entirely too stiff for the roads in horizon. Springs and suspension in general should have a bit of give on rougher surfaces to keep the car stable and planted to the ground.
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The default setting for the race brakes are biased forward heavily for most cars. The first thing I do when tuning them is to get the car up to speed and immediately take them to 100% with ABS off. Most cars will easily go 5 to 10 points to the rear before the rear wheels start to lock. It’s pretty easy to see just using the side view with chase cam. Feel free to use telemetry for it too.
The slider in relation to the labels is backwards, but the percentage shown is accurate to the rearward bias that is set and it’s under the " Rear" label on screen. So that makes sense at least.
I’ll use sport suspension out of laziness for suspension tuning sometimes or if the car really needs PI elsewhere. I’ll always skip over sport sway bars as Forza handling always benefits from setting them.
The sport suspension and bars probably do represent the trans am package well.
On a race brakes subject, anyone notice when brakes are fully to the front, power braking for a burnout works a lot better now? It’s almost like a line lock though a bit more annoying to set.
I’ve tried making the springs and dampers softer, but rarely get good results by doing so. I feel like these are pretty well dialed. What’s given me the most success is reversing tire pressures and adding a bit more to them while reducing the sways 25%. Oh, and completely changing the diffs to like 80 - 100% accel and like 20% decel.
Not just softer (per se), but proportionally softer. Front engine/Rear drive has a certain base level when it comes to springs, for most front engine cars, the balance is towards the front, so you can’t look at the springs as 50/50. At least that is how it works IRL, Forza however isn’t quite based on that kind of reality, so it’s a crap shoot.
The suspension upgrade became known as the WS6 package in later years, I think the “Bandit Style,” was the first to introduce it in like 1978.
True, and the package includes 15x8.0 aluminum wheels, rear disk brakes, 3.08:1 limited slip differential with TH350 or 3.23:1 with 4spd.
