A letter to Alan Hartman, Head of Turn 10 Studios. From the Forza Community Member Bladerunner

[PPS_Bladerunner]

As a big fan of the Forza games for the last decade you have given us some excellent racing games, pioneered many new things perfected other things and really done alot of good work developing and pushing the boundaries in the field of racing in videogames. You and your team are regargded among the best and rightly so. The forza franchise has built a great following of highly dedicated fans. Its an awesome community indeed.

As is pretty obvious in the last few weeks since the release of FM7 the community has become frustrated, somewhat dissapointed, and fragmenting. The damage has been done and the best thing to do is look at what went wrong and improve going forward.

For me the biggest issue seems to be ever since ForzaMotorsport5 the games have never completed development and been rushed to the market in an incomplete state, with the most recent iteration FM7 being the worst offender. You cant fault turn10 for being ambitious, its in there nature to do so.

Grouping cars into buckets is good idea, it has really brought a new flavour to the game, but it has come at a big cost and that is you have removed alot of the tried and tested forza systems, or you have not had enough time to make both systems work within the game. You can say there has been a decent amount of content added in FM7 with all the weather options, new tracks, tyre sounds etc there have been small improvements pretty much across the board.

Im not sure if Turn10Studios is aware that over the years the have had a large following or hardcore racers but they never seem to cater for these type of player, all of the development seems to be toward keeping the casuals happy. Makes good buisness sense, and makes the game more fun for the playerbase as a whole but YOU CAN cater for hardcore racers aswell, we dont ask for much more than a few more race customisation options, and simulation physics. Instead ever since forza4 you have taken away race customisation options and given us stupid as hell FRICTION OFF/ON

Instead of developing the friction mode you should have developed a sim mode, in forza4 we could tailor the race to every need with vast amounts of customistion options to the race, every time you release a game we get less race customisation. With these 2 things in place the hardcore players can begin to love forza once again.

The large amount of bugs in game like unstable lobbies, cars with no headlights etc, is unnacceptable and alot of the players dont have the patience to be treated as a Beta tester and will therefore not even play the game in its current state or may not come back to play forza ever again. Those that do play the game and encounter these problems several times an hour are not enjoying the experience at all.

Turn10Studios seems commited as a buisness to releasing a new ForzaMotorsport title every 2 years, with the last 3 iterations being underdeveloped, and the current state of FM7 goin to need alot more development, this has got to reduce the amount of time available to develop FM8. Giving Alan Hartman a proper headache.

Turn10studios is well positioned to do great things within the videogame racing scene but will almost likely fail to acheive anything significant in the future do to there emphasis on quantity of Foza titles over Quality of forza titles.

Good luck with the future i hope you can turn this mess around and make playing racing games on xbox fun again as currently all you get while doing so is a sore head.

Yours sincerely

[Deadly_I]

I agree with just about everything posted here. I was able to overlook 5’s short coming because it was a beauty at the time and was a new game on a new console. 6 was a step in the right direction and I envisioned 7 could be our forza4 of this generation. 7 should have been a fine tuned well oiled machine yet I find myself struggling to like the game; Ripe with it’s various bugs, overly restricted design and graphics that to me seem to be a step back from 5 and 6. I’m enjoying the career mode and think homolagation is a great idea implemented horribly. it should not have come at the cost of class base racing reducing forza to just a fraction of the game it used to be. I feel like we got less of a game with more content, more bugs, downgraded graphics, still no optional qualifying or flag system added to online wrecking fest. I love this franchise but if things don’t improve and can’t say I’ll be back for 8.

[Groo_93]

@Deadly_I

I agree with just about everything posted here. I was able to overlook 5’s short coming because it was a beauty at the time and was a new game on a new console. 6 was a step in the right direction and I envisioned 7 could be our forza4 of this generation. 7 should have been a fine tuned well oiled machine yet I find myself struggling to like the game; Ripe with it’s various bugs, overly restricted design and graphics that to me seem to be a step back from 5 and 6. I’m enjoying the career mode and think homolagation is a great idea implemented horribly. it should not have come at the cost of class base racing reducing forza to just a fraction of the game it used to be. I feel like we got less of a game with more content, more bugs, downgraded graphics, still no optional qualifying or flag system added to online wrecking fest. I love this franchise but if things don’t improve and can’t say I’ll be back for 8.

I can’t say I’ll be back for FM7, let alone 8. I was so frustrated at how they gutted this game, I got a refund. I keep coming back looking for some glimmer of hope they’ll at least fix enough of the issues to make the game playable for me, but so far all that’s really been posted is the letter from Alan.

Since Forza Motorsport 7 launched into early access last week, everyone here at Turn 10 has been keeping a close eye on our players’ feedback. The most important thing to us is to maintain open communication with the Forza Community. We’ve heard what you have had to say and, starting today, you can expect some significant changes.

Historically and presently, the notion of turn10 offering open communication is almost too offensive to be funny, but still I chuckle. Guess I’m just a fan of irony. Related to the communication is the “expect significant changes” which means what exactly? It’s pretty vague and unhelpful. Is it a promise to address many of the issues posted ad nauseum or something to string along users? I sincerely hope for the former but find little reason for optimism.

The longer it goes the less likely I’ll be returning to the franchise. At some point, we’ll get the message that they’re really trying to move on from a portion of their fan base, and it’s time for the fans to move on also.

[markvii1]

I don’t want there to be a Forza 8. That is the problem. And yes I can fault turn10 for their ambition because no one other than themselves are forcing them to release alternating game titles every other year. It makes no sense to me that they apply such an unrealistic release deadline upon themselves and it is the key reason why the last three games have felt unfinished at best and frustrating at worst. Players who purchase DLC are paying turn10 $100 or more per year and problems persist from game to game that we all know they know about and never fix. (Forza 4 had memory leaks, Forza 5 had lobby chat, and Forza 7 has all of the above). Stop farming out asset creation, stop acting like you are Steve Jobs when you are at E3 (cough cough…Dan), and start pushing your releases farther apart. Give us hope that you will either fix bugs before release or have the time and resources to fix them quickly after release.

[WindsweptDragon]

thanks for your feedback, feel free to email forzafb@microsoft with your opinion.