Almost Two Years In, Is a Single Fresh Track Too Much To Ask?

[ManteoMax]

From the July Forza Monthly livestream: "are we going to have IMSA tracks, or are we going to have a whole wildly new way of building tracks that are better for our players for the future so the next product will be all that we hope it can be? It was a hard call. We chose to invest in our future "

@ManteoMax

SHIFTING FROM FM7 TO THE NEXT FORZA PROJECT - 23:00
“One of the biggest things we’ve been running into on all sides - car production, track production, and of course gameplay - is the core problem around shipping a real current live game and making sure it is ready for the public, and investing in things that will help us for the next product. It’s all about speed for us, for a lot of purposes, to get to the next game. Something that I don’t think most people appreciate about the production for games that are in a live environment, that are actually in release to the public is that there is a massive overhead to getting it to the public. We can’t just code something and fire it out, we go through a ton of process for release. Basically it adds an overhead of from anywhere between 30-60% of our time, just goes to shipping this stuff. So when we’re looking at any of this development right now - shipping a track or shipping a car or even nuances to FRR - all of that work which is normally there - and we’re using all of this stuff for the next game - there’s a good 30-60% of time shipping it to FM7 which could be used to help develop a better game in the future. So we’re looking across all the studio and thinking, well, we could either continue this with FM7 and have 30-60% less of a game when we come out next time or we can start pushing all of that effort diirectly to the next product. … So we’re really going to go all in for the next product at this point.” and FM7 will have its final major content update in August.

COMMUNITY Q&A SESSION
Although the questions here were about FM7, they were addressed with the future in mind.

IMSA PARTNERSHIP, TRACK CONTENT - 59:00
Is there news on the IMSA partnership? “This is really about track content. So the IMSA partnership. we’re definitely looking at this for the future as something we want to go pretty deeply into. With track content, and specifically the licensed tracks for a full IMSA series, that’s a lot of work. Our tracks take a long time to build and it’s a lot of money. While that’s no excuse to not do them, once again this is a trade-off. Everything has to be looked at as a trade-off at this point. Does it go into FM7 or do we invest in the future? So we’ve had the track team for a long time now investing in the tools and technology that would help us ship more tracks, newer tracks, newer types of tracks for the future with a lot of new technology in them. The call was made: are we going to have IMSA tracks, or are we going to have a whole wildly new way of building tracks that are better for our players for the future so the next product will be all that we hope it can be? It was a hard call. We chose to invest in our future and make sure the next product has some of these truly authentic motorsport experiences either from a licensed series [IMSA, WEC, etc, or other]. These are things we absolutely want to bring in a much more authentic way, with the actual cars and tracks so we can actually bring series to Motorsport, and bring a more motorsport experience to Motorsport is certainly what we’re looking at for the future.”