I am a long time Forza fan. (well before my profile would have you believe as I switched Xbox profiles). I even went back and replayed the games again to get the acheivements again with my new profile. I purchased a new 360 (I had a 360 before and sold it opting for PC gaming), and then the Xbox one, and Pre-ordered the Xbox One X mostly because of Forza.
With Forza 7 though I am struggling not to be frustrated. I am struggling to enjoy the game as I had always counted on previous Forza titles.
UPDATE: VIP is being fixed and they already apologized and gave us some bonuses. This goes a long way to show they are listening and I really appreciate it. Thank you Alan and team.
Breakdown of remaining issues:
NO AI in private matches - REALLY?? Some people want to just race with friends. I however dont want to race 1 on 1, or with 3 or 4 of us. its fun to have a full field. Its not fun to race online with people smashing into everyone
What you can race is extremely restricted (homologation) - I get this at its core COULD be a good thing, if you are into leaderboards. I’m not. I play with a few friends, and single player. I play just enough MP for achievements. I want to be able to race the cars I want and enjoy racing and customize them the way I see fit.
You no longer get CR for assists. - not only annoying because of credit loss, but now every new player can effortlessly be faster than someone trying to learn to actually play with some skill and get the same bonus. Forza is SUPPOSE to be harder than NFS. Part of what so many people love about it is striving to be better and “learning to drive”.
MOD Crates - I could go on at length about this but… just sigh. This annoys me because I enjoy collecting cars and just want to buy them, not buy crates and HOPE I get a car I want. This system is laughable.
Engine/Exhaust sounds - Why did these get worse? Some of the changes don’t even make sense!
Load times are awful! I imagine if your a PC gamer with a nice SSD this is probably better, but on Xbox one… I’m scared to see the load times on Xbox One X with a mechanical drive and 4k textures…
I can see some areas that are better, but its hard to enjoy them with so many flaws!
I agree with a lot of what you’re saying, especially about VIP, homologation, assists, and crates.
There is one thing I’d add to the list and that is the change in drivatars. There is good. The crashes in the first corner have been greatly reduced. However there is the bad. Some drivatars have picked up some really bad habits. Some loving picking you in the corners. Other like to drive you off the track into obstacles. I love it when you are inside a drivatar going into a corner and the drivatar just pulls over into you driving you off the track into a tire wall. I really love this when there is no tire wall there in real life. Of course you could be on the outside of drivatar going into a corner. The drivatar will just run you off the track on the exit of the corner.
This doesn’t happen with all drivatars. If the drivatar is one of my friends I feel safe trying to pass them. The drivatar won’t do something unsportsman like. It is the drivatars of people I don’t know that cause the problems. I am guessing the drivatars picked up these bad habits when the real person drove online. You can’t do these nasty tricks to the drivatars when racing offline.
To combat this issue I have done something that I really don’t like. I turned rewind on. This was because I was in a long race that was going to take a little over 20 minutes to complete. I had sent the drivatar level to be somewhat competitive. It was about 15 minutes in the race. I was in third position. I had battled through the pack from starting 12th or 14th. I had already been driven off the course once by a drivatar. It was too bad. I only lost a couple of spots. Well I’m going into a corner. I’m on the race line doing nearly as fast as was possible. The drivatar in 4th rammed me like I wasn’t there. He managed to stay on the track and I was driven into an area far off the track. By the time I got back on the track, I was way behind in 14th position. I thought this whole race was a colossal waste of time. That is why rewind is back on even though I hate the idea of having to use it. I only use it when a drivatar acts stupid which is incredibly often. I don’t use it if I screwed up.
I wish Turn 10 had listened to one of my suggestions in the wish list. That was the ability to ban drivatars.
I need to give an apology to Turn 10 regarding the drivatars. I was reading another post that happened to have in it something about drivatars. I thought I had the limit drivatar aggression on. It appears I have it off. I will change the setting and hopefully the drivatars will behave more sportsman like.
This makes no noticeable difference Ive tried it on and off and cant see any difference in the Drivatars at all. That said i think the AI in F7 are the cleanest of any forza since 4 , I just wish they’d actually race each other the lead 3 cars just drive around never attempting to challenge each other for the win.
There is also the inability to upgrade a car before purchasing the parts (which you could do in Forza Horizon 3) which in turn wastes money on unwanted parts, it is harder to simply test drive a vehicle (with loading screens and several menus to go through instead of just pressing a button, choosing a track and then loading said track), the specialty dealer basically locks off dozens of cars for who knows how long, several cars are bugged out (I bet there are more which I have yet to buy) and even the money you can get via Forza Hub is less.