Builders Cup - Forza Motorsport's Career Mode

Forza Motorsport Forza Motorsport (2023) Discussion
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BUILDERS CUP INFO

On Sunday we introduced the Forza Motorsport career mode, called Builders Cup:

Out-build the competition by earning over 800 performance upgrades and race our most advanced AI opponents yet in a new, fun and rewarding single-player campaign, the Builders Cup Career Mode. We’ll properly introduce you to this single-player car building experience, including a full walkthrough with actual gameplay in our next Forza Monthly livestream on Tuesday, June 13 at 11:00am PDT / 6:00pm UTC following the Xbox Games Showcase Extended. We’ll see you there!

This thread will be expanded with more information about Builders Cup as we lead up to game release and beyond.

Tips:

  • Premium Edition and individual DLC add-ons provide immediate car unlocks and permanent credit payouts. See the Pre-Order Editions topic for more info.
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As long as we can do the entire story mode stock. I don’t want upgrades forced on me like in the horizon series.

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DISCOVER FORZA MOTORSPORT’S NEW CAR BUILDING CAREER

The Forza franchise has always been about falling in love with cars. Today on Forza Monthly we showed you the Builders Cup Career Mode, the new single player campaign in Forza Motorsport where you can fall in love with cars in an entirely new way.

The Builders Cup is a spiritual successor to our community favorite career modes from Forza Motorsport 3 and 4. It takes the magic of what made those games so special, modernizes it and genre-blends it with RPG progression. We like to think of it as a CarPG with three core pillars: competition, car progression, and car building.

Exciting automotive stories are at the heart of each series within the Builders Cup Career Mode. These are curated to be your gateway to discovering new cars you can truly fall in love with. See a car first on the showroom floor, get to know it by racing on the track, and then level it up and earn performance upgrades to build it into the ultimate track competitor.

This career experience has been designed to feel alive and fresh by evolving over time. That means new cars, tracks and series will be introduced into the Builders Cup after its release.

On Forza Monthly, with gameplay captured on Xbox Series X at 4K/60fps, we introduced the ‘Built for Sport’ series, featuring modern, compact sports car masterpieces like the 2020 Toyota GR Supra, the 2018 Porsche 718 Cayman GTS, the 2017 Alpine A110 and the 2023 Nissan Z. In each Builders Cup series, you will take a single car and level, build and race it on your way to the series victory.

Let’s take a closer look at the structure of the Builders Cup Career Mode, which includes Open Practice, a new Challenge the Grid system, a Featured Race, and our new car progression and upgrade systems.

OPEN PRACTICE

Open Practice is you, the car and the track. This is where you learn the character of a car and help it master each turn and apex. Your car will be stock at first – no upgrades and no tuning. Feel the car just as the manufacturer intended, like you drove it straight from the showroom floor onto the racetrack.

Notable HUD features include the target number of laps and lap time, Car Mastery and XP. These are your goals in Open Practice; every corner is its own objective. Your car earns XP and levels up by driving on the track, unlocking new upgrades. This is the heartbeat of Open Practice and a fundamental core gameplay loop of the new Forza Motorsport.

Track Mastery is a new skill-based system in Open Practice inspired by the “10/10ths" concept in performance driving. This represents how close a car is being pushed to its absolute limits – Forza Motorsport calculates the fastest theoretical time through a corner using any car with any tune or upgrade. Players are scored against this and will be shown a 10/10ths score on-screen. The more you push the car in each corner, the more bonus XP you’ll be rewarded. Now corners are like your enemies, giving instant feedback to help you unlock your fastest self.

Forza Motorsport introduces fully dynamic time-of-day with weather on every track, which means mastering the car and track combination is more important than ever before. Grip levels are constantly changing, and as the time progresses, the temperature of the track adjusts and impacts the grip of your tires, as does rain and even just driving the car. We also simulate when tires leave rubber on the track, which increases grip. No two laps will feel the same with these dynamics, which means every Open Practice session is important – especially if you’re looking to secure that podium finish!

BUILT NOT BOUGHT

New performance upgrades are unlocked as the car levels up, and after every Builders Cup event, you can install these parts to your car and continue its journey. Some upgrades will be available upon your first level up, while others will remain locked until you reach a higher level. The required level to unlock each component will be shown on the in-game upgrades menu. Each part includes a preview of what it does with a spider graph that demonstrates how it impacts the overall balance of the car.

Car Points are the resource used to install upgrades and are only earned through in-game progression by driving and levelling up the car. You are not locked into any choice you make with your build as you can easily uninstall a part and regain those Car Points to use elsewhere.

This new approach to car building in Forza Motorsport gives players agency, adds tons of replay value and encourages experimentation. Because you aren’t spending credits on upgrades, you no longer are forced to decide between buying a cool new car or upgrading your existing car.

CHALLENGE THE GRID

Forza has always featured a challenge system with scalable rewards based on difficulty. Challenge the Grid evolves this concept, allowing you to dial in race settings to your preferred sweet spot. Choose your starting position, change AI difficulty and damage settings, and customize the race rules. Challenge the Grid encourages you to play your way and makes every race more exciting and replayable.

FEATURED RACE

Featured Race tests your car build and the skills you’ve learned from Open Practice. Compete with our most advanced AI opponents yet, populated by your friends, their cars and their liveries – constantly updating with their latest creations and customizations.

Forza Motorsport’s new AI opponents fuel thrilling and intense competition in every single-player race with fun, tight and clean racing. They can keep up the fastest Forza drivers in our community and be competitive without any cheats or hacks.

Each race rewards Series Points that lead towards the overall trophy, as well as Driver XP, Credits payout and Car XP. The post-race screen also shows a summary of how you’re performing in the current series.

ALWAYS EVOLVING

This is only a sneak peak of the Builders Cup Career Mode, the new car building campaign in Forza Motorsport. Designed to evolve and expand overtime – we’ll be regularly introducing new cars, tracks, championships and events. Also, the car-building mechanic featured in Builders Cup is a primary driver of the in-game economy for all of Forza Motorsport – to help us ensure the security and fairness of the game for everyone, we’ve opted to make progression server-based, which will require an online connection during Builders Cup.

Forza Motorsport starts with over 500 cars and 20 world-famous tracks. Combined with our cutting-edge physics, advanced AI opponents, dynamic time-of-day with weather, and enhanced audio, the Builders Cup Career Mode is your new way to fall in love with cars.

In the coming months, we will show you our new Featured Multiplayer experience, Free Play, Rivals, and more. Here’s a list of topics we’ll be covering in future Forza Monthly livestreams and blogs.

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Can we turn off Race Engineer in options?

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If i’m max level do I still have the option then to buy a car and tune it completely with all tuning parts for races in the career mode?

And what I didn’t understand 100% (i’m german andy my englisch is sometimes not the best :confused:
) in Forza Monthly was the dynamic weather in career mode. Will it be fully dynamic in the career mode? And if not, will I have the option later to set another daytime and the weather?

This 2 points are very important to me.

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Gotta say i’m intrigued by the fact you can NOT use credits to upgrade your car. You’ll truly have to earn the privilege to add more power. :muscle::muscle:

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How much time in general is it going to take to be allowed to just have fun with any given car and apply parts we choose? 2 hours? 4? More?

Why can’t we just be left alone to make our own fun building cars how we want?

The car XP system would be fine if it discounted parts but we could still use credits to experiment with a build because we are curious if it will be entertaining. Being forced to drive a car stock for hours on end just to be allowed the privilege of modifying it much later is so unbelievably player hostile.

I am an adult. I can make my own choices about how to invest my rewards in a game, thank you.

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I’m genuinely shocked at this take on Career Mode. From what I can tell, there were generally two very different takes on how to do single player mode in games like this:

  • Start with a slow car, slowly build it up to be competitive in more and more categories against faster and faster cars. You get the satisfaction of growing your skill and your vehicle’s speed together, and can laugh at the fact you’re beating 6 figure exotics in your modified high school kid’s car
  • Free for all: immediate access to everything, build and race whatever you want from the beginning, make up your own challenges, have your own, don’t be limited by someone else’s version of manufactured challenge

And Builder’s Cup is decidedly neither of those things.

  • Do you want to stick with one car and build it up to compete against other cars? Too bad, you have to choose a new car every 5 or 6 races and start from scratch.
  • Do you want to have free reign to do whatever you want? Too bad! There are specific car categories that you choose from, and modifications are locked for every car until you spend 1-3 hours driving them

You can’t even argue that it’s like a “realistic” series, because while there is a free practice for you to learn the track and work on your setup, qualifying is just “yeah, pick wherever you want to start”.

I do not understand how anyone who pays attention to the community thought this is what people wanted.

I always thought the simplest answer was to have two different career modes:

  • Choose-your-own championship that let you pick/build whatever you wanted and do an actual championship season, with qualifying sessions and points per event, against vehicles of a similar build
  • Rags to riches, slow build, slow money, progress through increasingly difficult competition

This just seems like another entry where I’ll spend most of my time in multiplayer, or begrudgingly doing single player races just long enough to unlock the modifications needed to build a legal car for multiplayer.

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Everything I saw about career mode is just bad. I like Chris, I think he is a nice guy, but I don’t understand why t10 doing it over and over again from game to game? I mean they not even trying to make something decent, it’s the same boring bunch of events/series/leagues since idk fm3?

OK what the purpose of car leveling and built system if you reach 50lvl in 2-3 hours? What if you want to take a car for A class event for example, but you need to upgrade the car and there are no events where you’re able to lvl up to unlock upgrades? Do you want player to start already finished events or what?

After watching the video I don’t get do you need win the series to complete it or any place is enough. If any place is enough so is there anything for those who performs the best? Any prize, idk car maybe?

Challenge the grid system is another weird thing I don’t understand at all. Why we don’t have qualifying, but have this? Risk reward aspect? I don’t see any risk reward here, sorry because if win means nothing and you can’t ruin the whole series what risc it is?
I can tell what risk reward is. Just look at gran tourismo 4(yes 4) championships system.
Sorry if it feels kinda rude, I’m just tired of bad career and different systems design in forza both motorsport and horizon

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They keep trying to change the game to make up some kind of “racing game” when it seems they know nothing at all about the real racing world. It’s great in a game like GRID when you can actually improve your starting position by running qualifying laps. And throughout 8 versions of Forza (with users crying for qualifying laps) they have never implemented them. Well of course, they don’t listen to or care about the players. Well, I can’t say much for GT either they haven’t implemented them.

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How exactly does the XP system work?
Do you have to actually meet certain skills targets that get more challenging as you advance?
For example do a lap in under x.xxx or hit X number of perfect apex’s?
Or can you just grind and in time you advance no matter how crappy you drive?

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Sounds to me like the game caters only to the perfect gamer. Casual gamers can take a flying leap.

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As I understood it from Esaki a bit like that, but dynamic according to how you pushed the limits of the car.

I think related to you what next level up is, not somebody elses.

If you make a certain turn better on next lap and similar.

I kind of like the approach getting numbers on how you improve on that track, in that car and overall as driver. So hope it’s divided into those three categories car, track and you.

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As I saw in Monthly, by picking position you challenge yourself, assume the further back, higher rewards when progressing in field. Something like that.

But maybe there is old style qualifying laps too.

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That is probably true. There is a risk it feels repetitive.

But got the impression that leveling is quicker than 1-3 hours, it’s while driving even this happends. First steps probably after a few turns.

I could not make one coherent view what “community” wants.

But agree and hope there are different ways to approach progress.
I think FM7 was rather clever options, compared to FM3 with calendar driven linear, kind of.

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I noticed that beside speedometer in video, car with wheels and suspension and stuff.

  • no activity on tire temperature what I could see?
  • I always felt that view in FM7 was crap and told you nothing

Was game not all ready in this sense, that gadget worked, or?

Did anybody hear anything about Telemetry in FM?

  • there were some indicators about turns etc top right
  • but like FM7 extended, or?
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I wouldn’t tell the casuals to take a flying leap. I’d tell them to “git gud, scrub!”.

Lord knows keeping the crash-em-up derby prone casuals in the dark about actual racing, did wonders for multiplayer. No?

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It makes sense for this feature. I would also like to have a qualifying option. Thats all.

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Hopefully we can get info if there’s gonna be a qualifying period for multiplayer when they showcase it soon. At the beginning I’ve been confusing Challenge the Grid with qualifying but I think is more like a single player game mode (?), something for gaining xp for the cars we’ll be driving?.

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I hope multiplayer at least will have proper qualifying sessions. This “challenge the grid” feature seems fun but ultimately childish. The open practice should be qualifying that determines the starting position, or at least we could have an option to choose which one we want before races.

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