Not sure if this has been brought up in the forums, so forgive me, but with this new progression system for unlocking parts and upgrades, it basically kills one of the fun aspects of Forza, photography.
From what I can gather from interviews and videos, gone are the days of just buying a car, throwing a kit on it, a paint job, heading to a track and just snapping pics for days.
If this is truly the case, then I fear one of Forza’s best features and sub-communities will be diminished greatly.
Thoughts or updates on this would be appreciated.
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Yeah, from what they’ve shown so far, I get the feeling that this new “caRPG” approach will introduce more hindrances than benefits for players.
When retail launch hits, buyers who haven’t been following the announcements will be in for a shock, and I expect we’ll see some heated reviews & feedback.
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Painting and photography would help promote the game as players share their art in social media. It is something that should be considered and addressed “hopefully” soon.
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Extremely high risk is being taken. Very high probability for negative and mixed reviews early in the game life will be hard to recover from. One can see this with NFS Unbound and Ride 5.
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I totally agree. Even slightest mix reviews will be hard to recover from in the casual players eyes.
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Indeed. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re already working on PR damage control & how they’ll coach/coax the review scores they want…
…Big gaming media outlets almost never give a bad review scores to any “TrIpLe-A” games because they wouldn’t want to risk their mutually-beneficial relationships with big game studios, so I’m sure it’ll be solid 7s, 8s, & 9s across the board as usual, with meaningless summaries that sugar-coat issues like “a solid racer with a progression system that long-time fans might struggle to adjust to at first.” 
Customer reviews, however, might tell a very different story.
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This what counts on Steam. I look at the players reviews and compare the revenue based best selling list withen the genre.
The other reviews I follow on YouTube. But one should take into account how creditable the channel is.
Long support for a game strongly tied to cash flow. Not many new players would take the plunge if they see the red thumb down mark on the first page.
Ride5 imo is the best Motorcycle racing simulator suffering from bad start.
This game will most certainly score in the high 80s, maybe even low 90s, due to all the Xbox outlets as well as biased reviewers like Stevivor boosting it.
I was reading ResetEra the other day and there were people there who loved FM7 which is regarded as one of the worst. So I’m pretty sure the casuals won’t care. The general consensus among casuals is that Forza delivers regardless of format.
However, the continued support of the game depends on the more focused players. FH5 has 18k active users’ average on Steam, which is good, but low for a game with 20+ million players at launch. If FM sits lower than FH4 (~5-6k) then there could be an issue.
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There will be no mixed or negative reviews of FM. Mainstream media doesn’t care about details like photography and the like. They will just repeat like a parrot what was in the official marketing campaign (“from the ground up, caRPG, progression system, raytracing”) without true unique opinions or critique. They’ll get a “review guide” from Microsoft as to what to pay attention to (spoiler: photography opportunities are not among them), and they’ll just write their pieces in that spirit. Most columnists in mainstream media are a) laypeople, not hardcore racing fans, and b) overburdened with reviews to write on deadline. So they’ll take the official information and build their articles on that, adding some personal impressions here and there. None of them are going to deep dive into the nitty-gritty. Metacritic 86-92 guaranteed.
How do I know? I used to write reviews for a local magazine. What put me off from it is when I gave Halo Infinite a 7/10, I had to engage (not telling with whom) in an overly long debate about why it wasn’t at least an 8. I am appaled by this attitude, when writers are not encouraged (or simply let) to express their own, unique opinions. Mainstream media is just that for a reason. Predictable, risk-free influencing with a wide reach, basically part of the game publishing process. Most big publishers even predict where their games will land in terms of score, and outliers are crucified by the audience itself anyway.
In the case of FM, reviews will have little effect anyway. The game has a big marketing campaign behind it, it’s day 1 on Game Pass, so you can be sure that “X million players in a day” style assets will be posted on social media. Copies sold is not even important anymore, what’s important is to brag about the number of players (which is more like number of downloads, not active players, but who cares right?).
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I would like to see what happens if it would need level 10 to paint a car. Painters would go crazy, as tuners do now.
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According to Youtuber AR12, you need to have car level 45 to paint your car…
Source: https://youtu.be/RKUVm727K2c?si=y5CdcD5yYwi9k_hr around the 10:20 mark of the video.
While I hope that this is just a limitation of the early release given out to reviewers, it may not be.
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This refers to wide body only.
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Does anyone know if there’s a way to reset your whole progression because I accidentally deleted the Porsche 911 Forza edition and I don’t know how to get it back