Dropping my opinions in a second post so that I don’t bias the OP.
The car XP system being tied to (private/custom) multiplayer severely limits player/community freedom. Even if cars are cheaper to buy with CR, you still need to level up each individual car in order to unlock upgrade parts.
In previous titles, you could buy any upgrades you want, which then allowed you to try out dozens of configurations in order to find the best builds, and you could begin this process from the second you buy a car.
Now, because upgrades are unlocked through a per-car levelling system, you first have to effectively grind XP on a car before you can buy various parts, and then begin the experimentation process.
This is fine for single player as well as curated Featured Multiplayer, but when you’re preparing for community leagues or running casual sessions with your friends, an evening session where you may try out 10 different cars (not uncommon, my club does it every week) now takes 20+ hours to unlock everything if you’re primarily using cars you’re driving for the first time.
If you’re making events that mirror Builders Cup or Featured Multiplayer classes, that reduces the barrier to entry (and I expect the curated groups to be well-balanced with no obvious meta, or else they’re not worth racing in).
However, there are many communities out there who will either come up with something beyond the scope of the curated races (for example, cars that are in different in-game groups but did race against one another in real life, or something like Muscle v Micro) or will host several events in a single evening. Additionally, whenever Turn 10 has poorly balanced cars in a class in the past (PI system has historically been open to metagaming), communities have built their own performance balancing build lists to even out the meta.
Also, Forza Motorsport’s own Private Multiplayer settings have filters that inherently break the scope of car builds, by limiting power/weight/year/country.
In the past it was dead easy: buy car, download community-made tune (and paint if you want), go race. Now it’s buy car, spend 2 hours unlocking all the parts if it’s a new car, download community-made tune, hope the session is still up and the host is still doing that kind of race.
Long-term, once peoples’ garages have matured to the point they have hundreds of fully upgraded cars it won’t be an issue, but for the first 6 months to a year it’s absolutely going to be a pain point for ad-hoc community racing, the kind that thrives in Forza Horizon 5.
It’s also going to be a pain-point for any new players who jump into “their favourite YouTuber’s” community nights and doesn’t have many cars to begin with, or the kinds of players who only have 1-2 hours a week of spare time and want to spend that in custom sessions with their friends.
I’m on board with almost everything else Forza Motorsport is aiming to do (because it’s taking all the good bits from GT Sport , something I’ve been asking them to do since 2017), but this lack of a separate sandbox area is a design decision I strongly disagree with.
Outside of multiplayer, it also messes with Time Attack and Rivals, where again it’s not uncommon for people to buy, build and hotlap 10-15 different cars an hour in order to find the fastest one.
Why not just use the preset themes and Spec Racing?
In this scenario, let’s say one of those specified classes in a Private Lobby has 5 cars. You want to find the one that’s fastest or best suits the way you drive. The event you’re doing requires fully upgraded cars (because upgrading cars allows more player freedom and meta variety).
To test those 5 cars, you initially need to play for 10 hours to explore them all. It’s a big upfront time investment that only gets diminished if your community decides to repeatedly do that event series.
If they want to swap to a different type of car, you have to repeat the process. If you’ve done all of that in Builders’ Cup or Featured Multiplayer, then great, but there’s always going to be some people who are playing a car class/type for the first time or are only partly through their journey.
Historically the most popular kinds of races in Forza (both Motorsport and Horizon) have been open-class events, as the lists of eligible cars for each are in the hundreds.
Spec racing has its place and if Turn 10 balance each class well it’ll be a lot of fun, but a core appeal of the series has been to buy a bunch of cars, upgrade and customise them they way you like, and see how they do against your friends. It’s not uncommon for people to take a car 2 PI classes above stock and have what is essentially a production-based race car of their own making.
Locking the entire game to the Car XP progression system gets in the way of that, and it would have been nice to have at least one small part of the game where said system is not needed, and people can freely build/race with no restrictions.
I have no concerns with Turn 10 wanting to implement an effort-based progression system into the game (it’s overall a good thing), but to not have a single way to bypass said progression in a casual “I only have 30 minutes and want to whip up a car build for funsies” manner is going to be disappointing for some.
Related, there’s a suggestion thread on this for anyone incase anyone wants the throw a vote in: [Multiplayer] No upgrade parts locked behind XP. Every part should be unlocked instantly!