Today digital foundry released a one hour video discussing Forza Motorsport and GT7, and to be honest it’s a disaster for FM in certain aspects. John Linneman is quite generous in my opinion, and rather soft in his judgement. Still, GT7 comes out on top in many (or rather most) aspects, which is a shame.
Watch the video here:
It’s not only some of the the old car models, it’s the lighting, the unrealistic placement of trees, the (still) inferior car paint rendering and much more that really shows when you compare these two games. Turn 10 claims to have new laser scans and still a simple comparison on google maps shows how bad the virtual tracks represent the real environment.
I don’t want to be mean on forza. I always loved the franchize and I appreciate the dev team taking six years to come up with a fresh start instead of re-iterating. But to be honest, there is a LOT that has to be done before FM catches up with an older cross gen game that runs on PS4. Phew… it’s hard to swallow and I feel bad just mentioning it, since I don’t want the devs (that might or might not read in these forums) to give up on their product. I want them to get behind it and improve. But I wonder if that is possible.
I don’t know for certain where the problem lies. Maybe game pass really makes games worse due to funding gaps. Maybe Polyphony just has vastly better talented devs. Maybe Turn 10 isn’t half into racing sims as they claim to be (seeing how gameplay decision also clash with what the fans expected). Well, to be frank, I don’t care which reason lies behind all this. I just want the game to improve. I want to play forza motosrport and love it. I want it to compete, because competitions is good for development.
Starting with these points:
Give players an option for a more vibrant colour scheme
take two people from the dev team and have them check google maps street view so that tree placement on real world tracks can be fixed. This is a problem that could be solved within a week. I have made 3D environemnts myself and this is actually just mouse clicking effort. Since in the end there will be fewer trees, this won’t even change performance.
improve specular lighting on the cars. A lot of the lighting is too flat / wide on the car paint and needs to be more focussed.
give rain particles lighting properties so that they reflect light. Reduce the fog somewhat while you’re at it.
reduce the reflectiveness of wet tarmac surfaces. It’s totally unrealistic to turn them into mirrors due to rain.
I guess these are the major points that can be solved in a very short time and should already improve A LOT.
I agree, they are rather soft on Forza here.
Tbh. the grass textures and foliage alone make Forza look pretty bad in many shots, I notice it pretty much every time a track loads in and shows the overview.
All in all I find most of Turn10´s design decisions rather questionable, while PD clearly know what they are doing.
Pitty, up to Forza 7 I felt they took different but equally viable approaches, often with Forza being in the lead (Prague is still the most beautiful track ever imo).
I very much prefer Forza´s physics and ingame camera dynamics though.
In motion GT´s cars tend to look like toys with no suspension or weight.
As for visual improvements, one thing I´d wish for is animated raindrops in hood view.
I don´t understand why it´s properly done in cockpit view but entirely static in hood view.
Oh, about the tree accuracy mentioned by DF.
Who doesn´t remember Dan Greenawalt presenting Bathurst all those years ago, pointing out how important it was to properly depict specific trees, because pilots use them as reference points?
Then again, those were the days when Forza invented puddles, a feature later copied by others but abandoned by Turn10.
Listening to it now. Somehow, I don’t think Turn 10’s going to request that this get pinned to the top of the forum like they did their first videos.
At the same time, I can’t help but feel like Digital Foundry should have known better or been more discerning before they dropped those initial videos.
GT 7 fails in one big area though. Physics on a controller… I can’t play GT7 anymore after Forza and chase cam is so bad in GT7 there’s no sense of speed. . Plus there’s no AI to race in career races. You start last and chase the rabbit in first place in every race
Not going to lie, Forza does not even remotely look like a “next gen” title.
In fact it looks very last gen and hard to see, if any, improvements over FM7.
Why do you think it is foggy and washed out.
It is a lack of detail trick. Cinematographers do this lots.
If something looks bad, distort it and then a persons brain will fill in the details.
Turn 10 = fix garbage graphics with fog and haze and weather details. Simple fix.
I had the same feeling while going around hockenheim yesterday…grand stand looked low res with rough edges…so I stopped the car. Image became much better instantly. Idk if its motion blur implemented but things look much better when you go stationary.
I like like he touches something that I agree on strongly. Just because someone like one game more than the other doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy the other title in the same way.
I prefer GT7 by a mile. If you like Forza that’s great.
But when I read that forza simulates GT3 cars better than ACC… lol
Copying this from another forum because it’s a good summary of the video, but I do encourage people to watch it anyway.
For example:
Forza seems to either match or exceed GT7 in not only environmental detail in pretty much every case, but also has more dense crowds in cases, much more dense foliage, and also has more cars on track.
John showed an example of trackside tires not only being much higher detail, but also interactive in FM, reacting to crashes, popping up, landing on cars and falling with physics, while they are static in GT7
This is on top of featuring both Ray Traced ambient occlusion, and RT reflections in gameplay, and having higher LOD interior car models in gameplay, and very similar detail on exterior car models.
On top of this, Forza is using a completely dynamic lighting and shadow system, seems to have more light sources at night, and uses screen-space reflections exclusively at night.
Forza has much better Car Damage
Forza’s weather effects are much more visually eye catching and robust/ busy
Forza’s particle system produces much more pronounced smoke and emitter effects from tires, along with nice tire tracks
FM’s performance is a locked 60fps in those modes, as where GT7 suffers frame drops in weather.
Forza has more much more animated crowds, while most of the crowd stands still in GT (but it does have people walking around, which Forza doesn’t)
But
Gran Turismo 7 has higher detail car models in photo mode, and lobbies
GT has more robust Ray Traced reflections in replays
GT does some great things with baked Ambient occlusion, that actually can produce better results in places, even if it’s “faked”. This is a much, much less technically demanding way to do AO, but the end result seems to have been very effective
GT has really nice taillight glow at night (nice artistic choice that likely isn’t highly demanding)
GT does an excellent job with detail in Car taillights. A notable point since we always see them
GT’s cars give off a nice sheen, that seems more representative of a striking photo
Even if GT’s environment’s have overall less dense geometric detail, and some really poor looking trees at a distance, the overall silhouette of the trees seem to be more accurate to the real environments.
GT seems to have higher resolution textures in places, but John thinks the Hi res texture pack on Series X might not be working properly, as textures are higher res on the PC version.
Polyphony has quite an impeccable attention to detail in cars, and some great attention to detail in environments.
It’s ironic because we were talking about the attention to detail (GT7), or lack thereof (Forza) in another thread about which game is quote-un-quote, better.
Details matter.
They might seem nitpicky like John, said, but there comes a point where if games like GT7, and Forza, are trying to replicate real world race cars and tracks, the attention detail matters even if you can’t see it when going 120MPH.
Look at Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020.
Asobo (who also uses the Forzatech Engine) purposefully decided to focus on VFR (Visual Flight Rules) aka What you see outside the cockpit when flying low and slow, compared to previous games. They upped the detail to near photorealistic proportions using MS Bing Maps data (there is also a mod that allows users to choose Google Earth).
This is why the argument details matter isn’t just a Sony, or MS, thing. It’s a realism “thing”, and the reason realism matters in games that simulate real world objects and vehicles is because it helps with the immersion… Especially, in racing and flying games where static landmarks are often used as reference points to judge braking distance, as well as navigation aids that assist in landing and takeoffs.
I intend to enjoy both racing games since I play FM on PC, and I just bought a PS5, for GT7 (and other games).
Even f it seems like GT7 is clear winner, right now, there needs to be a healthy back-and-forth between the two market leaders because monopoly is the quickest way for one to become complacent and not put out their best effort… The very thing T10 seems to have fallen victim too despite whatever problems may have happened during the development of FM.
Loved the part where John says he believes gts spa is a newer scan than forzas. Supposedly the reason the game has taken this long, rescaning tracks, lies. I dont particularly care how old the scans are, but dont lie about it and at least try and make the scenery more accurate.
Even if they didnt rescan them, didnt they say they took 1000s of photos. They just stuffed the backgrounds with computer generated trees. The lack of care is the issue and thats my biggest takeaway from this video.
If youve played both youd already know this to be true, but im happy someone made a video that thousands of people who havent played both can see. Turn 10 have lost their way, this game is proof of that and im happy that even in the nicest way John points that out.
This “next gen” only game just got shown up by a studio half their size, a game 1 and a half years older and its cross gen to boot with vr and 120fps support. “Ray tracing changes everything”, yes Chris it did but not in a good way.
Note Asobo using ForzaTech was a misquote of an article translated from French that somehow managed to get traction.
Edit: maybe misquote was too generous. It looks like the source of Flight Sim using ForzaTech linked to a paywalled article in French (that almost no one would fact check) and “summarized” it with a bunch of made up quotes that were entirely absent from the interview.
Were we not told something about advanced AI?