Oh god no. That kind of thing needs to be based on the player himself, not in game.
Iād love to see a dedicated spectate option for racing games. Imagine being able to watch and interact with live races on your TV or through an app, with features like different camera views.
Hereās a potential concept:
- Practice on Fridays
- Qualifying on Saturdays
- Racing on Sundays
- Utilize the entire pit road for all drivers
This next-gen racing idea could be a huge hit, not just for in-game racers but also for spectators. It could even provide a platform for new drivers to showcase their skills to real teams.
Currently, thereās a lack of entertaining car and racing content on TV, with only occasional shows and YouTube videos. A dedicated spectate option would fill this gap, and Iād watch it all the time ā especially if the gameās sound design improves to make the cars sound realistic.
Iād sit there for the whole endurance race if it was entertaining.
Just to show a demonstration of how good and effective implementing this would be, SSRI did a 24 hours of Bathurst on ACC which started with a literal single lobby running for 24 hours allowing for what exactly Jack has suggested. PSUK eSports streamed there end here: Twitch
Attached is some clips how ACC has set up driver changes, and I truly believe Forza has the exact same potential to implement the exact same system, if not some other scaled working version of it. Notice how thereās 5 drivers āWAL, KIN, WIL, MEA and PHIā, and it displays whoās connected, whoās driving and whoās requesting to drive. These are literal player drivers accounts who just have to connect on their PC to the server in order to drive if they want to, or merely spectate.
So that T10 and others reading doesnāt have to sit through a whole 24 hour video to see how this works, Iāve done the work myself and have attached clips below.
Here is where Andy King (KIN) is connected to the game session, and requests to take over the car from Luca Philippi (PHI) who is currently driving the car. Pay close attention to the driver list on the top left: Twitch
Here is the clip where Andy King (KIN) takes over from LucaPhilippi (PHI), remember Andy ārequestedā to drive the car, itās not shown in the stream but Lewis Philippi also sets up handing the car over to Andy in pit settings: Twitch
During Andy Kingās (KIN) stint, here is where it shows heās selecting the next driver to hand the car to, also in the clip see where Luca Philippi (PHI) has requested to take over from Andy who is currently driving. Twitch
And a final clip showing Andy handing the car over to Luca in the pits: Twitch
See how smooth and fluent this system is T10? Get on it!
There are big enough changes that would need to happen for this to be functional thatās itās pretty unlikely weāll see this, at least on the current title. The three changes weād need are:
- The ability to set a fixed hosting location, independent of the drivers in the race, so that thereās no chance of a player leaving crashing the entire lobby.
- The ability to join/re-join a session in progress, without it risking the stability of the lobby.
- The biggest of all, an increase in the player count in the lobby. 24 users means you could only have 12 cars racing on track, if weāre to allow teams the opportunity to swap drivers whenever they want. And from what I understand, the 24 user limit is server-limited, rather than an arbitrary figure chosen by the devs, so, weāll need to get server upgrades, which they couldnāt do for the launch of the game, despite the increased reliance on server connectivity over FM7.
Itāll be optional. None of this will be forced.