After having a conversation with a friend about where the Forza series has room for new features to bring to new games we struck upon the idea for a relatively simple engine tuning system that should be fairly easily grasped by most users but would allow more advanced users to carefully fine-tune their engines for more desirable torque and power curves, in both Forza Horizon and Forza Motorsport.
The concept has potential to fairly simple, merely adding some optional side-grade parts that would allow you to tweak the output of an engine to be more desirable; such as giving a Subaru more low-end torque so it doesn’t bog down so hard if it falls out of boost or lightening the engine of a Porsche at a slight reduction in performance to change the car’s weight distribution.
However, this could be expanded in several ways:
Fictional brands could be attached to these parts, adding a little flavour to their implementation.
Perhaps the player needs to build reputation with the company to access their ‘Sport’ and ‘Race’ tier products. This could be done either through utilising their ‘Street’ tier parts or by racing in vehicles from their associated nation for example.
There could be brand sponsorship and/or rivalry, though this feels more specifically geared towards Forza Motorsport than Horizon, where using one brand’s parts would make the opposing brand’s parts more expensive or outright restricted. “Superlite Motors” might not want to let you use their experimental carbon fibre and space-age alloy engine components if you’re known for running a heavy and brutish “Powerhouse” engine.
Obviously, some amount of balancing would need to take place but as a very rough idea, imagine these parts a bit like how some Perks in Dead By Daylight work, you gain a slight benefit to one stat at the cost of another. Lets say with a “Stinktierwerks” engine component, you gain 5% more torque at low RPM compared to a “Forza brand” component, but at the cost of 2.5% more weight and 2.5% less high rpm power. With “Powerhouse” you gain 2.5% to both low rpm and high rpm, but at the cost of 5% more weight.
This system would allow users to build more, or less, balanced tunes; you could just as easily lean into a car’s quirks as negate them.
Instead of lightening the nose and reducing the output of a drag-tuned Dodge Dart to shift weight onto the rear tires and get off the line faster you could increase both the weight and the power and hope to build enough speed on the big end to win.
Rather than widening the powerband of your RB26 powered Silvia by improving low end torque, you narrow it for maximum peak output and use a transmission with more gears to compensate.