Fm8 devs don't seem like car enthusiasts/car guys like they were during and pre Fm4/before 2012?

Forza Motorsport Forza Motorsport (2023) Discussion
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NOTE: Grew up with Forza and loved it, me and my brother played all day from 2008-2012. We all grew up so all the stuff I complain about is in the back of my mind and just some thoughts to think about. I just want to reminisce on the fun days like me and my brother did in 2008-2012 so if this game sucks, whatever.

I feel like they have absolutely no idea why their old Forzas were successful. Like Fm4 was the best by far and that was over a decade ago?! It seems that something happened after 2012ish. All videogames are like this, cod, halo, saints row whatever, the originals were just miles better and it makes you wonder what the heck is going on in their heads.

It is like a multi layer thing. The main point being that it isn’t the 90s/2000s anymore. All car sports were huge like F1, XGames, Wrc, Nascars, Monster Jam, Drag Racing etc etc. The average guy owned or atleast wanted a kitted out decatted rx7 with neon underglow to race around in, pick up women and buy car parts. Car talk was about popping the hood/revving all day, swapping parts/tuning and hanging out blasting on their boot sound system. Fast forward to now and the average guy owns a piece of junk eco stale electric A-B car and “car talk” is just discussing seat warmers and safety options. All the car sports are basically dead.

This all reflects upon real life. Back then you had nfs mw/underground and old Forza had an array of customisations tailored to how we thought back then. Fm4 eclipses the Forzas after that. In recent years videogames has gone downhill. 0 creative minds and just a bunch of random people there to fulfil a task for monetary gain. To me, this just feels like a cheap arcade game designed for guys who don’t even know what a car is and their sales pitch is that they can utilise modern technology to make the games graphics look crazy realistic. Then that’s about it?

The advertising is just the same funky old guy going on about building stuff from the ground up. He doesn’t even talk about cars in most videos, they all just talk about the scenery and random nonsense like a spoiler customisation that is apparantly groundbreaking news. Do they even remember what Fm4 was?? Just look at the build up for Fm4 or even Fm3. It was absolutely insane and they were crazy about getting every little detail perfect for us. The contacts they made to build this game was above and beyond.

On to the game from what we know. The upgrade system is one thing we all go on about. Their mentality for why that is an upgrade is flawed/absurd. “Build and get to know your car” and blah blah. Yeah…I’m really getting to know my car by unlocking upgrades in a FIXED PATTERN for every car? Don’t they know that all cars react differently to different parts/modifications? Just like on the race track in real life, you swap minor parts/make subtle tweaks here and there. Can’t do that anymore, tuning won’t even make sense and sharing tunes will be dead. You have to unlock everything all over again on a duplicate car?? In older Forzas, are they not aware that while you are racing in one car, maybe, just MAYBE you swap the parts from one car to another behind the scenes to give you that sense of realism? Swapping out credits for car points is absurd, what was wrong with the old system? Paying with hard earned cash from the gruelling race you just did to get 1st position and achieve the maximum payout to afford/upgrade your ride ISN’T somehow realistic? But unlocking an array of cherry picked car parts as if it were a cod weapon attachment is ideal? They’ve added a £1m to the expensive cars so the scaling is completely off. Now my £10m Ferarri is £1m and my sucky Benz costs 10% of that. Yeah LOL.

They cut split screen so we can’t play together in the house on our giant TVs. (Heck back in 2010 we did split screen on a 22 inch TV, in 2023 that entire screen is less than half of most household TVs haha.)

The game is online only?? Yeah great so now I can’t do the career properly now since their servers suck. A few years from now what will happen?

Little little things like that are finally getting to me. Like, who are these people making the game, there’s so much more to talk about but why digress.

What do you all think?

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The developers don’t seem to want to talk about all the stuff we wanted from older Forzas. Their sales rep team is just making 1 or 2 points then going off on a tangent about it. I honesty wanted a Fm4 remaster.

These are the kinds of guys to just wait in the corner coding rather than even getting involved at track days. You don’t even have to be obsessed, just go to a few track days/showrooms/races, talk to some of the guys and soon you’d get the lingo/how to do stuff. They have no idea why everything that worked in Fm4 worked. The Fm4 designers were proper car guys and they showcased that during advertising a LOT before the game released. It’s almost as if they were proud of the effort they put into the game, then, hmmm, it somehow worked and everyone loved it hahaha.

Pretty much 95% of the showcase was just talking about graphics and sound. They blab on about something that is inevitably going to get better right? I mean if it looked somehow worse 8 years after their last installement then what the heck are they doing. But honestly, they seem to think that we care about how glossy some paint looks or how dirt builds up on the cars as opposed to what we were nagging them for years. The trouble is that 8 years ago the whole community was different and the Motorsport series was more for car enthusiasts as a whole. Enough time went by and now that we all grew up, we just lost interest and moved on in life. Car culture now is nothing compared to what is was then. They are catering to what seems to be what a kid would want which is eye candy. Their lack of focus on the racing, especially multiplayer, to me is the completely wrong direction to advertise a game. Their car models clearly looked reused from old Forzas, however in an old development build that could be a placeholder. But I doubt that as why plaster that Evo that I wonder is a development build placeholder as their showcase, the modeling efforts looked worse than a 2006 game. Shouldn’t they do the opposite and lie with a model that looks 100x better than the real game?? Haha.

A huge thing for me is how literally fun would it be. Fm4 was unbelievably fun and everyone agreed. The games now just feel so stale and empty, just waiting to reach end of life. The structural features that has been broken in older games, balancing, physics testing, are you adding in stripped ideas from older titles that we loved, the nitty gritty of smaller interesting details, the “why is this game better than Fm4” and stuff like that which we want to know about is pushed to the side yet they prioritised all the buzzword bullcrap in their showcases/trailers.

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Blame it on the semi-automatic and dual clutch transmissions bro. Times changed, it’s all about lap times, always has been. The automotive golden age has came and gone.

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Things have definitely changed at Turn 10, and I’m not sure it was for the better. I know Forza Motorsport 4 is often cited as peak Forza Motorsport, but I’d venture that Motorsport 6 shares that same level. I feel like that game was the last time they really had not just an idea of what they wanted and what they were doing, but also the drive to do it and stick with it. I have to try to think about the things in that game that I didn’t like. The rain was problematic - granted, it was their first time trying it. And there were a couple of questionable car choices - not nearly as bad as Horizon 5 would be, but it had it’s moments. But really, that’s it.

That Turn 10 needs to come back. I don’t like where this one is trying to take things.

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I kind’ve agree with the sentiment but I don’t like the boomer “back in my day car culture was cool” mindset about it. I’m sure older folk say the same thing about 2000s car culture for replacing RWD V8s for “sissy” turbo’d 4cyls for example.

But yes, I think it’s safe to say this new car list isn’t as “car enthusiast-centric” as FM4. The decision to almost completely ignore & exclude classic cars is horribly tone deaf for a racing game. The foundations of racing is so important for understanding where it is today. Labeling American Stock Car Racing ICONS as “Rods & Customs” or “Hot Rod Reivival” kind seems to show that they might not actually know all that much about racing history.

The decision to continually ignore everyone wanting proper junky econobox starter cars shows how they seem to just prioritize flashy new stuff and ignore the car enthusiasts joy for souping up crap boxes. As afterall, that’s oftentimes where we start out in real life too!

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I think the game industry ran out of game-play ideas around 15 years ago because it seems to me like they just keep reselling the same old stale recycled leftovers, just with more pixels every hardware/console generation.
It’s all sequels & remasters & remakes & “reimaginings” & recombinations of the same old elements.

Most games feel predictable & soulless after gaming long enough to have seen it all many times before.

I think heavily-monetized billion-dollar-selling games had a big (negative) impact on the industry by raising financial expectations too astronomically high for lots of game studios to reach…

…Studios that aren’t monetizing the ever-loving heck out of their games might be struggling to just do the bare minimum to try to survive one more day before they get shut down or swallowed up by another bigger fish.

How do you entice investors to fund a game studio when you all know up-front that the game won’t have multi-billion-dollar sales, and when those investors know they have the option to instead put their money into other games that have lots of monetization baked-in for more returns over the long-term?

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I actually think this is the moment T10 has tried to go back to the roots of the franchise, I know many people are frustrated with the car leveling system, however for the last decade people have been complaining about the lack of old-school progression in these games. The problem is that the games have curated a different audience from that when FM4 was out, the newer games throw money at you, and it becomes a lot about collecting all the cars, and lets be honest, FM4 was never on the level of GT2 in terms of low level grind, they struck a good balance but it was never quite as tedious as the original Gran Turismo’s.

Another problem, and rofflewaffle touches on it in one of his videos, is that the sim-racing community has blown up over the last few years, and with it the esports community, so while the old GT and Forza games required a compelling single player career to hold peoples interest, now the expectation is that multiplayer fills that end-game gap, the last 2 GT entries have had very bare-bones single player modes, trying to filter you into the sports mode which even then isn’t particularly content-filled.

So essentially, T10 are trying to cater this game to many distinct groups, there are those who only have interest in the single player portion, and whom want to be challenged like they did back when they played early GT’s or Forza’s when they were younger. There are those who are more used to the car-collecting style of recent games, and want to just fill their garage with all the cars. There are some who just want to fast-forward into the supercars and GT3’s and have no interest in anything under 200kw. There are also many who are going to do the bare minimum in SP mode in order to hop straight into multiplayer.

So the way I see it, T10 saw a problem, the lack of progression, and have tried to create a system that tries to solve this problem, without affecting many of the other player-types that have become accustomed to these games. I certainly see for many this might be a pain to have to grind through, but given that you aren’t forced to upgrade cars for getting through the single player content, and that spec racing means you’ll not need to spring for upgrades, I’m optimistic that if they haven’t achieved a good balance at launch, that they can tweak this system to make most people happy.

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I didnt know games had aromas

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Yeah I agree. Fm6 was the tail end of what Fm4 was all about. It was just powered on 2013 technology instead of mid 2000s technology. I think the developers were still relatively similar. Think about how long game development takes, they could’ve been working on it since the early 2010s which was the last scraps of any real car culture. I did notice that the Fm8 menus/UI are similar to that of Fm6, basic and clean without clutter. Plus the title menu/showroom music is normal in keeping with the game, reminds me of Fm6/Fm4 which is a good sign.

Fm4 just eclipsed any game later down the line. Fm8 isn’t right or atleast they are picking the wrong stuff to showcase when in reality the game might be okay? The “incredible customization” they showcased had them featuring the Forza Spoiler on an MX-5? Wow! That specific car had Like 5 different Sets of skirts/diffusors and 2 body kits in the older Forzas. Again, they seem to have forgotten what their older Forzas were built with in the first place.

For Fm4 they went to the track places to take pictures, then they modeled it based on that. It wasn’t like the Top Gear test track, they went to the Bernes Alps. How crazy is that?? This was nuts in keeping with all the divisions/seasons they had in the game. Back in an era before 2011 that was nuts.

In autovista you could see the attention to detail was much much more. For Fm4 they hopped to many car dealerships to source the sounds in a sequence. I’m sure Fm8 just sourced the sounds stationary/revving with a mic close by. Fm4 recorded the sounds on a dynamometer to replicate the strain of the engine. They scanned the cars and was accurate to over 10,000ths of an inch. (I recall that figure on an old forum post.) They recreated the modeling from images based on ultra zoomed in shots capturing the textures then they’d match the geometry to the photos. Again, in the 2010 era that is crazy. (Obviously this set the precedent for future Forzas so Fm8 doing this now in 2023 isn’t anything special anymore.)

People’s big issue with new Forza is that they are reusing models, so instantly it doesn’t matter how they go about it. Fm4 didn’t do that as far as I’m aware and even if they did it went unnoticed.

The car list was a big part of it. It had such an amazing balanced variety of cars, there really was something for everyone. They had their muscle car pack DLC right from the start. You could play as cars from Halo haha. It was when T10 started putting in some old classics from 40’s-50’s cars and classic race cars like the 787B which sounded incredible. The DLC packs were amazing. Best car list for a game ever.

Forza’s lost the “mundane” cars it used to have in the F class range. They made the car list interesting. The latest ridiculous Lamborghini concept car or crazy powerful hypercar isn’t as fun for me as the B class Nissan Sentra I had in FM4. Not to mention that you can upgrade/downgrade it a ton with realistic upgrades. Fm8 just has preset unlocks in the same chronological order for every car in the game. ???

I recall playing Fm6 at the store in 2015ish or whatever on release and I got a wheel spin which was an end game. We all just laughed and just looked at eachother like “was that a 1 in a million chance??”. When we bought it we realised the game just handed it out like candy. I won a Lotus E23 after playing for a few minutes, then a bugatti, then 1m credits. I could use those cars for most challenge races and I no longer had an incentive to earn credits to buy these higher class cars. Fm4 was nothing like that.

Fm4 was really hard. You had challenges every month against REAL race car drivers or celebrities where you could win unique cars. They were incredibly difficult and the community’s top drivers would make tunes to help everyone win the challenge. Things like like just made the whole feel of the game more alive and well.

You can’t match the ui, soundtracks, Jeremy Clarksonisms, multiplayer options, track feel, engine sounds, customisations, set challenges etc that was in Fm4. The pure fun was something they can’t seem to replicate at all.

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GT2 was a pioneer in that regard

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Well it’s been 12 years, and im sure most of the staff moved on by now. I know the heads are the same but the grind out workers aren’t. And they don’t want to create 4 again sadly. I honestly would lose it if they remade 3 or 4 after this. Just kept live service motorsport going and spent years remaking a classic, i know they won’t, but people can dream. It’s time, tone shifts, different visons. I honestly think this will be a sea of thieves situation

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GenZ is not a real car enthusiast’s generation – many of them don’t learn to drive till their late teens. Lol

Expect this to get worse moving forward.

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