I would argue that they were already working on parts of new project before 2019. Track limits, penalties and improvements (with quotation marks or not - you decide ) to AI - FM7 was a testing ground for all these and knowledge gotten from there was used in new project. In other words, process for already in motion before FM7 became EOL and new project was publicly announced.
In the end it doesn’t really matter, if it was 6 years, 5 years or 4 years, because the end result shouldn’t have been the thing we got. They made FM4 in 3 years, which probably had a smaller budget and smaller team behind (with smaller experience and knowledge base, since they have launched 3 more Motorsports games and been part of 5 Horizon games since 2011) it compared to FM 2023.
I’ve added more in-depth details about how AAA game development (usually) works by way of friends who worked for EA, on different annual games, on other threads speculating why FM was released in the shape it is.
All that aside, it’s obvious something bad happened during development even if FM wasn’t in complete development from 2017, on.
I don’t think it was all Covid.
That probably didn’t help, but I honestly don’t think the pandemic was the main thing that hampered development of FM to the point where they had to start over, and/or scrap what they originally planned?
I also don’t believe FM was going to be a typical copy & paste job previous FM games were.
If it were, they wouldn’t need six to four years to do that. They could literally bolt on Ray Tracing, and improve the physics within a year, year and a half and call it good.
For the all the memes and marketing touting “Built from the ground up”… I honestly believe that was the original intent, but then whatever happened, happened, and T10 never recovered.
It’s a shame because you can see the potential lurking beneath the surface of unfinished systems, but it will never reach that potential because of all the missteps that lead to it’s unstable and unfinished launch.
That’s probably what happened… They’ve scrapped the “from ground up” project and slapped together what they had, I don’t know any other possible reasons why game is in such a bad technical state.
In the end we pretty much got copy and paste job with some of the new systems implemented…
Game should have been deleyed some more, at least for it to be playable…
I think all of us would have preferred that (FM 7.5) because, at least, we’d have a fully functioning game with lots of content like previous Motorsport games.
Yes, but not even a full copy & paste since we’re missing half the tracks and car count from previous games. I can’t believe they didn’t just include most of what was in FM7, to make up for the lack of new features and systems.
) to AI - FM7 was a testing ground for all these and knowledge gotten from there was used in new project. In other words, process for already in motion before FM7 became EOL and new project was publicly announced.