I’m not sure where to post this, but I’m sure a Moderator will move it if necessary.
To the fine folks at Turn 10,
Thank you so very much for your chase camera. In my humble opinion it is the most under-rated aspect of what makes a racing/driving game fun to play and I’d go as far as saying it’s the VIP of the Forza games.
That probably sounds strange to some of you, especially if your experience of racing games is limited to Forza. It’s something I didn’t realize for some time, and hadn’t realized until I went back to play a game from another racing series that I had enjoyed quite a bit after having spent several months playing my first Forza game, FM4.
All of a sudden, that game that had been so fun to play, now felt and looked slow and awkward. It took me a few minutes to realize why; the chase camera was completely static, and the car itself hardly ever veered from pointing straight ahead. It sounds like such a small, simple thing, but it makes such a huge difference if you play your racing games in 3rd person, using the chase cam.
I bring this up now because in my wait for the next Motorsport I went out and bought the new Gran Turismo (7), and somehow, after all of these years, the folks at Polyphony are still using the same, static chase cam they’ve used for years. It makes taking turns feel like the track is what’s moving, rotating underneath and around your car, instead of the car turning around the track. It also dramatically lowers the sense of speed. And like how I said Forza’s chase camera was its VIP, GT’s chase camera is the main reason why I’m having such a hard time enjoying what seems to be, on every other level, a finely crafted racing game.
So while I do thank Turn 10 for their dynamic chase camera, it has also been a curse. GT is by far not the only series of racing games with chase cameras that ruin the action, and so many racing games that I’ve bought over the years since FM4 have ended up being hardly played at all.
It really makes me wonder if I’m the only one this has affected in this way, and if not, why in the world are those other developers still using such awful chase cameras?
Needless to say, the new Forza Motorsport can’t get here soon enough.
Thanks for listening and have a fantastic day!
PS, one thing GT 7 (and Sony) did get right was how they incorporate the PS5’s new haptic trigger technology into the game for the gas and brake pedals. Maybe launch the next FM in tandem with a controller redesign that has the same tech.