Disclaimer: this post is solely of my opinion only
This is just a thought I had in the shower.
Ever since Forza Motorsport 2, there has been a new Forza Motorsport game that has released every two years, around the October/November period.
In my opinion, from FM2 to FM4, the games was great, and I felt that the games reflected greatly on what Turn 10 thought the community wanted. Sure, there were bugs, glitches and some popular features were removed (no clubs in FM2 and FM3 and FM2 saw some great tracks cut out from FM1), but overall, the quality of the games were great, and they kept you coming back for more. I would be firing up my FM4 copy every weekend until I purchased my XB1 in 2016.
I’ve never played Forza 5, so I can’t comment on gameplay, but after reading on what features the game had and what it was missing compared to FM4, it seemed pretty evident to me that Turn 10 had a deadline to abide by, and had to release FM5 so it could either meet the bi-yearly release window for Forza games, and/or so it could be classified as an XB1 launch title (to help Microsoft push sales of the console), which possible is what resulted in the state of the game and how disappointing it looked compared to FM4.
Forza Motorsport 6 was my first Xbox One FM title, and what I thought Forza 5 should’ve been. I loved the game and how relaxing the menus felt. FM6 felt like a new and improved FM4 to me, just without the car clubs and custom lobbies. But hey, I could live without those.
Forza 7 is a great game, but it also felt rushed. The lag in the car menus and the numerous amount of minor bugs in the game, and how A.I cars aren’t that challenging to race against because of their power handicaps in higher difficulties. Only a few new cars in the game; the rest being ported over from Horizon 3. You can’t help but notice that Turn 10 had to take shortcuts to meet the release window for this game.
I thought of all this. And then I thought; what if Turn 10, instead of releasing a game every two years, had the option to take their sweet sweet time and release a Forza Motorsport game whenever they saw fit? Sure, we’d have fewer Forza Motorsport games. But after playing FM7 and realizing how rushed the game felt compared to FM6, I think if Turn 10 were given more than 2 years to spend time putting more attention to detail and content in past and future Motorsport games, then I think those games would be more enjoyable than they are now (they’d probably have more features, content, less bugs etc). Furthermore, the extended development cycle would probably give Turn 10 more time to iron bugs out (so there would be fewer people complaining on the forums. Jks). Sure, there would’ve been fewer Forza games in the staple. But traditionally, Forza games have had enough replay value to keep players occupied until the next game in the series was released.
Plus, with the release of more powerful consoles and TV’s, and players wanting more graphically enhanced games, I think a 2 year development window is inadequate, given that it requires more effort and time to construct a car or track model with a huge amount of graphical polygons - a 2 year period to build 700 highly detailed car models with a huge amount of graphical attention to detail wouldn’t leave much room for error, hence the noticeable amount of graphical bugs in Forza 7.
I don’t know if this is the case, but I’m hoping that the next FM game is released a bit later than October 2019.