How much should we expect from Turn 10? And do they listen?

Forza Motorsport Legacy Motorsport
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Since I’ve been a part of this forum, or should I say, community, this question has popped into my head periodically as my feelings vacillate on the subject depending on what particular dissatisfaction I may have at that moment and how desperately I may want resolution or some answer… But I think this needs to be discussed here. I think this is something we all need to think about. There are threads on this forum that are 30 pages long with 700 posts, a Features Wishlist thread (which I believe at one time had ‘bugs’ or ‘glitches’ in the title) which has over a thousand posts, a Track Wishlist and a Car Wishlist among countless other threads in which passionate users are voicing their dissatisfactions or suggestions to make the game better for all users.

The common feeling among all of these thousands of posters is that, not only is the game missing some essential feature, but more importantly, that Turn 10 isn’t listening to our pleas, that they’ve turned a deaf ear, that they don’t care about what we want or what would make the game better, more playable.

Regardless of how we feel on this matter, I just have to ask, really, what should we realistically expect from Turn 10 in the way of responsiveness to our concerns or complaints?

Part of me says, Yes, it makes all the sense in the world that they would listen to us. Anyone who own a business knows how important it is to listen to our customers. For goodness sake, they are the ones who ensure that we stay in business and stay profitable. Forza Motorsport 5 sold less than half what FM4 sold (see image below). Why? Is it simply gaming trends, first person shooters becoming more popular, etc.? Or is it because they’ve removed so much from the game since Forza 4 and they’re not listening to the flood of requests to put it back in?

The other part wonders if we need to simply face the fact that maybe the feeling of Dan Greenawalt, John Wendl, Alan Hartman et al is that they don’t need our input. They are the professionals in this business. They don’t need our help to make a great game. I put that possibility out there only as a guess as to why they seem almost offended by the suggestions that the game is lacking or not what it should be. While we can disagree with them, it’s their baby. Any parent is going to get offended when you call their child ugly, whether he looks like a puppy-baby-monkey or not.

The question of how much should we expect from Turn 10 has nothing to do with how much we believe they should care about us, but how much should we get our hopes up given the direction they’ve, now historically, taken with us and the evident futility in requesting features that are standard in any racing game. Does voicing our opinion here help? Does Turn 10 listen? Do you think it helps?

What say you?

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Probably not a great deal, I wouldn’t expect them to chuck all their eggs in the basket for any given iteration. FM7 will probably have a few more features, but it’ll never be enough because there’ll always be something missing. Such is the way with a game that caters to such a wide range of people.

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I believe part of the reason 4 sold so well was that it drooped on the backend of the 360 life cycle with many people having the console and perhaps playing prior versions. 5 was a launch title and would have never been expected to match those numbers. You say T10 doesn’t listen but could you not say that about most game companies? I don’t expect my wishlist to be attended to at once.

-k

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Why work on one game for a couple of years then bring out the same game after and change the number of it forza 6 should stay we don’t need any other forza’s add dlc for forza 6 and stop making the price of dlc’s high. people buy a game and expect the game to cost the same they bought it for so lets say i buy forza 6 for £40 i don’t expect to pay an extra £5 upwards for each dlc if i bought every dlc it would be more then most people could afford. rockstar made gta v every dlc is free thats the right thing to do why spend £40 on a game then have to pay an extra £100 on all the dlc its stupid.

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I seriously doubt most people that have the money to buy an Xbox One and FM6, simply wouldn’t be able to afford an additional $100+ for all the DLC… They may not be able to justify spending that kind of money based on how much enjoyment you get from it; but if money is so tight that you simply can’t afford $100 then it was pretty foolish (in my opinion) to spend $350-550 on something as trivial as XBox one and FM6 in the first place.

If I go out for a nice dinner and drinks it’ll easily cost me as much as all the DLC for FM6 combined. Considering the amount of time I’ve played it, its a pretty inexpensive bargain to me. Obviously, everyone’s going to be different.

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GTA V sold ridiculous amounts, 10’s of millions of copies. That kind of money pays for free DLC. Forza sells a few million copies and barely covers costs. It’s not for profit, It’s a flagship title to show off Xbox’s prowess. So the DLC is charged because they literally have no money spare for free DLC.

As for listening, sometime they do, sometimes they don’t. As a franchise they seem to have lost their way lately, but hopefully they’ll find their way back.
Forza 7 needs to just bring back all the community stuff and game modes they removed after Forza 4 which was perfect, and Forza 7 will be 100% perfectamundo! (Yes i’m using made up words today)

If you don’t like the price of DLC, don’t buy it, it’s not necessary to the game experience, it’s just added fluff. But some people love it and some don’t. Can’t please everyone. Although the car packs used to have 10 cars every month…

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Does Turn 10 listen to us? I think so. Several items in the wish list were added to FM6. However, I think they have their own priorities that may not be the customers’ priorities.

Does Turn 10 respond to us? Not very well. Some of the answers seem condescending. Some are just confusing. My favorite response was when FM4 DLC no longer was available for purchase. The first response was they were looking into it. It turned out the game went end of life. You think this would have been well known.

I removed an earlier comment about sales in Japan because it was wrong. I must have misread the chart.

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Yeah, the dollar/pound per hours is very good in games like Forza as they are played for hundreds of hours. In Forza 4 I racked up thousands of hours iirc in the various modes. So it was great value.
But some people don’t judge games on those kind of values. Some people won’t like Forza because there aren’t enough guns, or Lara Croft. lol But those who love Forza usually cite longevity as a reason.
For me that’s waning a bit due to other features being removed, but we’ll see where they head next.

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I can´t understand why you guys complain.

Forza 6 is a huuuuuuuuuge step from Forza 5 and offers many cars and many tracks.

Lets get to some pointe people wanted:

  • open wheelers → check
  • Spa, Bathurst, Nordschleife and GP Course → check

They also have their twitch-streams.

Show me another company of a racing game that does this as well.

I think they do listen to our wishes but you just can´t please everybody.

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They listened to me… I won’t go into all the gory details (you can read them in the mentioned thread) I told them a particular feature that was left out was in fact in the game you just had to “glitch” the game to see it. They promptly removed said “glitch” and haven’t added the ability to access said feature (even though everyone knows said feature exists).

Problem is with “vision” as we age our sight deteriorates.

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Remember that listening and saying yes are two different things.

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+1
I was about to make this comment as well, until I read yours.

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In regard to Faultier really?? Name another company doing it better lol umm let me see Slightly Mad Studios which to this day is still updating their game and listening to their customers. They fix cars monthly update AI all the time add tracks cars and not to mention it’s the closest game to full sim on console that we have but hey T10 is doing it better come on. There are so many features missing, cars that are broke , handling is arcade , but they fix one car and have yet to drop a patch this month for anything big. Yet project cars is on patch 9.0 I play both and I use a wheel and controller on PJC. I am not trolling just stating the obvious. Every game has its bugs and fan boys but when a company out right ignores and deceives it’s customers that’s wrong. Dan stated this game would be sim based but with all assist on anyone can drive and that is far from the truth. I personally haven’t purchased any DLC because they have yet to fix core features if everyone would follow suit they would catch on but people don’t. One the other hand I have DLC for Project Cars and Drive club which looks better than forza on every aspect. So yes there is is your answer studios do do it better. There is no reason why we still don’t have dynamic lighting, and weather changes in FM6 the rain is a joke play Project Cars one time and notice how huge puddles are none existent instead they build up. The tracks in forza are also wrong again play other games and you will see as are the sounds of these machines. I only play FM6 due to friends wanting to play leagues which is a whole different story.

Point is folks if a company such as slightly mad can do it on a lower budget and smaller in size there is no reason why T10 can’t! !!

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Agreed. The Forza franchise deserves better. We are not asking for perfection, but we should expect and demand no less than commitment to constant improvement for a product that was intended to have a long service cycle. We demand it from car manufacturer’s, Internet companies, and gaming platform manufacturer’s, why would we not demand it from a software or gaming company.

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In terms of sales, do remember that the PS4 has absolutely dominated the market so far, which is what the 360 did last time out.

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No one can say they truly listen, or else there wouldn’t be a bug thread (which I doubt anyone from T10 reads) along with the other suggestion threads… If they listened to us, then there wouldn’t be any of those threads on here. A lot of things that I’ve read in the bug thread that people want fixed, are just purely cosmetic. I would think out of everything, that this would be the easiest kind of thing to fix. If FM6 is supposed to be all about attention to detail, I would expect T10 to actually put the details in the game that matter. Why can’t I paint the other half of the AE86? Why can’t I apply decals to some of the rear license plate areas of a lot of the cars? Why are there FEW if any customization options for a lot of these cars, that I KNOW have at least have a FEW options in terms of customizing the exterior. The Honda CR-X has no side skirts? he FD RX-7 has zero aftermarket rear wings available in real life? There’s dozens of GT wings for that car, so it seems as if T10 failed to do their research. Same idea applies to the 1992 Honda NSX, the Nissan Skyline GT-R R32, and numerous other cars, but those two are ones that had at least a couple of options for bumpers and wings in FM4.

Heck, why can’t T10 just make some “Forza” bumpers, skirts and wings for some of these cars? (Not the “race” ones you can put on basically ever one of the cars) Clearly they can make up fantasy race tracks in order to give us more content, so I would think that the same could be done for the customization end of the game.

Customization matters just as much as the physics, tracks, etc in the game. ( I know the hardcore players don’t care about this though. )

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No you are missing the difference between listening and acting.

I have no doubt that they read all threads. I have no doubt they know what are in all those threads.

What is not happening is they are not doing everything being asked of them.

I am in a software development role at the moment. Nothing to do with gaming though.

There is a common theme:

  1. End users always want everything yesterday.
  2. End users always ask for things too late.
  3. End users never understand the complexity of making changes - and this goes both ways, what end users thinks is easy is often hard and the things they think are hard are often easy.

Bugs are not always easy to fix. At my work we tried to fix a bug yesterday, problem is the thing we changed fixed the bug we were working on but created another.

It is not always as straightforwad as we think.

Now I am not just a developer, I am also a gamer.

With my knowledge what would I like to see from Turn 10? Take on board all of the info they have gathered on the forums to ensure FM7 or FM8 is improved.

It is too late to make changes to FM6.

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Well, this certainly helps explains your logical, well thought out responses to all the complaining by users who do not get everything they want updated.

I sit and shake me head every time I read “such a change shouldn’t really take much time”. Unless someone has experience as a programmer at one level or another, that user really has no clue as to what is involved in finding, fixing and implementing said changes.

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+1…i do not understand the train of thought of some people, clueless and clueless!!!

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