In light of the last few trailers, soft rebooting the franchise was pointless

When FM was first announced and T10 said the game was “rebuilt from the ground up”, the fans really did think old stuff would be thrown away and replaced by new, better stuff, but this wasn’t the case.

Difficult to say about the tracks, but the cars are clearly carryovers. Which is expected in the industry, as streamlining development is necessary to avoid excessive costs. The problem is when you streamline so much, you’re reusing decade old, grossly inaccurate content in your game, and then try to pass your title as a “soft reboot”.

Quite the contrary. FM feels much more like FM8 than a soft reboot. It is an evolutionary step. The ForzaTech engine has supported raytracing since FH5. Physics most certainly didn’t require a complete rewrite of the engine to be implemented, nor did the AI.

And this is what’s most disappointing about it. Even if it turns out good, I can’t help but feel T10 misled the fans yet again. For what? There was no need to treat the game as a soft reboot. The franchise was in tatters, sure, but did it really need all the “ground up” and “soft reboot” nonsense?

FM is more FM8 than FM. This is alright… except when you tell us it isn’t.

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There’s an argument to be made that something can be ‘rebuilt from the ground’ up even if it uses recycled materials. But at the end of the day, even if it was all NEW material it could still have been FM8. The actual excuse for the name change is they gotta be paying marketing for something.

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The game is basically Forza Motorsport 7 with dynamic time of day and raytracing techniques implemented. It’s the same unrealistic lighting and colour palette, as if toy cars were racing, not real ones. The game is aimed at the mainstream audience, so it will feature a casual handling model, the same cameras, etc. The car list is mostly the same as before as well. There is no such thing as “built from the ground up” anymore, and not just in this case. There are new features and new things here and there, but this is obviously not a brand new experience.

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I think the tire model for each tire

  • from 1 spot once a frame
  • to 8 spots 6 times a frame
    is enough for calling it “ground up”.

Implemented on every car, 100 of them at launch.

I care more about this than visuals they spend a lot of time talking about.

180 kph is 50 meters/s

  • old tire model means car travel almost 1 meter every calculation
  • new tire model mean car travel 15 cm or so every calculation
  • and more accurately with more spots on tires as well

And most cars have higher top speed than this.
This will make a major difference I think in handling cars properly as physics goes.

  • every little manouver on wheel, throttle and brakes more authentic
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How about waiting for proper gameplay and not just the trailers

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There’s no need. Everything teased or hinted at is is purely incremental, not redone.

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Turn 10 could take FM7 replace it’s physics engine, fix FFB on wheels, add user defined camera placement, FOV adjustment, triple screen projection correction, and I’d forgive the rest of the shortcomings. The car models could fall into the “close enough” category and I’d be satisfied with the results. Since FM5, Forza Motorsport practically failed in the presentation and user interface departments. Fix these issues, and it’s enough “Ground Up” for me at least.

Also I remember rumors of Forza Motorsport going the G.A.S. route. Perhaps the soft reboot is part of that plan? To be honest, I would hope FM goes that route, because it would mean that the title will get more substantive and sensible quality of life improvements, rather than getting a lot of pizzazz in a graphical update and a new (and terrible) fantasy race track. But who knows if that is or ever was the plan?

I have no words for that kind of guessing and playing game dev that some people do here. Just mindblowing. I just want to facepalm hard.

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Meh. If garbage like Assetto Corsa is the toughest track racing competition FM has on XBOX, T10 won’t have to try hard at all to be the best available.

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Couldn’t say. Can’t find sales specifically just on XBOX, which would be the only relevant figures in context. What I can say is the controls felt like garbage on controller, which paired real well with the oppressive rules systems. I don’t know if Competizione fixed that at all, as I haven’t seen a trial/free play weekend for it to get my hands on it. But it’s a very common problem with “sim” racers that they ironically can’t seem to simulate the feel of driving a car without shifting the onus onto the player to help things along with niche hardware.

PC was irrelevant in context because my if-then statement was specifically about “the toughest track racing competition FM has on XBOX” and by extension not having to try hard to be the best available therein - king of the console, as it were. But I could only find total global sales. The only gauge I can readily find that potentially indicates popularity on console is the number of reviews (not the rating, just the quantity), which I would want to double check from my actual XBOX as in my experience xbox.com can be inconsistent, wherein AC and ACC apparently have less than 500 reviews each while FM7 has a couple hundred thousand. So, in summary, console gamers may technically be a minority of gamers, but it appears that I may be in the majority of that minority.

And I suspect all that necessary “fettling” might have something to do with it. In my experience, console gamers expect to jump into a game with a minimal of fiddling with settings. Many don’t even want to get into tuning cars, much less spending a lot of time dialing in basic control setting minutia. Even The Crew had to make it over that hurdle - early on it got a lot of flak with its console release because the default control settings were awful and it didn’t matter that people were posting better baselines for those settings with controllers. It didn’t really start to catch on until it was working better by default.

On the other side of the coin, it wouldn’t surprise me if AC/ACC was more open to modding than FM. Mods being a major draw of PC gaming.