Initial thoughts on day one

Forza Motorsport Forza Motorsport 2023 FM 2023 Discussion
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So I changed my timezone to NZ and got on a few hours early, and here’s my first impressions.

First up, immediately bad…

The intro sequence was pretty much ruined for me as the inital wheel settings are bad, awful even. The basic settings have a lot of progression in the steering meaning the driver turns more than I am, the steering is way to heavy (over damped) and I just stumble through the corvette and Cadillac entry features.

Doesn’t get any better when I start the introduction cup with the civic.

I spent an hour and a half just screwing around with the wheel settings trying to get them right. I was pretty annoyed at first thinking it was worse than FM7 and all the rest of it. While I’ve now managed to get to something I can happily play with, I still think there’s a fair bit of fine tuning to be done.

For reference, I’m on XSX and using a Fanatec wheel. The changes I made to stock settings are:

Road Feel: 120
Wheel Damping: 65
Steering Linearity: 20

Anyway, so I start with level 5 difficulty and Medium race settings.
I battle through the introduction series. I don’t do well at Oak, do ok at Mugello but surprise myself at Kyalami and get 2nd.

With the intro done, I go to my garage to get the NSX GT3 car I’ve been dying to drive (my main in ACC) and all of a sudden, I’m blown away by how good it feels in comparison to the civic. It steers easy, not heavy, it is snappy, agile, yet stable. I remember Hoki saying similar things in his preview…

Then I do the next series in a Hyundai, and it all becomes clear. It starts out hard tk drive just like the civic, but as I race it and upgrade it, man on man does it come alive!!! The changes to its handling are so distinctive, it is so cool how it feels and changes. NOW I am having proper fun!

While I had been worried about audio, I can happily report this has actually been really well done and is one of my favourtie parts. The soundscape is deep and diverse, with a wide range of sound effects (not just engine stuff, though the engines sound amazing) and the way the car notes change as you upgrade, so cool.

Now, I should say the FFB isn’t the best. It isn’t ACC good that’s for sure. And whilst it’s good enough and will get better with some tuning, I can’t see it rivalling ACC, there just isn’t the same detail and fidelity. But it certainly is good and waaaaay better than FM7, undoubtedly so.

The upgrade system that’s attracted so much controversy:
While having parts locked in a linear fashion sure isn’t great, it isn’t as bad as expected in my view. The parts unlock faster than you get Available XP, and the Series PI limit constrains how far you can upgrade.

I’ve been happily juggling parts as I try to balance out the performance of my car to manage my Available XP and PI. So I’m not just applying the “race” spec parts and then forgetting about it. So that’s been a pleasant surprise.

As for the gameplay: Wow. I have been having some epic races with the AI, along with some pretty clean battles. I start P3-5 and give them proper respect, and it’s produced some really fun racing. Now on Difficulty 6.

I love the new track limits. Can take properly abusive GT lines now! And I also really love the segment scoring thing, it’s so motivating when it come up to try to absolutely nail sections.

Graphics are just awesome. I am using Performance RT in 32in monitor, so the 1440p60 is perfect with this mode.

One race started with light rain and progressively became heavy, was so cool watching the wind push the rain bucketting down.

Anyway, much more to be done! Now to build up the Supra!

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How did you changed your timezone ?

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How is that possible to play earlier ?

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I thought stuff like this get you banned. Does it cause any problem changing timezone in your console?

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Wasn’t this the game that was 6 years in the making, first Forza to release purely on the Series X?

Here is my unbiased list (unbiased because I only bought a Xbox to play this and I was going to return it 1 week later even if this game was amazing):

THERE IS NO PAGANI ZONDA R!?!?

The career structure looks very nice and qualifying is awesome. The segments time splits are a really good addition, I liked that a lot and have been really into that idea. I do like the Hud/simplicity of the menus. So there are some positives. I like the feel of the game and the cars feel very heavy. That is a nice touch.

Went to my mates house 3 hours after release, he was hacked up to level 930ish, this was after 2ish hours of playing apparantly. He reset his save data on the Xbox with me and restarted his Xbox, nothing happened. I guess this is because it links to online saves thanks to online career play hahahaha. He can’t level up at all and is basically frozen in place lol.

It’s pretty obvious the creative minds/geniuses left the Forza team back in maybe 2015ish. Honestly, Fm6 looked better than this. Heck, Fm4 looked better. How is this even possible. Some models look like cartoons in the actual game?? The lighting is poor, the attention to detail is poor. The tracks look quite nice. AI feels better but is barely any different since the guy in 1st position will rocket out in front while the other AI plays as if they suffered a concussion, basically they’re trailing behind acting stupid. The upgrade system is still horrendous and illogical.

Here is the main part for me. The most expensive car in the game is around £400k. HAHAHA. Why is the rate of earning credits the same, now that you don’t use them on car upgrades, there is literally no point in racing or changing the difficulty for extra credits. 10 races in and you can buy the most expensive car in the game. (You get around 10,000 credits per 10 minutes of driving depending on difficulty/assists.) Cars used to cost £5m+ in older Forzas.

Everyone is saying the models suck and are reused. No comment there haha. Kind of expected.

Apparently tons of people have been hacked up to level 930+ which has essentially broken their game, so yeah online only to prevent hackers from PC was a joke. Now it is online only for literally no reason.

The UI is super laggy. (I guess this can be fixed in an update. So whatever.)

I haven’t played it properly on my own Xbox yet, just went to my mates house to see it live a few hours ago, I’m out and I guess I am in no rush to get home, watched lots of clips about it and even then it was a bit boring.

What is up with this game. I thought it would be bad, but was optimistic because of the graphical buffs when running on the new (ish) Xbox Series X. The sales team were talking as if this game was unbelievable and insanely realistic, it looks like crap. Nothing you’d expect from 2023. It doesn’t matter that it is “early release”, all they can fix is UI stuff and maybe change the balancing I was talking about earlier and maybe stop hackers. The base game is just, well, this.

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Good thing I checked before posting my initial impression as well. I’ll copy/paste here instead! I agree with pretty much all you have said but I made different tweaks to by settings.

Intro

  • First thing I notice in the intro lap with the Corvette E-Ray: my H-pattern shifter is not working! Is it because that car does not exist as a manual (Asseto Corsa does that)? Nope, tried with other cars, it is just not supported. Major, major bummer!

Physics and driving experience with the wheel :

  • Initially OK but numb. After adjusting a few setting in-game and it gets MUCH better :

  • Turning down the Wheel Damping Scale down from 100 to 20 and Dynamic Damping Behavior down from 100 to 0. (I do have some damping and inertia in my wheel’s settings and set the minmum here to avoid oscillation)

  • Increased Load Sensitivity from 50 to 60

  • I’ll keep tuning these setting over time but just these (and especially the damping) make a huge difference in feeling the weight changes, tire load etc.

  • Don’t expect Assetto Corsa level of feedback and fidelity but I’d rate it at maybe 85-90% of AC. I am more than satisfied, it is a very enjoyable experience with the wheel!

  • Different cars also give very different driving experience.

  • My first car was the S209 STI. It was partially responsible for the “numb” feeling I initially had, it is quite “plain” and neutral when stock. By the time I was at the final race for the Builders Cup intro, it was a bit more lively at the top of B Class.

  • I bought a Chrysler Valiant Charger after a few races and really had a blast driving that in Free Race with the dynamic weather. It is a lot more fun and engaging than the Subaru! But also very soft suspension and imprecise steering. After the first race, I installed larger wheels and sway bars and the handling was totally transformed and the change in the FFB was just perfect.

  • Second Builders Cup event, I went with the 2009 Focus RS (FWD). The car has a ton of lift oversteer and it feels like the rear-end is barely touching the ground under hard braking (very unstable). After the first race, added ballasts (they cost 0CP, yay!) to improve the weight distribution, along with a few other upgrades. Result : much easier to manage the car under hard braking and can still use the lift oversteer mid-corder. Great!

Gameplay loop :

  • The few races with the Valiant Charger and the Focus RS gave me a better feeling of the gameplay loop than the STi. You feel the upgrades done to your car between each races and it is a lot of fun. But it will get grindy. After three hours and using three cars, they are at levels 12, 8 and 7 (that does include a fair share of time in the menus upgrading cars etc.).

  • The driving score we get in the various sections of a track is really just based on how fast you are compared to the game’s prediction for you car. You can slide, be completely off the racing line, it doesn’t matter as long as you are fast. With the Subaru I had trouble scoring higher than 7.X most of the time. With the other two cars, it’s a lot messier on track and I’m hitting 8s and 9s very often.

  • Scoring between 8 and 9 give a 25xp bonus and over 9 is a 50xp bonus, but there is a “base” score, only seen visually in the progress bar but without a number shown. This base XP amount seems to vary according to the distance driven in that section. So you get decent XP just from driving. And this applies all the time so even when tuning and test driving a car, you’ll get the same XP.

  • The way the game is structured, with a lot of emphasis on driving well and fast (to get those XP bonus) and getting to know each car intimately as we level them up, it feels like Turn 10 wants to groom all players for competitive multiplayer. Seems like a risky proposition as many players could be turned off by the grind but on the other hand, it might help build a better (larger) fanbase of dedicated players online.

Multiplayer
I’ve only tested a few things in private multiplayer but so far, two negatives :

  • No AI in private lobbies
  • You can’t even lap by yourself in a “meetup” private lobby, waiting for buddies to join. You can’t get on track until there are at least two players.

Early Conclusion
The game is a ton of fun! Physics are great, the gameplay loop works (so far) but I do fear it will get quite grindy over time, especially if you like to buid old cars that start with a low PI into race cars in the B-A-S classes. Still, I know I’ll be playing this game for a long time because I’m having a blast with the actual racing.

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Day one thoughts? That’s a lot of Gameplay, Graphics and Stability bugs… More than I would expect with a few glaring issues such as VSYNC not locking the framerate to 60fps when enabled.

I wonder what they’ll fix day one…

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Lack of variety as in tag mode, drag mode, etc
But fantastic just little boring with just circuit only

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Lighting looks incredible at times, while handling feels much better and engine and exhaust sounds…just wow!

But, anyone else finding on Series X, even with the texture pack, road textures are lower res than 7? Very strange when so much looks better.

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My first impression…

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1000081735

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This one takes the biscuit

“General Gameplay - Some logos for aftermarket parts are outdated”

Idk how that got past licensing

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THANK YOU! I’m glad I’m not the only one annoyed over the literal child-level difficulty. It’s gonna feel the exact same functionally as Horizon except instead of cars and money being thrown at you, you will just have so much money so easily that you can buy whatever you want whenever you want. I’m basically PLEADING for a car price or payout difficulty scaler at this point :sob::sob::sob:

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You are the exact demographic for why the Horizon series was made.

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my thoughts on the game? i cant even get past the T10 intro. Game crashes everytime.

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At least they managed to have some returning features from FH5

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I’ve only played for a few hours but I love it! It feels much better than FM7. It feels like old school Forza again now we’re allowed (and encouraged) to tune our cars between races again. The menu’s are a fresh breath of air. It was time too. Very clean and modern. Upgrading the car level doesn’t seem too bad. If you drive properly you can get to level 12 in 2 races (with practice laps). We’ll see how that goes when we’re trying to get to level 50 though.

I also see some cars we don’t have in Horizon so that’s good! Hopefully they’ll be carried over soon!!

Looking forward to putting more hours into this game :smiley:

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100% no AH.
Cast your mind back to Motorsport 5. Its that
I’d be astonished if you could share liveries or tunes.
6 years is longer from the time they didnt have those features in FM5 to FM7 (5 years actually)
And thats how long they’ve been working on this game for.

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Incredible. Why would they not include AI in private multiplayer? Thats me out then. A terrible decision, i hope they will add them in an update. No reason not to.

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That would simply allow too much depth in replayability and personal control.

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