Is the Name change an indication of...

Forza Motorsport Forza Motorsport (2023) Discussion
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I have been noticing a trend in gaming… it’s one that I had hoped to see a long time ago.

I always saw gaming as a PLACE rather than a situation. I might have been a very ambitious person while I was young, and my tastes might have changed to fit, what was being offered, but I never felt like I found a game that really encompassed what I was hoping to see happen.

Games like Forza, expand upon the gaming industry, a place where you go to do specific things. I personally got hooked on the series from playing a demo, which really never showed off anything that I was looking for… it was just cars going around Laguna Seca.

Once the game actually showed up, I noticed that people were getting VERY fancy with how they painted cars. Some of these paint-jobs seemed as if they were modded into the game. They may have been. I decided to give the paint thing a bit of extra attention, and before I knew it, I had painted cars to appear as if they had Carbon fiber on them.

I started taking it a bit further but hit the limits of what I could do. Eventually Forza 2 broke through that barrier, and offered a full on livery system, that no games had ever seen before. It also Added Photography, something that I personally fell in love with. I spent COUNTLESS hours photographing cars, and locations, and entering contests until I actually won something in the OUTSIDE WORLD… as in I won a contest that had actual prizes.

Finally, for me at least, the game had a return on my investment. I kept playing the games, and kept noticing a specific trend… Lots of stuff remained the same from the previous games. In fact, the track textures on Laguna Seca, were the same textures used on Laguna Seca, in Forza Motorsport 3. Tire marks, and broken pavement, all in the EXACT same spots… just the lighting was different. It wasn’t a new version of the same track, it was THE same track from the very first game… it was even the same as the FREE demo I played of the original game, before Forza was a household name.

With that in my mind, and the whole thought process that I had always had in the back of my mind… I couldn’t help but feel like Forza, doesn’t need a NEW game… we just need a BASE game, that the developers continue to tend to, and add onto, for the entire console Life-cycle.

That brings me back to the question at hand… Was the Name change, to indicate, that Forza Motorsport, is getting a new life as a PLACE… rather than a situation? Are we getting a BASE game that will be fleshed out over the course of several years? It’s the ideal platform to simply add cars, and add tracks, and add new features.

Do we need a more Professional Photomode? Do we want the game to mimic buying a car from a Used car dealership? Maybe… Maybe you just want to rip around an oval track as fast as possible against bots. Maybe you want a way to import photos into the game… maybe you want to be able to paint your cars through an app on your phone rather than fiddle around with your controller.

All these things could be implemented into the base game. No need for waiting for Forza Motorsport 9, or 10, or 22 for a feature to show up. We would all know that the game is a living breathing organism… where the community pumps the blood, and the developers do the breathing.

So, is the name change indicative to the fact that we will no longer see sequels, and instead finally have a place where we know, when a car is added to the game, it won’t be missing when the next numbered game comes along? I know we all have our favorite cars, and when some of them don’t make it from the previous game, its somewhat disappointing. I know for certain, Forza Motorsport 4, (which I cannot play at all due to the lack of the correct console to play it on) has 3 of the last 4 cars I have owned IRL. My current car is in that game… the car before that… in FM4.

I definitely give the thumbs up of approval, if this is the plan for the game.

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That is pretty much the definition of “games as a service” and I really hope Forza and the next gen consoles don’t go that route.

If Forza goes that route we will never get updated graphics or physics and it is very likely they will never add a new track to the game. Historically track based DLC in Forza doesn’t work, unless everyone buys the DLC track you need to have a special online mode for the people with the DLC and then that mode is less popular than the regular modes. The only way a track works as DLC is if they make it 100% free or charge a monthly fee to play the game (aka game pass only).

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I think Forza is ripe for the games as a service model. All the devs have to do to make changes to the game is drop an update. If they want to update graphics or physics it will just have to be a larger update. I see no real discernible difference between a 30 gigabyte update that downloads while I sleep or having to purchase a new game to get the improved physics and graphics other than one is “free” and one is not. I already pay for Xbox live gold, I would consider a subscription to a platform that receives constant support and updates. I paid turn10 $60 to $120 a year for the last nearly decade to purchase the latest and greatest game. How is that any different from paying $5-$10 a month for an ever expanding library of tracks and cars, with occasional game mode updates, events, and upgrades to the basic platform? (Mathematically there is zero difference)

Most of us on this forum are habitual Forza players, and many of us have been playing since Forza 2. Not everyone will have bought all the DLC or bought the games at full retail price but if they had like me the outlay is $120 a year. That equates to $10 a month which is high in my opinion for one game. However if every player in the Forza universe that played the game paid a subscription of $5 a month the habitual players would save money over buying new versions of a game that lately have felt like updates and not new games anyway.

Just my two cents, take it or leave it.

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totally agree! Forza should go “game as a service”
Been racing Forza Motorsport since the first - sometimes still hook up the old “duke” and race the first one, and second and third. What i notice is that Forza gone from simish to arcadish - I hope they get back to simish. I hope they get physics up at iracing/acc (very different things thos two) specs. The cars in forza (if you not race griptuned D class cars) are often understeered monsters driving on warm soap. sadly… Made me look elsewhere. And offcourse the ramming and no consecquence other that that 10 min race ruin, lets hop into another one.

So iracing, not perfect how they do their point system, but it really hurts when you run off or anothher running you off the road. It follows you! I make so you can join sertain series, and you will be put in a lobby with people with same safatyrating and Irating (Irating is like how good you are) An Iratingsystem combined with the way forza ghosts out rammers - would be nice!

For those not familiar with iracing, its a sim as a service, you pay (way too much) for each car and track and a monthly fee. (10 - 15 dollar for a car or track) What this do, is that you train, practice and get godd in a few cars not 700… They have official races that change once a week. usally it series that goes for 12 weeks. som races goes once an hour, some every second hour etc. an example, say you want to race and do good in an MX5. You look at schedual, its a race at 10.00. its a 30 min race. then you can check when it goes trhioiut the day/week. and you find that it starts every second hour. Then you know, it will allways bee someone to race at that time. and iracing has millions fewer racers than Forza. And the pricing? dont worry, if Forza goes “subscriptions” my guess is that its included in gamepass…

And for thos who think that devs dont upgrade grafiix and physics? i think iracing has updates every week. sometimes new tyremodel, sometimes changing physics on a specific car that feels wron on track etc, and yes, the grafix is something else than in 2012.

Microsoft has so much more money than the iracingfolks and turn10 has allot of competance - sho they should be able to blow our mind an make an awsome SIMracer - that with a press of a button feels like Horizon or regular Forza 7. And offcourse make those wheelbases and pedalsets out there workon forza -and dreaming on vr support for pc. (now i cant race forza7 cause game wont map my Fanatec dd1 with heusinkveld pedals. witch is weired and make no sence, ;p

sorry up front for bad english . ;-p

CRU espreeso see you on track!

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Totally agree that GAAS is the best way to evolve this series. I’ve been a fan since I played the first demo on the show floor of E3, the day they announced the original game. You could make FM8 and I’m sure it would be fun and all, but I’m glad they’re looking at things differently. I just hoping that we get to be part of the ride. I want to see this thing grow from the bottom up, like I did from pCars. I really hope they open it up to test broadly through alphas and betas and for years to come.

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It will be a service, it has to be. It’s going to take a very long time for this to come out compared to 6 and 7. They’ve most likely overhauled the entire thing. Forza Horizon already is. They took way to long to catch up with 7 and that derailed all of their plans for that game with add ons. I’d rather they spend years expanding on this new vision they seem to have. I just wish it was going a little faster…

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I have a concern with a “Service” Motorsport game. This could be the last set of clean leaderboards for this title.

A question to everyone that enjoys hot lapping. Will your motivation to play be reduced after setting your best time on every leaderboard?

I enjoy organizing hot lap competitions, but fully completed leaderboards will make them much more difficult to run.

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An effective solution there would be to give players an option to “erase current time/score” from leaderboards

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Indeed, Moss. There are multiple concerns that could arise. Besides the “been there, done that” feel of a long-living leaderboard, it’s possible that the physics is updated during the game’s lifecycle, which would require a wipe… but what if it isn’t done? Also there’s the cheaters problem, and we must hope more stringent action is taken against that in FM than what is being done in FH4, because Microsoft is operating on a “let the players handle the reporting” basis, since the Xbox Live games on PC don’t have a built-in anti-cheat system.

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It’s definitely an interesting thought Moss & one I’d not considered when I’d read this thread previously.

I think there are a couple of things though to take in to consideration - even if I’ve hotlapped a track, as a fairly average player - I might do 10 - 12 laps and call it done. If I’m hotlapping in one of your HLC’s it’s probably not unusual to do 10-12 laps per session - running more than one session a day - over a number of days to try and eke out the last bit of performance or skill I have. So even with a time on a board, chances are I should be able to beat it with the concerted effort one of your comp’s usually brings.

Even if they do go game as a service, which is still an if - one of the things, you would hope that would bring is new tracks periodically as well as new cars - so that would mean an ever expanding range of leaderboards to challenge. Plus we’ve all seen new LB cars come as DLC later in the life of games, with an attendant rush to run those to the top of the board in the past.

There may be/ could be occasional leaderboard wipes, which we’ve also seen in the past for one reason or another - now, if it went game as a service could be a feature rather than something done to fix an issue.

Even if it is a game as a service, it’s still likely to only have a lifespan attached to the hardware, with a reboot required with the next step up in technology every few years (or four to five years say as a guesstimate).

I know the class based leaderboards/ rivals were added to FM7 late in it’s life but I still don’t have an issue going on there and either finding a track/ track variation I don’t have a time on or one I could beat with a little more effort even at this stage in it’s life.

I totally agree it’s something to be considered as it’s a big part of the game to a lot of players - I guess until we know more this whole thing is speculation though, but fair play for raising a legitimate concern that I’d not thought of.

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People need to define what exactly GAAS means to them so we have some idea what what we are talking about.

Would I pay $5 a month or get Gamepass for access to all Forza content while T10 works to improve the game and add new content? Sure. There’s no real need for re-releasing Laguna Seca and the 69 Camaro every two years when you can instead work at pushing out upgrades to subscribers.

But I don’t think it will turn out like that. We will most likely have subscription fees and tokens and some kind of consumable plus paid DLC plus whatever else they can think of. Have you hit a file limit? For a small monthly fee we can upgrade your garage from Street to Sport! GAAS usually means monetization over gameplay, which will kill Forza.

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I agree that people need to define gaas because it usually isn’t about making a game “better”. I think they’ll be a lot of unhappy campers if turn 10 decides to gut the games content only to try and sell it back later. The forza series didn’t have a content problem, so I dont see it becoming a gaas as a positive. As far as a paid subscription service I think some major changes in the direction of the series would be required. Iracing being an online racing simulator requires obedience when it comes to racing etiquette and cleanliness to be successful and it is because of it. I just don’t see a console game offering the same strict ruleset of a game like iracing, its the opposite of turn 10s approach over the past 10+ years of welcoming players of all skill sets.

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Making it a service game makes sense, why start from scratch every single time, better to build on what works rather than scrap it all

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When did they ever start from scratch and scrap everything? The closest forza title that could slightly be described as that would be forza 5, but even that had remnants of forza 4 spread throughout it. All they’ve done over the years is keep what “works” choosing not to really build anything new but the car list. They became the madden or fifa of racing games, largely a carry over with a modified roster.

I think they’ve been trying to be a gaas but the problem is the only guaranteed money they’ll make is from releasing a new game. Forza has always had car packs, track packs and expansions, the problem for them is that none of these packs have a high adoption rate. Fact is the game is largely the same game after game, adding some new cars and a track or two doesn’t really add much to a game that already has 700+ cars and 30+ tracks.

They tried leagues which imo wasn’t implemented too well and they tried the esports thing which really hasn’t held up compared to others. I honestly don’t know what they could add on a consistent basis that will keep people around that they haven’t tried before. In a way, the games not focused enough to target any one group for long enough, maybe that will change, only time will tell.

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My point about having to start from scratch, is mostly for obtaining Licensing. Can the game engine be updated? Well if the game is designed to allow for additions to it, like cars and tracks, making the Engine itself portable, would make 100% sense to do, if it is something that can be done in a manner that is PLANNED in advance.

Look at every racing game you have ever played. Notice that a sequel sometimes no longer has the cars you enjoyed in the previous title. Maybe you really like one of the tracks that didn’t make the list for the sequel. Gaming has changed so much, that almost nobody expects every game to be available in PHYSICAL format… There are games that I own that are ONLY available as digital (Shadow Warrior 2).

When you realize that it’s more important to NOT LOSE ACCESS TO things in a sequel, than it is to INTRODUCE NEW THINGS, and you quickly see how not replacing a game with a sequel, and losing access, and losing playerbase, along with being able to keep the game fresh, is KEY.

The downside, is that it becomes unmarketable at some point. 5 years is a long time to keep pushing a GAME AS A SERVICE… Games like Destiny 2, For Honor, Rainbow Six Siege, have all been around for years… you either Own these games by now, or have at least heard of them… you don’t see people buying a console to play them, and when the DLC drops, only the most HARDCORE fans will buy into it.

There is almost no fingerhold, at 5 years, where you can convince people to buy your game. Forza Motorsport 7 is how many years old? Horizon 4 is how old? One of these two games, is closer to a GAS title, and with a little bit of a push in the right direction, the Motorsport division, could easily be the biggest selling point for car enthusiast, in the console market.

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When using the last 3 motorsport games as an example, the base car and track list has only grown with each game. It was very rare to see anything not carried over from game to game. On top of that they all had a car pass, forza 5 had 3 free tracks added and forza 6 had 2 expansion packs which added tracks and cars. These are all attributes of a gaas.

Do I think it was technically necessary to release 2 new games rather than just continually upgrading forza 5, no I don’t, but i know that the reason is money. As I said above forza has had content updates usually spanning 6-10 months after release and even with that player counts still drop. Theres a much better chance of them gaining new as well as past players by releasing a new game rather than just upgrading an old one.

Forza 7 had updates that spanned almost a year and a half after launch with many major updates to the game and guess what, most people didn’t care. Some came back for a bit to check out the changes but it didn’t spur much change in player numbers. The motorsport franchise’s problem is not what sales model it chooses to follow, its problem is that people are choosing to play other games.

No matter what niche of the racing genre you can think of there’s a better option than forza motorsport out there right now. It needs to stop relying on pure content ie cars and tracks to be competitive, many games have seen much better long term success with much less. I don’t see how becoming a gaas is going to fix motorsports problems. If they had less content than I could see it working a little better, but they’ve already spoiled people with hundreds of cars at launch that people just won’t accept anything less at this point.

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Most people see these types of games as a Grind-fest.

The biggest complaint is that people might have had a billion CR in the previous game, and now have nothing. While I see the issue, I don’t necessarily agree with it.

At some point I have been so rich in a Forza title, that I owned every single car. I never drove them all. Also with no long term or short term goals, the games were now more or less interactive encyclopedias for me, and I only played them to tool around in a random car, and take photos.

Car games are always going to ultimately end up, as an encyclopedia, or a platform where people can compete against each other. Enjoying the Journey more than the destination… absolutely. I honestly don’t care if I win a race, against friends, just as long as we have fun.

As long as a game like Forza separates its user base by having numerical titles, this sort of thing becomes less and less possible. Not all of my friends who enjoyed FM5 even bought FM6, or FM7. This means that some of the people I could say, “HEY LET’S PLAY FORZA TONIGHT” simply cannot do so, because they don’t have it.

While you can point to GamePass as the solution, or going back to a game from 5 years ago, I don’t see it as a solution, just a band-aid. Having a game that you can ALWAYS turn to as an option, and the developers not having to design a NEW game at all times, but instead focus on improving what already exists, is a much more productive method of game development.

Imagine that Target were to close their doors, and change the way that they do business, rather than keep people on board working to improve the business. It wouldn’t make any money for target while they are closed, and it wouldn’t provide any benefit for the customers.

The same thing happens when you make a new game in a series… player base drops off, and finds something else to do. Some players return, based solely on their previous experience, and some people simply disregard it, knowing that the developers will once again abandon the game, once they start working on the new game.

The Forza games have done the latter for the majority of the games. Only recently with Horizon 4 have they attempted to keep the title fresh, and for the most part, they are successful at keeping people interested.

The bottom line is that these games were not designed for a LONG TERM lifespan, and as such, offer only a trickle of content. Designed from the ground up, to be a long term ordeal, a game like Forza Motorsport, could truly change the way that people play racing games… having weekly events, and a more hardcore mode, for ONLINE competition, while still providing a single player experience that allows people to practice, and unlock content…

Will people still grind to get that Ford GT on day one so that they have an unfair advantage… absolutely… but these people will eventually be dethroned, and no longer have the advantage that they had.

Having a long term plan, would also allow for more car companies to use the game as a format for revealing their new cars, and allowing people to interact with them in a manner that doesn’t require them to leave their house… but that’s a completely different flavor of horse.

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I understand what you’re saying but to say something like this is a little ridiculous. The last thing a forza motorsport game suffers from is a trickle of content. Other than gt5 no other game has as many cars and other than pcars 2 and possibly 3 does any game offer more tracks.

To say they’re not designed for the long term, yet you can play forza 4 online right now even though its a 9 year old game. Thats a pretty long lifespan. Every motorsport game while very similar, also have their differences. Some people love forza 2, some people love forza 4 and some people love forza 7.

What if the next motorsport game takes a particular direction that you don’t like. If its a gaas, you’re basically stuck in a take it or leave it situation. As opposed to maybe skipping this particular title and waiting for one that may suit you better.

I still don’t see the necessity in becoming a gaas when the content is already there. In forza 7 they gave everything anyone could hope for whether it was cars, tracks, weather, night racing, drifting, drag racing, painting and multiple online modes, the list goes on and on. Yet people still stopped playing, imo a lot faster than in the past.

Odds are because of gamepass motorsport will use the gaas model because it takes the revenue out of the equation. But like horizon 4 I hope everyone’s ready to do trivial tasks every week to earn a new car or paint job or clothing of some sort, can’t wait sounds exciting…