I haven’t played this game since before Christmas due to being busy and playing other games. I’ve come back to it today and honestly it’s shown me again just how bad the handling is. Driving feels like a chore, there is no enjoyment or satisfaction whatsoever from it. All the cars feel like they’re on ice. They somehow all oversteer and understeer at the same time which causes every car to feel exactly the same where I’m just constantly wrestling the thing to try and keep it on the road. The higher you go up the PI scale, the more exaggerated the feeling gets.
I’m playing on a Fanatec DD on Xbox Series X. Forza 7 felt far better than this. It felt like I could genuinely attack the corners with the car and be aggressive to reach the limit, but with FM 2023 I’m almost scared to press the accelerator for fear of the car spinning out unexpectedly, and the same with braking tbh, I brake in a straight line yet the cars want to step the back end out or pull to one side even though I’m trail braking. It’s honestly crazy and I’m completely fed up with it.
To think I thought this game was gonna be a step up from Assetto Corsa’s handling 
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FM is a very simple simulation, not to compare with AC. It’s more on the level with GT7, if you have the right wheel settings then it’s quite enjoyable, but if you play the game after playing AC then it’s quite logical that the FFB feels bad, I mean AC has one of the best FFBs out there, especially the new car mods are top.
Forza is also not really comparable to other games when it comes to handling, because all Forza games have always delivered when playing with a controller, but on a wheel it’s meh.
My comparison to AC was only that I thought this game was going to be better than it in terms of handling, purely because of what they said in the marketing buildup and the fact the game is basically a decade on from AC and on the new console.
My main comparison of the game is to FM7 which I believe whilst still being more on the arcade side, still had a good enough sim feeling on the wheel. I’ve been playing Forza since FM4, I played with a thrustmaster TX and a Fanatec CSL DD on FM7 and both felt great, the DD feeling even better of course. But on FM 2023 there just is no feeling of the car when compared to FM7 which I think is a fair game to compare to
Wheel user here and I’m definitely not experiencing what you describe regarding the handling characteristics. No disrespect intended, but is it setup related? Are we talking stock cars?
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I use a Fanatec CSW and feel connected to the road in most cars,even more so with tire upgrades added.If you try to corner too fast you lose grip very easily,gently braking until you ‘feel’ the grip come back is my technique.For me the driving is very enjoyable and a step up from FM7 which I still play weekly.I guess not everyone can be happy with every game and maybe this one isn’t for you.
TBH id rather lay tc: motorfest than fm2023 and i own both 
From both stock to upgraded cars. In fact upgrading the cars sometimes makes them worse. I’m no expert at tuning and I never will be, but in all previous Forza games I didn’t need to upgrade and tune a car to be able to drive it well. I’ve used other peoples tunes and they don’t make too much of a difference. I’ve even tried playing it on the controller and tbh I notice the same things happening so I don’t believe it’s an issue with my setup of my equipment. Also the fact that there are some cars that have actually felt very good. One example being the 2018 Acura #36 NSX GT3 which did feel connected to the road and pretty planted unless I pushed the car too hard or far beyond the limit which is fair enough. But so many other cars just feel like they’re on ice like I’ve mentioned. They have no grip, they understeer and oversteer like mad and they’re just not fun to drive at all
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This somehow is very odd because the handling is one of the few things they did relativly good. Friend of mine bought the new Fanatec and he loves how it works with this game.
I’m a controller pilot and also think that this game is much better handlingwise than FM7 BUT you need to invest some time in controller/wheel settings and setting your car up.
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Forza is definitely a bit of a strange franchise when it comes to a few things. You need some basic knowledge to really have fun with the tuning and upgrading of cars.
For example the Sport tires in FM are basically drift tires, that might sound weird, but basically back in the day when Forza games didn’t have drift tires people used the sport tires, that’s why the devs changed the thermal physics for these tires so that they cool down faster. sadly they didn’t change the code since today and if you look at the telemetry data they still behave very strange. Therefore I would suggest you to either upgrade race tires immediately instead of sport, and if the car has sport as stock tires, then race should be your first upgrade to get rid of the slipperiness in long corners.
There are a lot more of these little things when it comes to physics, but in the new FM there are also a lot of cars that are just undriveable imo, even my nerd knowledge can’t help me for some cars, I just hope the devs keep improving the cars and physics.
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I agree but honestly I don’t have much faith that game’s current cars’ physics will be fixed. Maybe (hopefully) new cars are better, who knows. There was some leak about upcoming cars and if it was correct I’m already worried how the new TT RS will feel because the current one is one of the cars which handling in my opinion should be fixed.
Personally I think AWD physics as a whole would need to be fixed too but most people seems to be fine with it since forums are not flooded with AWD rant. For me personally it’s an issue since I like cars like Audis and so on and feel the rear wheel part of the AWD systems just isn’t ever really there even on cars that doesn’t have the issues of some Haldex cars. Will it be fixed in the current game? I’m 99.9% sure the answer is no / never so I haven’t bothered making a topic for it.
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I’m not sure whether they are going to do changes to the physics model, but they did say they will have support for the game up to 5 years or even more, though they will most probably not make specific changes just for the AWD.
Talking about Audi, I drove one of the older ones the other day (can’t remember which one) and it drove superb, no severe understeer but still awesome corner and straight line ability, this issues, from my perspective at least, seems to be more specific to newer cars.
I’ve been also playing a lot of ACC lately and they obviously also let you tune the diff, but only the preload → if the car understeers a lot, just lower the preload and that basically fixes it. They could try implementing a physics change like this to FM, I’ve never been a huge fan of the current diff system, it’s not really beginner friendly and also not realistic.
I agree new cars are way more affected by this but for me something even on old cars is a bit off. I just struggle to throttle oversteer the cars in tight corners no matter what I do. On GT series I never had real issues with AWD cars. Just flick it, floor it and off you go - sideways. Maybe it’s a FM thing. Or me. GT had initial setting for diff though, could it explain it?
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I decided to make a new suggestion for 3-stage adjustable differential on suggestions hub. I’ve missed this feature since I stopped playing GT6 years ago. I don’t know does it help with my AWD issues but it would be useful in tuning nevertheless. If interested, search “New differential upgrade option with 3 settings”.
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I just loaded into a practice session and as it was doing the 3…2…1… countdown before I takeover control and the car nearly spun out and that’s with it being controlled by the game. It literally sums up exactly how I feel when driving the cars on this game, like I’m going to lose it any second. After all the different racing games/sims I have played over the years, I truly believe this is a physics problem with the game itself. I’ve never felt a game before where the cars feels so off
Just believing that it’s a physics problem is not enough, you have to prove it somehow.
When I drive, I have full control, most cars have graspable physics and are immersive to drive.
If you need better wheel settings then check out Ermz video called " I Found The PERFECT Forza Motorsport Wheel Settings" on youtube.
As someone who’s played all Forza titles excluding FM1, 2 and 3, I can confidently say FM has the best driving physics yet. It’s really detailed and with the right wheel settings you can easily drive on the limit.
Of course keeping in mind that some cars are just badly implemented into the game and need a rework, but that is not a physics problem, that is an individual problem to those specific cars.
And as someone who has played all of the Forza titles except FM1, I do not agree with that statement, but each to our own. I won’t say that FM2023 has the worst physics of all the FM titles, but I certainly do not find it to have the best, not by a long shot.
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I’m not sure what @TimmyTheSnail is experiencing but I’ve noticed sometimes in online practice / race the grip goes weird. I don’t know if it’s track rubbering feature or something else but it feels like the whole track is covered with dices that flip to their other side when you run over them resulting really unpredictable feel to driving. That have never happened to me in free play, about career I’m not sure.
I have also been wondering is the controller steering angle issue game physics issue or just a problem on some cars… I guess wheel users don’t have that problem(?).
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Ok, I’ve not heard of that problem yet, but seems to be quite bad. I’ve not played much on controller yet, but when I did, I noticed that there is a new option in the settings which is called “Steering Self Alignment”, this isn’t in any other Forza game, and this basically lets you choose how much the game interferes with your controller inputs. The higher this setting the more the game will dampen or align the steering input and therefore it could occur that the car understeers in some situations more than in others.
I wonder if there might be people who turned that setting all the way down or up, because they thought it was altering their input in a bad way or even make it better without nowing what the feature actually does. I personally would suggest everyone to find their own preference with more skilled people using lower values.
I usually use 10-45 depending on the car. I noticed that lower values make the car more unpredictable but also more precise in a weird way, maybe that’s also the reason why I have less understeer compared to other people on the forums. But of course I can’t now if other people even use that setting, so I can only assume.
I don’t think steering angle problem is a self alignment issue since it happens randomly.
I’ve experienced this same thing happening multiple times. First steering seems fine and suddenly steering is not available, please leave a message…
About that “dice-effect”, I’m not really sure what’s causing it, it’s also random. Maybe it really is just a rubbering effect but it feels strange.
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I think I have seen frame rate drop a bit when “the dices” appear.
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Same feel for me, when i’m on a drift without touch the joystick, the steering self alignement make a countersteer on the steering wheel.
The more you decrease it, the less it countersteer.
And at minimal value, i have the same feeling you got “more unpredictable”.
But i prefer lower value because it feel like when my car “rotate” it want more to stay in rotation with lower value
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I personally would like to turn self alignment off but when I’ve tried it, it feels like cars just keeps going circles.
Going circles aside, I would say it feels more natural to drive with low setting.
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