Issues with spectating races.

[PJTierney]

Hi all,

I posted this a few months back when the ESports scene was starting to pick up, but after watching some of today’s stream I feel it bears repeating.

While watching yesterday’s Formula E Race-Off Pro Series event I made a few comments regarding the way that Spectating and Replays work in-game and how they can be improved when it comes to eSports. Mechberg asked me to post feedback in a thread so here goes.

Incase you missed it, yesterday’s race can be viewed here.

Due to the current limitations of Forza Motorsport 6’s Replay and Spectate options, the following important information was missing:

• Lap counter.
• Position indicator.
• Current driver/gamertag.
• Laptime.

The following additional information is also not present:

• Overall race time.
• Minimap.
• Gap to other drivers.
• Rev counter and throttle/brake input.

This left the commentators and viewers uninformed, to the point where nobody knew how Qualifying was going until 10 minutes after it ended. During the race it was also difficult to follow the flow of the action.

All of the above information is already available in-game, through our normal UI when racing:

I am sure it wouldn’t be too difficult to display this information in Spectate/Replay Mode, after all it was present in previous games:

Here is what Gran Turismo 6 has when you spectate. There’s a lot of data here but with a button press you can remove the bottom row, leaving just the timers, map and position tower:

With Forza Motorsport 6 starting to become an eSports platform it gets closer to what racing fans see on TV every week. In order to bridge that gap some improvements will need to be made in terms of how we can watch races.

Racing isn’t as fun to watch when you don’t know what’s going on; it’s a shame to see nothing has been done in this regard with such a big event now underway.

Hopefully future titles will have these features.

[Zedeeyen]

I hope T10 do something to make spectating better just so we don’t have to watch as much of ESL’s “banter”.

Dear God…

[Sp33dyKat]

100% agreement, PJTierney! If the Forza franchise is to “take it to the next level” in the world of eSports, these basic features simply must be in place.

[JibbersHCrabst]

100% agree! The racing engine is good, the video is good… just need to refine it for broadcast!

[im2fast4u711]

Well they better do something fast because with less than 1000 viewers the first time around this esport experiment may die a quick death.

[PJTierney]

Looks like some spectating features got added to Forza Motorsport 6 today. Good on Turn 10 for doing this; it’s rare for any sort of game to get even an update as small as this over a year after release.

Hopefully the next title will have E-Sports features embedded from the get-go.