Just a small list of points that show how far FM7 has strayed from the glory days

Forza Motorsport Forza Motorsport 2023 FM 2023 Discussion
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FM2 menus: Faithless with insomnia and Daft Punk playing at my house (enough said)
FM2, 3 & 4 Menus: Clean and simple but effective.
FM2, 3 & 4 Menus: Just the around pleasant lounge music vibe that soothing and relaxing
FM3 & 4: Storefronts based on player profiles with all content visible
FM4: In-game chipmaker/video editor with SLOWMOTION (So cool)
FM2, 3 & 4: Far more extensive damage models.
FM3 & 4: Class leaderboards
FM4: In game Clubs (clans)
FM4: Free market less limited auction houses
FM4: The variety of motorsport based vehicles, DTM, JP-GT500, Le Mans P1 & P2, GT1, GT2, GT3, Group 5, V8 supercars. (and not just one or two cars per class, but a healthy base of motorsport focused vehicles)
FM3, 4 and 6 (if i remember correctly): unicorn cars
FM4: Performance indexing that was more reflective of the type of car i.e. GT1 was higher than GT2.
FM4: Point-to-point racing for certain tracks

The whole focus of FM7 on ‘‘collecting’’ cars and the fake sense of speed has ruined the community, many have switched over to GT Sport and surely won’t be coming back when the full fat GT 7 arrives, it’s so depressing to me considering FM2, 3 and 4 were some of the best console racing games of all time, and likely will remain as such.

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Agree with almost everything on this list, particularly in regards to the UI, soundtrack, race-car variety and features.

Only thing I’ll mention is the damage model in FM7 was actully glitched for the full extent of the game.

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FM 7 has some flaws, like horisontally scrolled linear menus consisting of 50-70 items (a lot of pain), AI issues, night races, etc, but GT? No
GT never been simulator, it made some great progress from simply laughable physics in GT4 to some pleasant driving now, but simulator? No.

The truth is Forza Motorsport is unique game, there is no game like it. All PC simulators for 20 years are all about GT3 cars on Spa,Monza, etc. It may be interesting for a while, but when you have another 15-th GT3 game on another Spa like Assetto Corsa Competizione - you just don’t care anymore. Modern race cars are boring to drive: they are too stable, too easy to control, have ABS and traction/stabilization control, and all those Spa, Monza, Laguna Seca, Le Mans, Silvestone are beaten to death long time ago (besides Le Mans and Silverstone are pretty bad tracks to start with). I knew every turn on those tracks 10 years ago.

FM is the only simulator game featuring loads of production cars. It also featuring some not real life track (though the majority of tracks are same beaten to death in every racing game). It would be nice to have Proven Grounds from FM2 back, because real life tracks are designed for 400-700 hp race cars, they are not suitable for 100-200 hp production cars, the turns are too wide, straights are too long.

FM also has challenges similar to NFS 5/PGR 4: cones, overtaking, etc, which is nice addition. And bring back Fujimi Kaido, mods for Assetto Corsa with long twisted roads up to 15 km long were a blast.

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To be fair, I think that Forza 5 and 6 still had good soundtracks and especially Forza 6 felt like Forza when painting and scrolling through the menus. Forza 7 however abandoned much of the “Forza feel” for me, so I hope they are bringing it back.
Forza Motorsport 3 and 4 were such a joy to play, but 5 wasn’t sadly (I can’t quite put my finger on why). FM6 got better and gave me enjoyment, but Forza 7 lacked that magic for me.

I know, I’m being quite vague here. Just make it as much Forza 4 as you can, but make what you can do better better.

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The UI in FM7 is awful. But I wouldn’t backstep in the series for the sake of UI, music, or storefronts. The most important thing to me is racing that I enjoy in cars that I like. And 5-7 do a better job of giving me that than the earlier games. I have gone back to FM6 a couple of times, though, mainly for the puddles.

Indeed, it was going from playing FM5 at a friend’s house to playing FM4 at home that pushed me to get an XBOne a number of months after launch.

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And the local leaderboards of FM2.

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You have some great points, but I especially agree with missing the storefront. I’ve said it like a million times in a variety of different forums here, but it can’t be said enough. We need a storefront or something like it to get back to the days of a solid community with this series. The current sharing system does not allow you to find anything at all with any relative ease whatsoever and it is absolutely killed the community. As a painter it hurts so badly to know that my designs will basically never be found because no one can view a profile and see all of my work in one convenient place. The racing and the physics are pretty good the way they are, so moving forward this is seriously what turn 10 needs to address in this next game.

Also Forza 3 & 4 menu music and UI was really really wonderful and I miss it so dearly.

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You have some great points, but I especially agree with missing the storefront. I’ve said it like a million times in a variety of different forums here, but it can’t be said enough. We need a storefront or something like it to get back to the days of a solid community with this series. The current sharing system does not allow you to find anything at all with any relative ease whatsoever and it is absolutely killed the community. As a painter it hurts so badly to know that my designs will basically never be found because no one can view a profile and see all of my work in one convenient place. The racing and the physics are pretty good the way they are, so moving forward this is seriously what turn 10 needs to address in this next game.

Also Forza 3 & 4 menu music and UI was really really wonderful and I miss it so dearly.

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You have some great points, but I especially agree with missing the storefront. I’ve said it like a million times in a variety of different forums here, but it can’t be said enough. We need a storefront or something like it to get back to the days of a solid community with this series. The current sharing system does not allow you to find anything at all with any relative ease whatsoever and it is absolutely killed the community. As a painter it hurts so badly to know that my designs will basically never be found because no one can view a profile and see all of my work in one convenient place. The racing and the physics are pretty good the way they are, so moving forward this is seriously what turn 10 needs to address in this next game.

Also Forza 3 & 4 menu music and UI was really really wonderful and I miss it so dearly.

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Sometimes when i’m pottering around the house i’ll put the Forza 4 soundtrack on in the background and smile at the start of almost every track, so much better than the obnoxious noise they put on 7, I had to mute that on the first day!

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As harsh as it may seem, Turn 10 has a pretty awful track record at realizing potentially great features. What I mean by this is that Turn 10 blows opportunity after opportunity as each sequel is released.

• One of the best regarded features of FM4 was it’s auction house. Sitting right on the cusp of becoming a fully fledged player driven marketplace for cars. Everyone was sure that Turn 10 would expand it going forward. The possibilities and potential were incredible. Instead they went a different route, and hasn’t recovered since.

• Forza Motorsport has long been considered to have the best drifting in gaming. Due to the specific way the game engine handled physics, it was simply better at it than any other game. No simulator reproduces actual real world physics or car handling 1 to 1. It’s literally an impossible task that’s only further constrained by hardware limitations. For whatever reason though, Turn 10 created the hands down best drifting game likely by complete accident, as it probably wasn’t their focus at the time. All that being said… Turn 10 basically sat on the feature for years, refusing to market, expand, or properly utilize it. It wasn’t until among their most recent efforts, that they decided to give it the attention it properly deserved by incorporating drift tuned suspensions and the like. However, true to form. Turn 10 managed to stay true to their history and completely break it. Where you once explored every apex, angle, and real estate of every corner in order to wring absolutely every point possible from it, in order to compete in drifting. You’re now relegated to drifting along a chalk looking racing line. Every corner no longer holds untold points within it that remain to be discovered. Drifting has been dumbed down to simply drifting along the line. Fast and wide, or slow and inside no longer matters. Everyone simply line up and follow the line or suffer defeat. While they didn’t get around to fixing the loss of points for reverse entry into corners, they did make sure to implement drifting during the straights. Almost negating the need for corners altogether.

• It’s obvious that Turn 10 at some point changed course. Where they once created their own unique game that forged it’s own path. They’ve recently have chosen instead to follow Gran Turismo. While FM7 wasn’t perfect, it was what it was. It was by no accident that once GT Sport released that Turn 10 took a sudden interest in making their online racing experience more like GT Sport. Nowhere to be found before, suddenly things like race regulations, and track boundaries were suddenly implemented. Where GT Sport was built to monitor racers behavior and skill, and place them with other similar players… FM7 wasn’t built with any of that in mind. In a desperate attempt to give their games online play some credibility. They decided to shoehorn in a track marshal program, and implement several ban policies that ran completely counter to the games design. The default color of the 69 charger is orange for a very specific reason. Always has been. Once fully encouraged by Turn 10… Recreating the Dukes of Hazard now resulted in a ban due to the flag on top. Creating a vinyl that had the Japanese Rising Sun would also result in a ban. Despite Turn 10 featuring the very same images on every Liberty Walk vinyl, as well as having the rising sun image included as a preset in their very own vinyl editor. Once touted as a revolutionary feature… At launch, they promoted the advanced AI behavior their Drivatar opponents employed against players. Only for them to wide scale ban players for exhibiting similar behavior online. The same behavior their drivatars exhibited that they bragged as being as close to racing an actual person as possible, was suddenly reversed and considered unacceptable. The way they intended you to race at launch or whenever you bought the game, would now get you banned mere months later. Where every other developer and publisher has made a good faith effort to ensure their customers could play their purchased title. Turn 10 decided to take the bold step of having the only game available where bans were handed out without the person banned having to consciously do anything to merit it. While the developers have long held the rights to revoke, ban, or remove a players ability to play their game online. None had ever gone so far as to so easily ban their players. Where others would only issue a ban if a player performed an actual physical act in order to cheat/exploit their game. Turn 10 apparently had no such concerns.

• The Forza Motorsport series crippled the giant that was GT, that many believed impossible. It outlasted many of it’s competitors and became what many considered the best racing game series available. Over the last generation of consoles, Not only has Turn 10 failed to compete with it’s competitors. It’s allowed newcomers to come in and outshine it at times, such as with titles like Project Cars, or Assetto Corsa. If that wasn’t bad enough, a completely new third party studio came in, took the very same tools and assets that Turn 10 had built and had years of experience with… And created a game series in Forza Horizon that has gotten more acclaim, won more awards, gotten better reviews, and gotten over forty times more sales than FM itself. Leaving it dangerously close to becoming completely irrelevant.

Do better Turn 10. Make the game everyone knows you can. The trust and goodwill you worked so hard for and rightfully earned has all been spent. Your allowance of mistakes has been reached. The number of releases that fall short of sales expectations has almost been reached. Time and chances are unfortunately no longer on your side. Best of luck.

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I don’t use auction in FM7 for one simple reason: there is no option “show only cars you don’t have”. As a result you ended up endlesly scrolling one million cars you already have trying to find some interesting offer for cars you don’t have.

Also I like to drive stock cars for better authenticity in custom races, but there is no option “remove all upgrades”. You should go into upgrade menu and manually click every single damn part and see is it upgraded or not.

Add horrible suicidal AI multiplied by 24 cars in race, “day” sunset races, where you can’t see pretty much anything against the sun. Tinted windows, which makes cockpit view unplayable even at noon… The game has a lot of flaws.

Luckely it has PI system and rewind. It is not easy to set custom race in Assetto Corsa with diferent but more or less equal opponents, very far from it. And leading in Project Cars 2 and spinning out 200 meters before finish line in 20 minutes race? Happens all the time, I hate it. But I really want the ability to create my own championships, whatever I want, like in Project Cars 2. Lots of fun

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You can search for one car as well if you are looking for a particular car

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Custom public lobbies. That’s all any racing game needs. Rid the marshalls. Race as the host wishes or bite the dust.

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Custom public lobbies could be awesome - they could also be terrible… Rather than public lobbies for classes only (mostly), I’d like to see racing-series-based lobbies. Like GT cars, Trans Am, NASCAR, etc. lobbies.

The UI is absolutely awful. I really miss the simple menus of FM4. I also miss the storefront.

The fake (made-up) tracks are terrible. They might look good, but they are awful to race on. The only made-up tracks that have ever been worth a darn in Forza were the ones REPLICATING REAL-WORLD TRACKS, al la Sunset Peninsula standing in for Daytona…

The marshalling system is a joke. It is too hard to remove/avoid bad players/drivers online. Matchmaking is sketchy at best. Pit stops have never really improved. The number of actual cars in the game has gone down. (Forza or whatever special edition that can easily be recreated, or various liveries of the same car, do not count as a new car.) Online hoppers have not changed/improved, some have been removed. Painting hasn’t been improved either, nor has mapping (for applying decals) on the cars.

T10 needs to go spend some more time with iRacing. The ONLY thing that Forza does better than iRacing is the lack of payment for every single car or track and the availability of production cars, but T10 removes production cars with each release and they are hiding more and more content in DLC packages, so they aren’t too far ahead…

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Myself and many people I play with disagree with this opinion. Of course we all are entitled to ours, but to make a blanket statement like this is probably not accurate. I have found many of the created tracks to be enjoyable and still look forward to racing on them all the time. When you drive many hours in your simulator it’s nice to have something that you don’t see on TV or can’t drive anywhere else.

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Well, I was too harsh about Forza AI. Just played Assetto Corsa, Paris track from modders. Gorgeous track, I like good city tracks which are very few between all those endless Monza,Spa, Silverstone. Restarted race three times and couldn’t get even to the third lap, three times AI crashed my car to broken windshield, undrivable. And it was only 12 cars grid.
Rewind is a genius invention of Turn 10, should be in every racing game. AI in every game is far from perfect, rewind is the only option somehow to fix it.

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While we’re ranting, I really wish I could pick AI cars AND TUNES, rather than letting the game randomly decide. This would make balancing tunes for racing series much easier…

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I turned off the music a long time ago.

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Really interesting discussion here. I started at FM5 and have gone both forward and backward since.

I did not experience the storefronts or older auction house while they were relevant, but what I find amazing is that the auction house UI was more responsive in FM4 than it is in either FM7 or FH4. I tend not to use them because of how slow the process is, both in displaying and in actually processing auctions. It is hard work with a controller, but they could for sure do something like an app that could interface with the game and auction house, and streamline all of that stuff. But then of course they can’t even get their own loyalty app to work, so maybe not.

UI in general in 7 is poor, as has been said, seemingly a product of mimicking Windows 8 and the Xbox One home UI, which has been improved greatly since. A fully customisable one would be great, mimicking how the Xbox home UI is now. Having said that, the process of changing things like cosmetic pics and titles takes fewer button presses in 7 than in earlier games, except getting there in the menus… Also the blue/green/white box career grid of 3/4 was hideous compared to what we have had since.

The car collection game is silly for sure, and they still haven’t achieved a decent UI for picking cars when there are so many. I feel like Horizon does it better, especially now with the ability to set everyone to party leader’s car, but further back like in Horizon 2, still the best game of all of them, the “20 seconds” to choose cars online was never enough.

Mods are more annoying to use than they are worth, definitely, but at least we got rid of brand loyalty, which was a mad grind especially in 4 and 5, and just made me want to never use those brands again, ironic when they gave bonuses for them. Also not helped by grindy achievements to max out loyalty.

As I gather, the drift mechanic was really good in 4, but then went a bit backwards? It was bad in 5 at least, especially for that nasty long beach drift achievement! They certainly don’t give it the focus they could, anyway.

Forzathon was an inevitable addition, but is really fiddly, unimaginative and with pretty poor rewards. Even just the ability to click on one of the “challenges” and have it set up a race matching those conditions, would be a nice qol improvement.

Ever increasing grid numbers were a mistake, as was the underdog achievement. Against the AI you just have to be so aggressive in 7. Especially on some some tracks, like Road America, which they somehow seem to be much better at given the same difficulty settings. Also being able to change so many settings mid-race is impressive, but it is a shame that it is at the expense of the game -ever- encouraging you to improve your skills, given the static rewards, at least in XP, or is it credits? I forget. That is something that should be in the game, or even just moving up the car classes as it was in 3/4, oh and Horizon 1.

Not really bothered about music in motorsport, as compared to horizon, but I was actually impressed with the in-house effort they put in for FM7, especially compared to the minimal elevator music of 5.

7 certainly got the loading screen situation right, much quicker to load the first time, but for some reason, there is no quick restart race option, which is often just necessary with 24 grids. This is one that titles like Dirt 5 get perfect, with nigh instant loading for a restart. The Series consoles should of course help things out here again.

Going from 5 to 6 was exciting with the explosion in track numbers, but 7 was very lame in that regard, especially as they counted the FM6 expansion tracks in the new count, as well as the resurrected ones! Seemingly instead they added driver gear, possibly the lamest feature of all, given that you almost never see it. Definitely more of a horizon feature, and even there it sounds like they are toning it down in 5. For motorsport I feel they need to focus on more tracks down the line, to keep up the interest, but free so that they don’t segregate the online play again! Adding more cars, and especially adding -back- cars from older titles, just pales by comparison, and homologation removes most of the differences between cars anyway.

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