As a hardcore fan of the Forza motorsport franchise I have long been wondering since the launch of Forza Motorsport 7 why I’m so disappointed with the direction they have taken. Since Forza Motorsport 2 I have been playing these games, and it has remained the main reason for me to buy an Xbox console all these years. I have chosen to hold of posting my review of this installment on the Forza forum because it took me a while to gather my thoughts on the issue, and frankly I didn’t want to post a hot-headed thread again. A while ago I bought a PS4 Pro and Gran Turismo sport to see if the grass was really greener on the other side. It has given me a good reference point of what Forza is missing nowadays and what it does better than other games out there. With that I felt it was time to post this review.
I think that I’m probably not the only one that considers Forza Motorsport 4 to be one, if not the best Forza Motorsport title in the history of the franchise. And if the user rating on Metacritic is anything to go by it certainly is (I’m not paying attention to the score given by critic reviews, but I’ll get back to that). It has consistently remained the best rated Forza Motorsport title with the exception of Forza Motorsport 2. And this is not entirely without coincidence. In my opinion Forza Motorsport has been so appealing to so many because it struck a perfect balance between arcade and simulation. Forza Motorsport 4 embodied this absolutely perfectly, it was fun and open enough to entertain and attract new players whilst being serious enough to keep the fans interested in playing it long after its release. It did that by catering to the fans of the series and doing this so well, that the shear quality of the game appealed to the more casual gamer too. And that is exactly part of the problem nowadays. In recent times we have seen to many examples of franchises being ruined by mediocre sequels that try to cater to everybody, while it completely abandons the fundamental/core aspects that made that particular franchise so great. Dead space, Resident Evil & Dragon Age instantly spring to mind, a trend that leaves more and more gamers disillusioned with the industry. (Quick shout-out to Cuphead for keeping it real!) This fear of developers to exclude anybody has had a pretty appalling effect on the industry. Turn10 is guilty of the same problem, since Motorsport 5 it has catered more and more to the casual gamer (that will inevitably lose interest in the game after 4/6 weeks) at the expense of the loyal supporter of the franchise.
Personally at the time I was able to forgive Forza Motorsport 5 because I thought it would be a jumping off point for the franchise into the next generation of gaming. I held out hope back then that it was a new baseline from which they’d progress to the level of features and polish that made Forza Motorsport 4 so great, but with next gen graphical fidelity. It indeed proved to be a pivotal moment in the franchise, but sadly for all the wrong reasons. Not only the focus on the motorsport aspect was lost, but that of the community as well. I never been the most active member on the forum, I certainly won’t pretend that I am. But I have been around long enough to notice that things have changed. With Forza Motorsport 4 there were a number of in-game features that tied the community together. The in-game storefront was at the center of all this, a place to make your own and show of your liveries, photos/videos and tunes. This literally made you part of the community. But, and this is personal, the rivals mode was at its absolute best in Forza Motorsport 4. The payment mechanic with rivals was absolutely addicting to me, each time you beat the time of your rival you would get a bonus. The higher up on the leaderboard the better the payout, this kept me constantly wanting to improve and really made me get the best out of me. But since Forza Motorsport 5 the community has consistently been neglected, not only due to the removal of features we held so dear, but also due to lack of communication from Turn10. Although Turn10 has provided us with a nice looking forum to gather and discuss issues, no actual feedback is provided. The community is often left on its own wondering whether their input is being heard or not. Personally I’d advise Turn10 to hire community managers like Bungie does to frequently engage with the community. Something this franchise desperately needs.
With Forza Motorsport 6 we all hoped it would get better, but it never really did. Sure it remedied some issues and offered a lot more content , but somehow the franchise had lost its allure. Something was wrong that you couldn’t immediately put your finger on. That’s not to say that there weren’t issues that were immediately apparent, because there were. The most abiding memory of the recent Forza motorsport titles is the lack of effort from Turn10 to do something about the constant ramming and grieving in multiplayer races. And it is constant, make no mistake about it. No amount of words can over-exaggerate the seriousness of problem that plagues the multiplayer. Being part of a clean race in Forza is as rare as being struck by lightning and winning the lottery jackpot on the same day. Even now the effort to improve the multiplayer experience is laughable. I’m sure it is meant well by Turn10 to include a marshal program, but frankly there is no getting around the fact that it is far too little, far too late. Which brings me neatly onto Gran Turismo Sport. Since I always preferred Forza over Gran Turismo (and not a GT fanboy here to rip on Forza) I can honestly and objectively say that I was extremely impressed by the way Polyphony managed to stimulate clean online racing and punish unsporting behavior. For those who don’t know how it works, it’s really simple. You get a safety rating, when you start out racing you get the lowest rating possible out of six categories S, A, B, C, D and E. S being the highest rating. The more you finish races whilst staying out of trouble your rating goes up, if you keep making contact your rating goes down. And you are, for the most part, only lobbied with players of the same rating. The system is not so complicated as i.e. iRacing that it only caters to the hardcore simracer, but it’s simple and intuitive enough to cater to the more casual player without requiring the need to delve into a rulebook. Sure it’s not perfect, but I’d certainly go so far as to say that it’s effective. Looking back in at Forza, there is no doubt in my mind that this would be the right approach for Turn10 or any console racing game for that matter.
Another very apparent part of the problem regarding the current lack of focus on the Motorsport part is the roster of cars that currently are available with Forza. Forza Motorsport 4 featured cars from so many different racing divisions that every motorsport enthusiast could get their fill: DTM, JGTC/GT500, GT3, GT2, GT1, LMP2, LMP1, Group C, Porsche Supercup, etc. Each class I just mentioned had enough cars to make division filled with healthy variety of cars. It really was immense. That level of variety has never really been achieved ever since Forza Motorsport 4, which clearly was one of its strengths. It’s incredibly frustrating to see cars being added that have no business being in the Motorsport title. Forza Horizon? Sure that’s actually where you’d like to see some 4x4 vehicles for example, because having such vehicles in a game with offroad sections contributes to its overall theme. But in the case of Forza Motorsport, I think it isn’t unreasonable to expect Turn10 to focus on getting more cars in the game that actually belong on the track. I want to address one more thing about the cars before moving on. I’m disappointed that Turn10 felt the need to add Forza Edition cars and count different liveries toward the official car count of the game. Its feels misleading and dishonest to advertise a game has certain number of cars when in fact approx. 80 / 100 of those cars were in fact Forza Editions, Formula E’s. etc. Which shouldn’t count towards the unique car count. And on the subject of advertisement, regardless of the fact whether or not those cars should be counted double, they actually advertised, and I am quoting: ‘’More than 700 ForzaVista cars 700 cars at launch’’. When in fact at launch the game featured 688 cars. Maybe I’m bad at math, but I can’t help noticing that 688 is less than 700.
Forza Motorsport 7 in particular has rubbed me the wrong way the most. After spirits were lifted slightly with Forza Motorsport 6, I felt a bit more at ease that this time around they would get it right. Also in the back of my mind was the fact that in the past, traditionally a game released this late into a consoles lifecycle usually meant that a developer knows how to make the most of the available hardware. But frankly I wasn’t prepared for how badly it ran on launch, something that was never a issue with Turn10 (not on this scale anyway). The game was unstable, glitchy and performed poorly. Something as simple as selecting a car in your garage for example was a painfully juddery annoying chore, although in fairness this was improved slightly with a patch. But 7 installments into a series (3 of which were on the current engine) Turn10 should know how to make a polished game, they did it before. Coming back on the focus of the game, the emphasis on car collecting instead of the actual racing is exactly what I was on about earlier. Turn10 has opted to implement a shallow device to emphasize on the grind of collecting cars, a mechanic that becomes irrelevant after playing the game for approx. 2 weeks. And I think that says it all, like mentioned earlier, catering to players that usually are only interested in a Forza game for about 4/6 weeks hurts the longevity of the game for those who really support and play the game in the long term. The time spend developing a meaningless mechanic like car collecting could be better served on features that are actually requested by the community. Sounds silly right? The lack of meaningful innovation towards a better motorsport experience are worrying.
There is no way of getting around the fact that the launch of Forza Motorsport 7 was a disaster. The unstable performance, the lack of innovations and the amount of online features that were unavailable. Frankly the game wasn’t ready and shouldn’t have been released when it did. All this combined with the fact that Turn10 felt the need to screw over their players by introducing loot boxes and the VIP-debacle. The community drew a line by giving a clear signal that there is absolutely no need for loot boxes and micro transactions. And thankfully Turn10 remedied the VIP-pass problem and we have yet to see micro transactions make it actually in to the game. I think at this point it won’t, given how scared developers have gotten about backlash regarding monetization. But in fairness I should point out that it already started with Forza Motorsport 4 where you could purchase tokens, which you could use to buy cars in game. But the in-game economy was setup so that you wouldn’t need them anyway. Which isn’t the same for Forza Motorsport 7, earning money is a lot slower and I can’t help but get the distinct impression it was setup this way with the obvious micro transactions in mind that were supposed to come down the pipeline. As far as monetization is concerned I don’t mind paying to prolong the longevity of a game, i.e. with DLC like car packs. But what ever happened to the ten cars per pack instead of the meager 7 (many of which are now cars that don’t belong in the game anyway). Al I can say on the monetization issues with Forza is that I hope Turn10 have learned their lesson and won’t try anything this stupid ever again.
As I mentioned earlier I made the jump to Gran Turismo Sport to see what’s what. I was intrigued by the realistic details in the car models, but mostly the online rating system. After playing it for some time I was really impressed. Sure sometimes you get a bad race but overall I frequently find myself in a clean online race fighting with competitors who are evenly matched. The worst thing about Gran Turismo that hindered me the most was the lack of force feedback in the controller during accelerating and braking. There is no way of telling when brakes will lock up or when you might get wheelspin other than to use muscle memory. This particular issue is something Forza Motorsport has always gotten so right and makes it an absolute treat to play. Another problem with Gran Turismo is that it is extremely good fun for someone who wants to do some serious racing, but there is no real way to let your hair down every once in a while. And that’s where the great balance between the arcade and simulation of Forza comes in. It feels realistic enough that you feel immersed in the racing, but when you want, you can go to a test session and just do some donuts and drift around a bit. This is what Gran Turismo definitely misses. God knows how many hours I spend just hooning around and burn up some rubber on the test track. That balance between the plain good old fun and the reserved realism is what makes so Forza Motorsport so unique and appealing to me. It’s probably the reason why couldn’t really every consider Gran Turismo a true alternative, both games are just unique in their approach to a simcade racing game. But where Gran Turismo has stayed true to their origins, Forza’s focus has gotten more and more distorted down the road.
One issue that bothers me a lot isn’t necessarily with the game but it’s with reviews from professional gaming media outlets. Apart from the rare review on YouTube, I haven’t seen a honest review that accurately describes the experience and gives decent consumer advise. I mean here are just some quotes: ‘’Bulletproof multiplayer experience’’ – GamingTrend, ‘’A real racing masterpiece’’ – MondoXbox, ‘’This is the best car sim of 2017’’ – Gaming Nexus. Just a small grab from so many unrealistic reviews that don’t address a single issue a fan of the series might have. You know I might be wrong but I’d describe the multiplayer experience anything but bulletproof. Forza Motorsport 7, as evident by the issues I’ve mentioned is absolutely no masterpiece, and in no way shape or form is Forza Motorsport the greatest racing simulator (it never has been, nor does it need to). Basically they all say it looks pretty and has a bunch of cars, and think their review is a job well done. This is the reason why I mentioned earlier that I don’t take the critics score seriously. It’s something we see a lot in the industry right now, so many games are consistently rated considerably lower by actual gamers than their journalistic counterparts. In case of Forza Motorsport I can completely understand why. It’s incredibly hard to give a honest and accurate review of Forza Motorsport games, unless you are a fan that has carefully witnessed the changes with every release whilst keeping in mind the impressive baseline for the series that was established with Forza Motorsport 3 & 4. To a casual player or journalist who is just there to review the game on its face value it’s nearly impossible to accurately rate and value the game for what it really is.
On top of all the problems with the current installment there are whole host of small things that make the experience needlessly frustrating: the fact that you have to setup an entire free race in order to go for a test drive, having to purchase every upgrade individually instead of having a basket-setup like Playground implemented in Horizon 3, liveries constantly not showing up in your garage, or still no real possibility to choose AI’s cars in free and private races. And all the individual issues I have mentioned so far in this review are easily forgivable in and of their own, but the all of them together have made the overall experience extremely disappointing for me. Perhaps I’m overly nostalgic and should stop referring to Forza Motorsport 4, but in truth once you are so heavily invested in a franchise you don’t want to let go of it. You hope it gets better, you hope your loyalty is rewarded. But when it consistently isn’t, it’s hard not to refer back to golden times. I take absolutely no joy in being so negative about the current state of Forza Motorsport, in fact it really saddens me. But at some point I just need to speak my mind. I really do hope things will get better, but at this point I struggle to believe that it will.
Thank you for your time and attention, please let me know your thoughts on the current state of things. I’m really curious what other fans think of Forza Motorsport at the moment.
… who’s been playing since Forza 2 came out!)