I get the feeling that a lot of the complaints are coming from people who are accustomed to a certain play style: they want access to whatever they want as early as possible, because they’d rather focus on the cars they’ve learned to enjoy from previous Forzas and care less about the idea of career progression or having to work/“grind” for earning things. And I get that – when they say they’re giving up Forza for PCars or Assetto Corsa I figure one of the reasons is that those games let you mess around with whatever car you want if you’re going online or just running time trials. I’m more the kind of person who likes the sort of mixture of gradual progress and luck that the current economy and career are steered towards, though it helps that I’ve been able to earn a fair amount of money without spending my VIP mods or forcing myself into races I’m not interested in. Taking a break from career to set up my own events in free play helps a lot, as does switching race lengths to long, and now that mods are there solely to reward skill rather than actually artificially boosting your car’s abilities (as far as I’ve seen) I like them a lot more. (I’m pretty sure almost all of them, even the common ones, earn you more credits than the old assists-off bonuses did, and even the ones from the cheaper crates wind up paying for themselves pretty quickly in the right circumstances.) That, and a lot of the higher-end cars are (sometimes way, WAY) less expensive than they were in previous games. As someone who’s super-into classic racing cars of the '60s, I took notice that the Ferrari 250 GTO, which cost 2 million CR in FM6 and (post-economy tweak) FM5 and an obscene 10 MILLION in FH3 is only 1.35 million in FM7, while the '60s prototype cars that cost around 1 million CR in FM6 are half that or less in FM7. So that’s a bit helpful.
Still, between this and the homologation system – which I like in its own context, but also wish wasn’t 100% mandatory – I can tell this is a pretty drastic change for a lot of fans, and makes me wish there was an additional FM4-style “just go out there and do whatever” career mode alongside the more hardcore Drivers’ Cup.
Some additional thoughts:
VIP - this is kind of annoying, though not “sue T10 for misleading advertising” annoying to me, and that’s mostly because I expect other exclusive rewards to come to VIPs anyways. If T10 gives us rare/legendary badges and suits, specially tuned/painted versions of locked cars, and other things like they’ve done before, hopefully that should ease the sting a bit.
Crates & microtransactions - I’ve never had to spend real-world money for an in-game car or credits or anything else that would help me enjoy a Forza game more or be more competitive. And compared to the pre-tweaked economy of FM5 this isn’t nearly as frustrating. (This ties in with the point about less expensive high-end cars I made earlier.) I’m also pretty sure that by the time I was 10 hours in to FH2, FM6, and FH3, I’d actually forgotten there was that whole token system. This isn’t “pay to win” by any measure.
Locked cars - I haven’t even finished the Seeker championship yet and I’m already pretty high up in the car collector tiers. Part of that might be the DLC cars, the cars I won in showcases, and the fact that I bought a lot of lower-tier cars because I liked them. This seems like it might be a wait-and-see kind of thing, since between the showcase events, crates, the specialty dealership, and other potential surprises and rewards, the higher-tier and otherwise locked cars might just be easier to get than some people expect. That said, I have a hunch I might change my mind if I want to get a car that’s only available in prize crates and I have to dump a bunch of in-game credits into a RNG. But as someone who missed his only chance to win a Porsche 928 in FH3 and doesn’t have the millions of credits to buy one in the Auction House, I figure there are worse obstacles than this crate stuff. And if homologation works out like it’s supposed to, at least there’s less of a chance that we’ll get a car a majority of the players can’t access clogging up the leaderboards. Then again, I’ve got more enthusiasm for gradual career progression than a lot of players, so it’s all subjective.
Actual aggravating problems - I thought I’d be playing FM7 all weekend, but I haven’t, and to be honest a lot of it comes down to bugs which I expect (hope) to be fixed and a few annoyances that seem to make the little things a bit less fun. Tuning’s more irritating when you have to actually set up an entire race just to test drive your car. The livery editor’s .02-increments bug is bad enough, but creating liveries feels beside the point for career mode when all the drivatars are stock showroom colors; I know some people wish current-gen Forza games were more like FM4 but this is one way I don’t want it to be like. (And if T10 goes through yet another FM title where drivatar liveries just don’t show up in free play mode at all for no good reason, I’ll be pretty upset.) Weird visual bugs and glitches are all over the place in a way I haven’t seen in any Forza title, ever, from the matte-paint drivatars to the weird Forzavista glitches (i.e. the double-hooded Lancia Delta) to aero parts just not showing up on some cars. I’m glad you can do extra-long races in career mode but not if it results in entire track geometry disappearing at some point. Hopefully T10 recognizes that these things are so legit broken that they’re a high priority in getting patched by wide release.
In conclusion - one of the reasons I’ve stuck with Forza for so long is that there isn’t a single game out there that does everything it does, combining deep visual and physical/mechanical customization with relatively credible physics, a strong if still somewhat incomplete track selection, and an exhaustive car list. And if the mainline Forza Motorsport title fails or otherwise loses its way, it’ll be a pretty major gap in my library. Other sims do the competitive real-world motorsport things better, but they don’t have that fun tinker-in-the-garage aspect that lets you drop a supercharger in an Alfa Romeo GTA or refit the XJ220 with the all-wheel-drive configuration that Jaguar originally intended. Forza Motorsport’s been a gateway for me from its roots in being a casual sim (a term I prefer to “simcade”) to more hardcore sims like GT Legends, GTR2, Automobilista, and Assetto Corsa. But while those titles have their own strengths, they always feel more like supplementary experiences to Forza than total replacements for it. I don’t want to make excuses for what’s obviously a flawed game, but I’m far more invested in seeing it fixed and improved than I am in the $100+ I paid for it being returned to me so I can divert my attention to a game that doesn’t scratch the same itch.
