The Forza Team would like to get your feedback about tuning cars in Forza Motorsport. Please vote in the polls below and reply with additional context.
If you haven’t been using tuning on your cars, what are the reasons you haven’t? What would prompt you to start or do more tuning?
If you don’t do your own tuning, please indicate the reasons below
Tuning save file/limit issues
Waiting on Creative Hub updates
Too many variables to test tuning effectiveness
Too little explanation of how tuning settings work
Tuning menu is too confusing
Cars feel fine without it (stock or upgraded)
Prefer authenticity of cars in factory setup
Prefer stock car events for equalized competition
Too time consuming to level up for adjustable car upgrades
Easier to grab a shared tune
Prefer to be racing than spend time on tuning
Just completing events for rewards or progression
Prefer painting or photography
Other (Please add details in a reply to this topic)
0voters
Do you use tuning on your cars in Forza Motorsport events?
Never
Sometimes
Frequently
0voters
Do you adjust your own settings or use downloaded tunes from other players?
Only my own
My own and some downloaded tunes
Only downloaded tunes
I haven’t used tuned cars
0voters
Which game modes have you participated in with tuned cars most often?
Tuning is what got me hooked on this series years ago.
Tuning is the foundation for why I play.
I tune literally every car I drive (except, obviously, for spec events with locked/restricted tuning).
Tuning is kinda like the character loadout & skill-tree customization in other non-car/racing games - it gives players freedom to tailor their tools to best fit their desired approach.
It’s a bit of a grey area, but in my mind there’s tuning and then there’s tuning.
Zero-ing out the game’s silly anti-squat/anti-dive settings and a few little tweaks to aero or gear ratios barely count as tuning but that’s what 90% of my adjustments are. I rarely touch alignments and other suspension settings except for ride height, and I almost never touch diff or brake settings unless they are borked as standard (such as for AWD cars burning through front tyres or BMW brake balances being the wrong way around).
Sorry I hate the thought of doing my own tuning. I just want to race. Imagine Lewis Hamilton having to sort his own car out before a race. I always use shared tunes. I love how tunes make the cars much better to drive. I’ve just no interest in tuning. It’s just feels a chore to me.
Obviously lots of people love it. I’m clueless about tuning cars
Im not a tuner, far from it , im still learning , but I do try to tinker about with each car I use in Career mode & Freeplay to get a basic balanced level that makes the car feel good & preform a bit better than stock set up for me . I would only tweak cars a bit more pacifically for each track & conditions that im racing on only if the race is long enough to warrant it & the time it takes to do it , otherwise I just run with an overall balanced tune that makes the car handle & preform a bit better for me, but nothing super competitive.
For how much I enjoy driving cars with tunes from some of the best tuners, I do wish multiplayer spec events were just that… spec. I don’t think tuning should be available in those events. Spec events, IMO, should be a place where everyone can race and depend only on their driving skills. I race them even though I never win and rarely even podium. I get passed and gapped by people driving cars that they tune… I only know how to do minimal tuning so I can’t be competitive.
This may not really apply to tuning, but I hope Motorsport will someday get rid of things like Traction Control, ABS, etc. as an element of in-game assistance, and make these things directly part of the car that has them present or absent. It’s strange to see these elements driving a car that doesn’t have this in it. And it is equally strange to drive a car in which these elements should have a large range of settings, but we are deprived of this. The current implementation may be good for FH, but I wish there was more common sense in FM.
So, I’ve been thinking about this topic for a little bit as I try to level up cars to 50 and make sense of this game’s frustratingly-inconsistent handling. I decided a few weeks ago to adopt the method of a poster here - their name escapes me, but they have been using and documenting real-world numbers for tuning, particularly with the suspension and alignment. In doing that, one of the things that I’m finding is that this system is too precise. And that precision ends up hurting things in the long run.
As an example, I’m going to use the 2013 Dodge SRT Viper GTS (quick aside - just reclassify it as a Dodge. Horizon 5 figured this out, and unless you’re going to bring back the 2013 GTS-R for reasons, it makes no sense to have it there on it’s own island) and 2016 Viper ACR. There are lowering springs available for those cars that also stiffen the ride and increase performance; after a quick bit of research on a popular real world item, I settled on tuning the in-game suspension to have 500 lb fronts and 800 lb rears, and that worked nicely. Then we get to the dampers, and here’s where problems crop up. Maybe it’s not so on bespoke racing suspensions, but on real-world adjustable suspensions, dampers aren’t set in .1 increments. In fact, you never really get that far into the weeds when it comes to damping at all; on the real-world ACR, the adjustable Bilstein shocks get dialed in using knobs that go from 1 to 10, increasing in stiffness. There’s no “set bump to 4.2 up front and 4.9 in the rear and rebound to 8.6 front and 9.3 rear”. It’s probably simpler to adjust an actual ACR than it is in Forza.
I think tuning would be greatly encouraged by a combination of explaining what settings do in concise detail AND a simpler, broader-stroke option for players to use. I would suggest reworking the Sport suspension options to more accurately replicate what you get on commercially-available adjustable setups and make those options adjustable, but not to the degree that a Race setup would do. For instance, setting dampers from 1-5 in increments of 1, or sway bars along the same increments.
There’s other things that are bugging me about tuning and how cars are represented in this game…but let’s start there first and see where this goes.
I wish the default tunes were better for that.
I usually dread or avoid events with locked/restricted tuning because it seems like so few cars have decent default tunes.
Most of the default tunes feel like I’m fighting the car, not driving it.
I’ve had related discussions about this with fellow virtual racers who also worked as mechanics/tuners in real-world performance shops.
Good folks & very knowledgeable, but their in-game tunes were never competitive because they refused to take certain approaches due to their strict adherence to real-world specifics.
They would say things like “I’ve tuned this car in real life, and nobody would ever use these crazy settings for this car in real life, so I won’t use those crazy settings in games either” - which prevented them from being competitive in games.
They’re certainly not incorrect in their automotive knowledge, and these types of games should ideally reflect real-world principles better, but I often reminded them that we gotta go with what works in context if we want to be competitive in that context.
Most gamers are not engineers or mechanics, but the in-game on-screen tuning descriptions (and many freely available guides online) often seem to try to explain things too technically from a engineer’s or mechanic’s perspective, which requires a foundation of specialized expertise that most gamers don’t have.
I’ve always liked how this old video explains & illustrates differentials:
Before getting into FM, I raced AC and ACC against AI. And before that, older, long-gone sims in private multiplayer leagues many years ago.
In those old multiplayer days, we had one or two members make setups that the entire group ran. I learned a bit back in those days, but forgot most of it in the 15 years since.
Racing against AI, I can often just use the stock tunes. Especially in ACC and GT7, (and even FM7) where the stock tunes handle decently at my lower skill level. I just imagine a world where I can hire a race tuning mechanic to get my car dialed in, same as I’d pay them to install the upgrade parts.
With FM, I’ve had to re-learn the tuning stuff from square one. And that’s due to the stock tunes often feeling so much like I’m fighting the car.
So in FM (and rarely in ACC/GT7) I do tune the fight out of some cars. I tune to add/reduce stability on corners. I sometimes adjust the gearing when a track needs it. But as in the example above about not doing unrealistic things… I’m not interested in doing edge-case sim-tune meta-stuff. Racing against AI (I almost never race online)… it works out OK and I have fun.
Just my offline reasoning. And yes, I think you are completely correct in how the tuning needs to be suited to the game, to be competitive online.
For me, though, it’s not about being competitive with anyone other than the AI (which is another thoroughly-discussed subject), but instead about having some kind of authenticity. That sense of authenticity that I’ve usually derived from previous Forza Motorsport entries is being stretched almost to it’s breaking point in this entry because - as you noted in another post - the stock/default tunes for the majority of cars in this game are terrible. As a result, the satisfying feeling of hopping into an unmodified car - particularly an unmodified sports car or supercar - is gone because 9 times out of 10, I’m having to throw on modifications that would effectively destroy it’s character in any other game just to forcibly imprint that same character onto the cars in this game. The Mercedes-AMG GT Black Series is a good example in my experience. That car is one of the fastest cars around the Nordscheilfe, but you’d never know it if this game was your only exposure to it, because it’s an understeering mess straight off the showroom floor.
That’s a totally understandable preference.
Although it seems like the quest for full authenticity will always come up short in imperfect emulators like mass-market video games.
The historical, current, & foreseeable limitations of mass-market consumer-grade electronics (like game consoles, PCs, & peripherals), along with the budget constraints of mass-market game/sim developers, make it impossible to perfectly simulate reality in this context (even in well-known “hardcore” sim titles).
I get that, but at the same time, it seems like they actually had something reasonable before (except for FM5. Not sure what happened there). How they missed that mark here, I don’t know.
Another thing that’s been bugging me tuning wise in a real-world context is the 2023 Chevy Corvette Z06. If you look anywhere that will compile that kind of information, you’ll be told that the final drive ratio on it is 5.56. If you put that in to the in-game car (after modifying it, of course), you get something that happily uses all eight gears. Why is this a problem? Well, if you go to Corvette forums, one of the biggest complaints is the gearbox and the ratios basically falling off of a cliff after 5th gear. So…who’s correct here? As some would say, the math ain’t mathin’. What does the final drive ratio in this game represent if it’s so wildly off the mark there?
Yeah, the process of bringing cars into the game shoe-horns them into the game’s limitations, and they don’t always seem to put much effort into mapping the virtual cars’ performance attributes to each cars’ real-world source.
