Turn10,
I’ve played this series and enjoyed it since Forza 1. This release of Forza Motorsport 7 as it is, has me more frustrated than when Forza 5 was released as a half-baked launch title that you guys forgot about finishing once the new Horizon was in development. I can no longer stay quiet about the following grievances, and speak up in this forum with the sincere hope that you’ll listen to the number of dissatisfied players and implement changes ASAP.
Item one: how in God’s name did you think it was acceptable to release this game without AI drivers able to be used in private multiplayer lobbies? This has always been available in previous entries, and was a primary component why I kept playing after doing all that interested me in the career mode of every game. If you think that playing in public lobbies full of other human players is a sufficient substitute–IT IS NOT. I want to play with a few friends, race hard as well as be laid back and screw around as the mood strikes us, but have a full field where we can control AI drivers’ difficulty. I am an average player, I make mistakes. Contact happens. As far as multiplayer goes, I need to be able to apologize to a friend in my party chat when it occurs, or not care if it’s an AI opponent. Otherwise, I’m be ruining someone stranger’s race in a public lobby (or having it happen to me), and they may take the game far more seriously than me. I’m really not enthused about multiplayer as a whole as the game is now. If there’s some processing power limitation, I can understand not being able to fill out a 24 car grid, but omitting it entirely? That has me furious, and is truly unacceptable.
Also, the private multiplayer lobbies are where we can tweak settings to suit our preferences, ones that may not be shared by the majority of others playing online (say, driving assists): If I’m not hosting, as the game has shipped with NO dis-incentive to play without assists, what restricts players from turning on every assist under the sun in the interest of having an easier time winning online? I have no desire to play against a bunch of random people who may well have full suggested line, stability control, and traction control on–these are settings I refuse to use (for the personal challenge and to add realism). In a similar vein, the removal of a credit payout bonus for less assists (offline) feels like a slap in the face. Now the only way to bump up the credits awarded for winning is through choice of difficulty level (that’s fine) or mods cards. To be honest, I wasn’t a fan of mods when they were introduced in previous games, but I figured I didn’t have to use them. I merely ignored them and ground for credits by playing. Now, all the mods cards are limited or one-time use, and I can’t even use them as a substitute for an incentive to drive without assists. And note the sarcasm as I say, “Thanks so much for one of my major bonuses of buying the VIP edition of the game being CONSUMABLE mod cards that I flat-out don’t intend to use.”
Since we’re on the topic of loot boxes, you seriously messed up when an article calls you out for one of the worst examples of the practice to date:
Tokens suck, and you will get absolutely jack from me that way. EVER.
The “car collection” tiers have merely aggravated me by locking certain cars behind another experience-bar wall. But wait! It’s worse than that, since it REQUIRES me as a player to add cars that I often don’t want (and in the case of experience-level rewards, to forgo a credits bonus to get unwanted cars at a discount) to fill out my collection tier in order to UNLOCK cars I actually want. Are you kidding me? Some of these already cost hundreds of thousands of credits, isn’t that restriction enough? This, and the penalty in car collection tiers for selling unwanted cars makes it painfully obvious you’re just trying to wear down players into spending tokens or getting loot boxes to try to get the cars/in-game credits/whatever rather than a player enjoying playing the game and spending winnings to get what they want that way. It’s reprehensible, and while I understand it’s becoming more a facet of the game industry, it shouldn’t be. If I’m paying $60 (U.S., for the base model) for a game from a AAA studio, don’t tack on a bunch of free-to-play B.S. in order to bleed extra money on top of that. (Note, I paid extra for the VIP edition to include the season of car packs. That’s content I WANT.)
There are other gripes I have, like the newfound absence of a “restart race” button from the pause menu in single player. It’s just adding another couple of inputs to choose “quit race” first, and then there’s no load time (thankfully) once you choose to restart from the second menu. Put it back where it was. The upgrade/tuning menus don’t have a “test drive” option that I’m finding. The text in the upgrade menus is often very small, and difficult to read if someone doesn’t have a TV the size of the Great Wall of China. The menu defaulting to “buy this car and extra parts to homologate it” when purchasing new cars is annoying, and has led to me wasting credits and time to return a car to stock before upgrading it how I want. I enjoy that when buying a new car, you can look at popular liveries and preview them (with a “free look” option as you’re doing so), please include these aspects in the “search for designs” menus after the car has been purchased, rather than simply downloading and applying a selected design–I’ve had a ton of instances where I thought the menu still of a design was cool, and then the rest of it didn’t speak to me, or on closer inspection I didn’t like it. When changing engine parts in the upgrade menu, the torque value is now not shown. That’s dumb. And over the course of EVERY GAME where you could do engine swaps, the scale of the reference lines in the dyno graphs still change as engines have varying RPM limits. Let me be clear: when the rev range changes from 0-8k to 0-10, the graph has the same number of reference lines, but now the value between them has changed–I hate having to estimate how to translate that in my head. If a car has the Mazda 4-rotor as an option to shove into the car (and that graph goes up to 12,000 revs), then make that be maximum RPM value of ALL OF THE DYNO GRAPHS. That way, as I switch between choosing the stock engine, or an LS V8, or whatever else, comparing the curves and their rev-limits are obvious. It’d be nice if the upgrade menu would show engine displacement again, as well. I’d really appreciate having the ability to sort by more details of the cars when filtering/buying/choosing cars (also in multiplayer); I remember in the early Forza games, you could sort by engine cylinders, tire width, curb weight, parts value, pretty much everything I could think of. It’d be great to have that again. I miss using the shoulder buttons to quickly page to the left or right in upgrade options, this is especially annoying when selecting wheels. Why was this taken out all of a sudden? Half of these are obvious details/features you had in previous games–keep the stuff that works.
Bug-wise, I haven’t had any dealbreakers (and I’m sure many are reporting issues elsewhere, especially for PC), but real quick–I’ve had a couple of crashes one my Xbox One when selecting liveries as I’m purchasing a car.
Please take all of the above to heart. It’s not all bad, I concede–the game looks gorgeous. The weather effects are beautiful, and the possibility of them changing over the course of a race is welcome. There’s a wide array of cars which has often been a strong point of the series (letdown of car packs/tracks in Forza 5 post-release notwithstanding). I’m ecstatic about the return of Maple Valley Raceway, Suzuka, and the inclusion of VIR from 6’s DLC. I’d be especially happy if Sunset Peninsula and Mount Haruna were also brought back, and Tsukuba would have me thanking the heavens, but I understand if the latter is not feasible because of some licensing/budget issue. The varied racing disciplines keep things fresh as you proceed through career mode, that’s great. And you guys finally got the “intro” races right–short events before you’re quickly cut loose to start your own career, and the ability to change assists immediately to your liking. I’d have preferred the cutscenes be skip-able as well, but they weren’t long, so whatever. The driver audio clips are nice an unobtrusive, I love the inclusion of Rutledge Wood even if I’m not wild about the limo bowling event. The physics feels detailed and like it has a nice balance of accessibility (with assists) for the more casual players, but also keeps it on the simulation side of the spectrum without being punishing. I can only hope to find the right settings for my new wheel and pedals so that the cars don’t feel twitchy–but that’s something I need to work out and get used to.
As far as future content, I’d love to see smaller oval tracks with simple infields, I think that would be good for the slower cars, drifting, autocross, what-have-you. A car pack with some pro drift cars would be fantastic, I’ve really enjoyed Hert’s Twerkstallion for this reason. (More drift-friendly content in general would be a plus–it has quite a following.) An autocross-creation tool would be enjoyable, too. I know additional tracks, cars, and features mean a high added cost, but you make good content and people will be happy to pay for it.
Honestly, another one of my car friends has been so enraged by these changes that he’s demanded (and received!) a full refund on his game from Microsoft. I don’t want to follow suit. There’s things that I’m happy about in this game, and I want to enjoy spending countless hours playing this as I have in Forza 4 just tooling around building ridiculous cars, goofing off or having tense, close races in multiplayer. But what you’ve made right now is enough to make me consider swearing off your products and looking to another franchise.
Mods, move this around as you see fit, just please let it be read. I’m aggravated such that I can’t stand to wade through the forum comments to see what’s already been said or where the official place is to air these grievances. It’d take too much time to go through every thread and hit “like” on what I agree with, and even if I had, I feel this is necessary. I love this series–and I want more than anything for this game to be much better than it is now.
P.S. If someone looks at my gamertag details or something and only sees playtime with Forza 5 onward, check “aquila121” as well–I couldn’t transfer the gamertag to a new email after I got locked out of an old email address, so I just started a new one. My Forza Hub tier should be a little better than it shows. 