Hello everyone!
So, this is going to be a rant / some sort of story, so be prepared. I have never before ( if I remember right ) made any complaints before on any forum about anything but I really have to get this one out of my chest. I’ll share some background for this so you may better feel my urge to do this, but I’ll put some sort of TL;DR in the end.
Ever since I was around 5 or 6, I have been loving racing games. There was this one game, published at the end of 90’s, which had lots of awesome race cars with cool liveries and plenty of tracks to race on against equally awesome machines and I got instantly hooked. I kept playing many different racing games for years to come but at the halfway of the 00’s, different franchises started to lose their touch on the magic they once had. I stuck on playing some of my “golden games” for a while, but then, out of nowhere, this new cutting-edge technology arrived to consoles and oh boy it turned out to be something game-changing: Online Multiplayer mode.
At the beginning of that chapter of my gamer’s journey, I bought the newest ( at the time ) console from a good friend of mine so I could try this new thing out, but I got stuck playing with him this first-person shooter - game which was all the fuzz around the schoolyard. But couple years later, I started to long for my beloved rubberburning, petrolguzzling, hi-octane games and there were some disappointments on the way and after some research I decided to make a radical decision and I bought my first Xbox console and Forza Motorsport 6 with it. My lord it was a whole different world that I was used to but it was all there: Those sick looking racing machines with flashy liveries, beautiful graphics, driver’s eye view with detailed car interior in every car, many awesome tracks which included many tracks I didn’t even knew existed, rain that made some puddles of water that really impacted your driving and the chance to play with more than maybe 5 players at the same time online… Simply amazing.
Long gone were the days when cars changed shape / pixels constantly while driving a straight line.
The thing that struck me maybe the most was how some cars just behaved so drastically different to others. Sure, some games also did pretty good job with this, but at the time Forza Motorsport 6 was in its own league to me. And there were also many special cars to choose from, for example, prettymuch all of the Porsches. Not many games had any Porsche at all and when they had, they weren’t that realistic games and they only had Carrera GT, some sort of 911 and / or maybe a Cayman. But alas, my life in general took turn around and my journey with console gaming and with that Forza had to be put on halt shortly after the beginning and I was stuck on playing totally different stuff with my toaster-pc for the moment.
And now, finally, I had the opportunity to join back in the fray with Xbox Series X and Forza Motorsport (2023?). When I realized that the game was about to launch, and I also had the opportunity to buy my way to early access to start play immediately, I had no hesitations and I instantly bought the game and waited anxiously for the download to complete. On the next day, after I got from work, I was shaking from the pure excitement to see how this newest speedmachinegame was going to look and feel like and what kind of cars were available. And dear lord I almost started to cry when I saw the Zak’s Capri again, Porsches ( most of them ) and other legendary race cars from the 70’s and 80’s and also those magnificent Group C cars, especially the Jaguar XJR-9 which was never in any game that I owned ( except for one weird cartoonish game where cars could “fly” and “swim” ) but I knew how amazing machine that is.
So my experience with this Forza had started. I completed the first 4 career - mode cups to learn the ropes after my long hiatus and after those great and painful races I decided to go try the Featured Multiplayer. I was pretty shocked ( in a good way ) to see that I got to race with Honda Civic race car ( which I also bought literally 2 minutes before this just because I hate the idea of renting a car and didn’t expect a free car ) and the way that the whole online gaming looked and felt seemed pretty well executed. And then, after completing the Qualifier Series and I got to see what races there were to do, I quite literally started to laugh in joy when I saw that there was a race for Group 5 cars ( Zakspeed Capri, Procar M1, IMSA Quattro etc. ) and that the tracks involved legendaries like Spa Francorchamps and Le Mans circuit and there were also so many laps that you had to do a pit stop if you didn’t want to skate through the finish line with your wheels with no tires. That was almost every check on my wishlist marked on one go. So, I bought the Capri and eventually some other cars too to test them out but the Capri was by far the most epic to drive of them all, it truly felt like you were constantly wrestling with a turbocharged mechanical beast which is trying to kill you and everyone around you, and I can’t praise it how good it felt when you nailed clean overtakes on the corners while the tail is sliding and on top of that you get your fastest lap time on the same go. That car gave me the most adrenaline that any game has ever given to me. I bought a 2nd ( and eventually a 3rd) Capri so if someday I would want to try to learn tuning, that would be the car I would work on and I won’t have to juggle with save file-thingies.
But now I am at a point which I can’t really believe is happening: I can’t drive my car in an online race. Moments ago I could.
After couple hours of wondering about what I was witnessing, I decided to try out some GT-car racing but oh good heavens how boring it feels after many, many hours of playing with a wheelspinning metallic manslayer and instead now I’m kinda forced to drive with these “train-like cars”; You keep trying to push your car to the grip limit but oh boy if you let it snap even a tiny bit, then it’s game over for you. There is no excitement, there are just the words: “Don’t overdo it”, repeating in your head. But I have to point out that I love GT cars in an endurance race, that’s what they were made for. I admit, I haven’t tried all of the GT cars but I highly doubt that there is any one that fills my need for thrill because that is just how modern race cars behave, they are built to stick to the ground. Luckily the Porsches are a bit different story because of their rear-engine setup so they give their own challenges when you try to do fast laps on them, but the way that you have to drive them fast is so much different than the one that the oldfashioned race car requires that it’s like learning a totally new driving style which even doesn’t feel super fun at all. And most of the races that I have to do while learning this whole new style are held on tracks that I haven’t even seen before and the races aren’t even long enough to have a need for a pit stop.
Sigh, the moment when I saw that there was over 20 minutes time till signing up for Spa - practice is going to run out and all that time of practicing is for 3 laps of the track ( or was it 4, it’s midnight now so it’s getting a bit hazy ).
On top of that, I managed to gain a little over 4,900 skill rating and S safety rating while driving the Capri so it is highly possible that most of my opponents have a little bit more experience on these cars on these tracks than I do, if the point system is to be believed, and my finishing positions have gone a looong way down from the pretty constant top 5 placings. And of course my skill rating is slowly going down, but that is a minor detail to me personally, I just want balanced competition, but still, it doesn’t feel nice.
Some people would surely suggest me to start trying to tune a car for me to race with joy, but I don’t see that as an option. I would have to learn so much stuff in so little time that it is just impossible for me to do, and I really can’t imagine that an A-class car would give that kind of kick that I am longing for, plus driving a tuned Mazda RX-7 compared to Mazda Motorsport RX-7 while using the driver’s view has a little different feeling to it.
Tuning the GT-class Porsche is a bit tricky too because the car has different PI while doing Featured Multiplayer than it has in Free Play and I have no idea how to find out what is different there. And if I would solve that part, I would also kinda have to learn those “new”, short tracks while playing against AI so it would still lead me to do some compromises that I can’t believe I am forced to do in a entertainment product that I spent money on, more than I was even required to pay.
Third option would be to just download some other person’s tune, but it is like playing with a rental car: You get to drive it but you can’t touch anything about it, not a slight gearing ratio change, no new rims, nothing. You just drive.
So I am just sitting and watching the menu of this game that has to offer the best entertainment that I can remember I have ever enjoyed, but it won’t. And it won’t tell me when it will. Tomorrow? After 6D? Will it hold races that are long enough that pitting is a tactical decision? Will this waiting continue after it has been available for week again? I don’t know what else to say than this has been maybe the most depressing feeling I have ever felt about any video game before and man it hurts. Couple days ago I was dancing under the brightest sunshine, now I can’t even see the clouds in this night.
I hope that people would soon be able to drive the races they want with the cars they want, it sure has been absurd to see that a game that has 38 different car divisions and 9 different performance classes has only 5 series available at a time, and 2 of those are for one specific car. And what I understand by looking at stuff in-game, this may not change in 6 days.
If you read all of this, I want to thank you for that. At one point I was about to wipe this “message” but decided to continue so if someone is having issues with this topic, I want to let them know that they aren’t alone. Now it’s time for me to hit the bed, I wish the best for all of you fellow racers and have a great weekend!
TL;DR
There are severely limited options in Featured Multiplayer - series, it sucks to be forced to play with cars you don’t enjoy.