Turn 10, what you got right and wrong with Forza 7

Career mode: :+1:

For me, Driver’s cup was very enjoyable. Specially with all the credit, special FE cars and gears i kept on earning. The Masters Driver’s Cup gear can only be earned by completing each and every race of the career mode including the endurance ones and that is what makes it valuable just like Forza Edition cars. However,. FE cars became less precious once they started appearing in Forzathons. What i am getting to is things that can only be earned through hard work have value. Do you remember the “Lane Perfection” badge in Forza 6? It could only be earned if one could complete many many clean races and to receive the silver and specially the gold version of it, one had to drive clean for even longer time and that is what made respected. In Forza 7, badges and gears are readily available for purchase in the race shop. They cannot get earned through any hard work at all. Therefore they are nothing special.

Homologation: :-1:

Forza 6’s ghost leagues were simple and much more enjoyable. This week it was A700, next week S800, the week after that R900 and so on. With Forza 7, homologation restrictions have excluded many cars from participating in league races. For instance, in Forza 6 ghost league, I could tune the Ultima GTR for R900 races but in Forza 7, the Ultima GTR is in P 913 class and cannot be tuned for R900 class. Similarly the pre order car packs such as The fast & the furious car pack and the hoonigan cars cannot be tuned to be driven in the leagues either but only in hoppers. I hope not to see these restrictions in Forza 8.

I hope developers see what they got right and what wrong with Forza 7 and make Forza 8 an even better game.

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double post

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Not trying to be negative, but coming off FM4 and FM5 and not playing FM6 at all, I found this game to have done just about everything wrong and in the wrong direction.

  1. Go back to having still pictures and not these long loading times
  2. Get rid of the driver outfits, they weren’t necessary and no one cares
  3. Actually attempt to balance cars in the game, ie. more lightweight cars in the lower classes should have a high PS for every part they equip for being so lightweight
  4. No more P2W cars please, you banned cars from online for being too OP, then made paid cars that did the same thing
  5. The physics are too loose, it feels like driving on ice rather than racing
  6. Balance engine swaps better
  7. Fix online stability
  8. Focus more on cars that will actually be used for racing and not random crap ie. muscle cars are fine but the hot wheels junk, off road trucks, etc. just no.
  9. Not enough tracks at all, can we have some of the older tracks that were in FM1-4 back? I don’t know why we can’t.

And this list just goes on and on and on and on. This game was a serious downgrade from 5 IMO and that’s not an exaggeration. This game literally made me pick up GT Sport when I haven’t played GT since GT3 because forza was just objectively better.

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  1. Loading times will not be an issue next gen.
    2.Driver outfits can be great if done right. Look at GT Sport. Making your own in a similar way that you can create liveries would be a better option.
  2. Car balance is pretty bad, mainly outside of homologation. That said how can you balance so many cars in ABC etc catagories? Difficult if not impossible.
  3. I thought certain cars were banned for collisions (open wheel cars) and certain heavy rammer cars. I don’t remember any being removed for being overpowered.
  4. Physics are awful with a bad tune and sim steering but I have seen many a car turned from a mess to lovely to drive.
  5. I would say just remove engine swaps.
  6. Online stability seems different person to person. Personally I can count the amount of times I’ve dc’d on both hands with 3500 hours of mostly online play. Not saying it doesn’t need improving but it’s been mostly flawless for me.
  7. Variety is the spice of life. We do need more proper race cars, modern and retro.
  8. There wasn’t enough work done here at all. Pretty disgusting tbh.

I too have picked up GT Sport. Hate how stiff the cars feel, almost the opposite to Forza but at the same time, that game gets tons of proper support with free cars and tracks. The tracks keep me going back for more but GT Sport still severely lacks cars and I dislike how multiplayer is set up compared to Forza.

I would like to add.

Forza needs a proper tyre and fuel model. I feel little to no loss of grip until the tyres are in the red for example.

The livery editor needs some serious work. Wierd mapping and warping issues on countless cars can make a 8 hour paint job take a few hours more on a compromised job. Had an absolute nightmare doing a McLaren shadow livery on the new indycar for the indy500 Logitech booth :crazy_face: The job was literally impossible to do like for like.

Still, it turned out ok apart from the engine cover :grin:

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To give T10 some feedback from someone who’s relatively new to Forza, I’ll say that I almost entirely gave up on the Motorsport franchise because I found the initial driving experience to be much more challenging to pick-up on a controller than FH4. As a result, I stopped doing the offline content because it felt like a real struggle to get the cars to respond in a predictable way. Since leaving FM7 for FH4, my only interactions with FM7 were the weekly Forzathon events, and they too were beginning to feel like a real chore because I just wasn’t enjoying gameplay using an Xbox controller.

When I saw the Watkins Glen NASCAR race last weekend it renewed my interest in FM7 and I decided to give it another look. While I took to the FH4 driving experience better than FM7, I think what really bothered me about Horizon is that it’s a fictional arcade game at its core. This is why I started out with Motorsport instead of Horizon in the first place. In fact, I only bought FH4 as an impulse purchase and didn’t think I’d actually play much of it. Ironically, I think what ultimately got me back into FM7 were the months that I was playing FH4. Since I found driving to be a lot easier in FH4, I was able to stick with it long enough to understand the quirks of driving with a controller. The added time spent in Horizon allowed me to delve into other aspects of the game that would ultimately be transferable to the Motorsport universe.

With my only experience with Forza being Motorsport 7 and Horizon 4, I can say that (IMHO) for someone looking for a pure racing experience, FM7 is the hands down winner. I wouldn’t have thought that a week ago because I was enjoying the multiplayer experience in FH4 (Well. . . Sort of). The only thing that I really looked forward to in Horizon 4 were the weekly “The Trial” Co-Op events, because it was tough to find people interested in doing unranked races. I mean, the userbase of FH4 probably dwarfs that of FM7 by a significant margin yet there’s curiously nobody around to enjoy racing for the sake of racing and nothing more than that. Sure I could venture into the ranked lobbies and deal with all the “crazies” driving Hot Wheels and fighting each other for a silly “Grandmaster” cap; But frankly, it’s not a fun environment to be in when you have to navigate through uneven terrain and some nut has to spam “Nice driving!!!” for the next minute-and-a-half because there’s no such thing as an accident in the world of online racing.

What Motorsport 7 gets right is the multiplayer experience. I never really explored it in depth before because I felt that my driving was too horrendous to ever leave that “101” lobby. Through the weekly FM7 Forzathon challenges, I stumbled upon a few cars that really suited my driving style. I tuned them up and drove right into the deep end of the FRR Class lobbies. What I saw there wasn’t what I expected to see after having dealt with FH4’s ranked racing. I was actually amazed at how polite, considerate and professional the players were in FM7 multiplayer. It was far removed from wacko players working feverishly hard to push my Ford Raptor in the direction of a blue tractor that’s conveniently sitting in a wide-open field during a Free Roam race. That’s not racing for people looking to race. I get it now why there are people in FM7’s multiplayer lobbies just racing for the fun of it, while FH4’s custom lobbies sit relatively empty. If I were to judge a book by its cover, I would’ve thought that Horizon would be the easy winner – it’s flashy, it’s got cool tunes, and it’s got tons of sheep grazing in the countryside. It’s essentially just a gigantic bug zapper attracting craziness – like driving a car off a jump to see if it lands on all four wheels or if it lands on top of a church. In contrast, FM7 is like that thousand-page book that’s been collecting a decade’s worth of dust on the bookshelf – while it might seem like a bit of work to get through at first, it’s definitely a satisfying read in the end. There’s something that feels meaningful to virtually race on a track called, “Road America” instead of something called, “Ambleside Village Circuit”. Anyway, for me, the most fun I’ve had so far with Forza is right there in FM7’s multiplayer lobbies. I think my only suggestion for improvement would be to indicate which lobbies have the most activity so I don’t need to randomly query each hopper’s game server.

No doubt my FM7 driving got better because it shares similarities with FH4. However, the real gamechanger for me was when I actively sought cars in FM7 that shared similar handling characteristics to those that I liked in FH4 and tuned them up! And I think this is an area where both franchises suffer, because 9 times out of 10 a car isn’t “easy” to drive out-of-the-box. There’s a very steep learning curve to drive well enough with a controller for it to be gratifying to a new player, IMHO. I only stuck with it for this long because I felt obligated to after having spent money on both titles. Had I started FH4 through Xbox Game Pass, then I likely would’ve left after ten minutes.

  1. I’m on PC having loading issues, it has NOTHING to do with the generation and being on console.
  2. Complete waste of money and resources, I thought this game was supposed to be for serious racers who care about racing and not stupid driver outfits.
  3. I dunno, play the game, see which cars are obviously imbalanced and balance them a bit? Doesn’t take that much effort to realize that a lightweight GT40 is OP or how the S2000, Miata, honda civic, etc. is dominating the lower classes.
  4. There were literally specific cars being banned for having too much handling, again, do you even play this game? Seems like you don’t or you joined late. How can you have 3500 hours and not know that specific cars were banned because they were completely outperforming the competition? Most of the cars you can currently buy that are OP replaced cars that were banned for doing the same damn thing with handling vs. acceleration ratio and being broken, except now you have to buy them which is P2W. I approved of their removal os such cars but did not except for this to happen.
  5. Um, tuning = going faster, that doesn’t change the bad physics of the game. Compare this game to any more serious racing game and it become obvious quickly that this game has terrible physics and is too arcadey. For starters, not even including the feeling of driving like you’re on ice, there is way too much grip in this game and you can easily tell cars have too much grip.
  6. I agree
  7. Congrats on being in the minority, most people have constant DCs, CTDs, black screens, etc. You can literally watch anyone steam MP and see this
  8. I agree, variety with cars that were not made for racing is pointless and a waste of resources. It doesn’t matter if you have 700+ cars, if only 50-100 of those cars are used because the rest are bad.
  9. I agree

I agree and disagree with many of your points slet’sts just leave it at that.

Edit: I also completely agree that GT Sport cars are far too stiff and is a complete turn off, that’s why I’m switching to iRacing which is far better than both these games.

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My honest opinion;
What they got right:

  1. Car roster. 834 cars in this game is insane and never thought it would get that high and just about every piece of motorsport is touched which I like. I do not like the forza edition cars though for the most part especially with it counting towards the roster, minus those we still have around 785 cars in game which is real nice. Look at birth of grand prix for example, nice full class of classic cars there.

  2. Dynamic weather. While it sucks not having dynamic time of day and only 6 or so tracks having weather variations I think T10 did this part pretty good for what we got. Going into freeplay on a track with a rain option for instance, you can fine tweak different parts of a given race with about a dozen different weather options spread out with probability and as you race you can watch the weather unfold with even rain drying up, I like it a lot just wish it was on more tracks like Daytona, circuit of the Americas, long beach, and even Rio.

  3. Career mode, drivers cup. One of the best career modes in the series real nice being able to go through and use different vehicles and motorsports and the AI even behave better in career which makes for some nice racing.

  4. Menu layout. The colors and layout is pretty good

  5. Freeplay, mostly. Hands down way better than forza 6 in this area. You can set up just about any kind of race you want with whichever vehicles. Almost complete freedom here until a few bugs show their ugly faces and kills the whole set up. But still freeplay with the bucket choices, weather options, power caps, handicaps, and grouping cars based on everything from year to weight is so nice.

What they got wrong;

  1. No track DLC. What the heck happened here, ever since FM3 we had track DLC whether it was 1 track or 4, free or part of a paid expansion we always have had tracks. While this game gives us a nice dose of 32 different locations with dozens of layouts theres still many glaring omissions that could have came along and spices up the roster even further. We have a all these cars but only a fraction of the amount of tracks to race them on. Tracklist would have been nice sitting at at least 45-50.

  2. Freeplay bugs. Everything from freezing, to resetting without knowing, to homologation restrictions it kinda messes up the fun here and it’s a shame.

  3. Car sounds. Even after that update dozens of cars still sound weird, way off or just flat out crappy. I dont understand why they couldn’t nail it like Fm5 and 6. Yeah the roster is much bigger but make sure the cars sound as good as they look, and some even got messed up worse coming from 6 to 7.

On a positive note, I loved how accessible Free Play became - I mean literally every option you could imagine was right there. Very versatile, loved it. Inclusion of wide bodykits was also very welcome. Enjoyed the dynamic track conditions and all, great. Lots of car variety and visually, the game grabbed me and had me hooked. Quite nice.

On a not so positive note - I was nearly shocked to see how far back they had gone in terms of car audio between FM5 and FM7. I understand that this is a topic that many in the community may not care about as much as some of us pure car nuts do, but having played their older FM games on a reasonably good sound system, I was in utter disbelief in regards to the “sorry, this will do for now” attitude.

The game is clearly rich on content but overall, should have gotten a LOT more attention in terms of quality, bug testing and polish. FM5 and 6 in comparison seem like really polished and finished games. Sure, FM5 was low on quantity/content, but dear God, it wreaked and oozed with polish and quality. FM6 made some great additions too but I didn’t quite enjoy how casual the physics had gotten.

The track selection in FM7 is also something I’m not all that pleased with - it appears the same tracks have been recycled for the last 4-5 games with some really great tracks disappearing altogether. If memory serves, FM2-4 had some really brilliant race tracks - where did they all go? This is the first FM game I believe to not feature any track DLC, which is a major letdown. Also, driving seems to be getting really easy with every game release. FM5 had a fairly good tire model and the driving was quite nuanced. That learning curve was nowhere to be found in FM7.

I think the next Forza Motorsport game will really have to go out of its way to impress me because this one certainly didn’t, even though it has its moments and can be fun. Sure, good visuals are great and sell games, but in a title like Forza, I frankly believe the developers should be paying a lot more attention to car audio and physics.

My thoughts are merely constructive criticism for the developers and I hope that at some stage they will be taken on board.

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I’m a wheel user so there’s none of the older titles that I appreciate ike FM7.

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Forza 2 is the best in the series. Forza 7 has too many problems. Abysmal AI wich makes career with 24 grid barely playable. Extremely dark outdated graphics due to 4K HDR support. It is the only modern driving game which doesn’t have dynamic lighting. UI is pretty much the worst I’ve ever seen.

Driving is enjoyable, but this constantly smashing-pushing-crashing AI drives me mad. Even rewind sometimes doesn’t help

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What they got right with FM7: They produced it!
What they got wrong, ok, it had a few bugs. Still does.
Great game overall, thanks Turn10.

What they got wrong with FM8: It isn’t out yet, come on guys. Let’s get that FM8 out for the last harrah before the next xbox. Then you can do FM8.1 for the next xbox.

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If F8 doesn’t have Custom Public Lobbies back then im not buying it. plain and simple. Ive given too much money to this franchise for the last 3 iterations to be disappointed at they attempts of multiplayer for the last three that I can’t tolerate it anymore.

Also Tsukuba and all the old tracks would be nice. Also please scrap VIR and Top Gear. Although again CPL’s would fix that as I would just never host those tracks.

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The things turn 10 did badly in my opinion were;

  1. Locking cars at the beginning behind Forzathon or speciality dealer. First, too many cars were locked and secondly no one had any idea when these cars would become available. Now I am all for locking cars behind achievements. Win a race series and get a car is a great way to do it as long as it is available to everyone and any time.

  2. Race suits. I have a few issues with these. First, as in the cars, they should all be available for doing certain things. For example get a brand suit if you win 5 races with that brand, similar with tracks. I still haven’t been able to get a Rossi suit. Secondly, allow us to “paint” suits. This doesn’t have to be adding stickers, but at least allow us say 6 different suits that we can colour various panels to suit our wants. Also national suits should use national racing colours rather than flag colours. A 5 minute Wikipedia search would have shown you what those are.

  3. Car sounds. Most are atrocious, especially if you aren’t using in car view. The sounds really need to all be recorded from the actual cars rather than generic V6 or straight 4. Also we need an option that allows us to pick between having sounds that match a particular view or having the best sounds regardless of view.

  4. More details for car and upgrade information, including searchable information. It seems like every edition of Forza has less and less information. We should be able to search by engine type or capacity. When upgrading the power/torque map should have numbers to show how much power at what rpm, the enlarge capacity should show what capacity you are upgrading to. Is it going from 6.0l to 6.2 or 6.4?who knows?

  5. Multiplayer. While a lot of work has been done I know a lot of people who are having issues with low bandwidth and high latency warnings showing constantly on good connections (50Mbps and higher). The lobby set up is much better now, although being able to set engine capacity limits is something else that needs implementing.

  6. Communication with Turn 10. This has been possibly the biggest upset. The game when released was not up to the expected standard by any means. Instead of having someone with some clout talking to us in the forum’s we felt like we were ignored while the videos posted by T10 spent most of the time patting yourselves on the back. We are your customers, many of us are long term customers going back to Xbox 360. Talk to us. Let us know what is going on with specifics.

  7. Finally paint shop.while there were some good improvements in paint, we are still left with 99% of cars having off centre coordinates. We still have many cars that have areas that are not paint able at all, or paint will show up in multiple areas (most single seater cars). Most cars don’t allow window banners. This is something that many people have been calling to be fixed for years, yet we get no word at all from T 10

I know that is all doom and gloom, but they are what I believe needs fixing.

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This! I can sing this tune all day long. A suggestion that deserves praise over and over again. My sound system is always under-utilized when I’m playing F7.

It is easily one of the best in the series - especially the modifications and how they affected car sound. Even the exhaust tips look different when you upgrade - something which I can’t understand so as to why they took out of the game permanently since FM3. I’d give it to FM4 though for sheer content and the overall package. It’s just a really fun game that I don’t mind playing over and over again - they did so many things right in that game. I was hoping FM7 would bring back some of that glory. It didn’t.

Okay, so does proper HDR calibration solve the strange looking bright white/orange “glowy” tail lights in overcast and low contrast track conditions? I’m on a SDR screen and playing a ton of other HDR games and none of them show colors that look odd - except for maybe PCARS2 (same problem - tail lights look really washed out when you brake).

The game looks gorgeous on my 4K HDR TV. Make sure your TV’s picture is calibrated correctly for HDR. Also make sure your Xbox One X’s video output is showing green check mark :white_check_mark: for everything.

Try enabling / disabling YCC 4:2:2 to see if picture quality improves or not.

You can find more info about HDR on Rtings.com. They have step by step HDR calibrations on their website as well as on YouTube for many, many different TVs and models.

Finally, in game, under settings > video, adjust the HDR brightness per Turn 10’s recommendation. However, leave Gamma at the default value of 50. Brightness of the room where the TV is located has an impact on how we see everything on the screen.

Many people immediately assume HDR means brighter picture. In reality, HDR means accurate picture.

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Yes, bugs exist in graphics just like the washed out taillights you have mentioned but it doesn’t mean graphics are entirely broken. I easily end up getting distracted with the beautiful sunsets and lightnings during thunder storms. I don’t expect Turn 10 to continue improving this game any further since they have officially announced August update to be the last patch. However, I think the next motors port game will be much much better in every way. We already know it’s going to be in 8k resolution plus this time Turn 10 will be taking their time making sure Forza 7 mistakes aren’t repeated.

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I never said the graphics are broken - in fact, I have nothing but praise for the visuals, but the bugs get annoying after a while - like the wrong colour and illumination level on brake lights (poor calibration which was never an issue in FM6 and FM5), cockpit shadows and detail popping on and off on the driver’s helmet as you watch replays, objects and detail suddenly popping in around the track while you’re driving, missing shift animations, etc.

That’s the stuff I can’t get past - why create such a beautiful looking game when you can’t even quality test it properly? I doubt if they will change their approach in FM8. It’s now all about cars, cars and cars - throw as many cars and game features as you can at the audience, “this will do” for now and “we’ll see if we can clean up the bugs later”.

When the internet was still in its infancy, developers would put their backs into the game and quality-test the heck out of it before it even hit shelves. In this age of “I want it now” and “we’ll just fix things up later through the internet”, developers have taken a back seat. I don’t like it.

Finally, the 8K resolution thing is just a fancy number on paper. Far more important than that IMO is proper lighting, photo-realistic texture, detail and filtering, true-to-life particle effects, exceptional anti-aliasing. Majority of people still don’t own a 4K screen because a good quality 1080p TV with a One-X is more than adequate for most. I can tell you from my own experience that I see minimal jaggies in 60fps games even sitting 6 feet away from my 40" screen and no jaggies at all in 30fps games.

They repeated the mistakes of FH3 in FM7 and then repeated the mistakes of FM7 in FH4 - you see what I’m getting at? I’m being realistic here - the team at T10 has changed a lot - and I say that after playing all their games from X360 tp X-One - their is now clearly an emphasis on quantity, gameplay features, “fun” and of course “Get Forza because it is HDR/4K/60fps”.

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Very.

HDR (at least on SDR screens) is a gimmick. Modern IPS panels have deep enough blacks to render portions of the environment in indiscernable shades of grey. If I can’t make out what’s on screen, it doesn’t matter what output data analysis says, it’s low-contrast.

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I should add that Forza 7 is still my favorite modern racing game besides all it’s flaws. I have Assetto Corsa (and Competizione) and Project Cars 2, but still have more fun with Forza

The problems with AI are quite random. I can race for hours without any trouble, but sometimes it really annoying. Maybe it depends on stability of your car, or maybe it happens when you are slower than AI

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