And I play FM since the first one. Penalties are the most annoying thing I’ve ever seen in games.
I was slowly boiling from constant stream of annoyance “you did this”, “you did that”, “you’ve got panished by 0.5 seconds” and then AI rammed me from the track. I pressed rewind and got the message “Rewind is desabled” for some uknown reason, and just pressed Alt+F4 and uninstall.
Maybe penalties are necessary for multiplayer, I don’t know. Never played online in racing games and not going to.
But why trash single player? Why don’t make option “off” like in any other racing game?
There is. For both career and free play. Free play allows to set rewind, penalties, and damage toggles independently. Career only allows three presets, but you can still choose the preset you want.
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Looks like you have to read a bit more carefully the ingame screens. Everything is perfectly explained from the beginning.
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Explained what? I don’t want to play with penalties, what is the point to play the game which constantly annoys you?
How do you explain this?
In the difficulty settings there’s three presets, one of these disables penalties and doesn’t block rewind.
You should go through the difficulty settings when doing the introduction to the game. It’s explained in there, hard to miss I’d say.
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All of those difficultty settings have penalties. And the dumbest part, you can’t scale up realism like damage because it means even more penalties.
What is the problem to give player options? FM never had any penalties and all of the sudden you just cant switch them off and play the game as you want.
Nobody cares about real life races, FIA GT and so on. 99.9% of people play racing games just to have fun from driving different cars on some spectacular roads and race AI to the ground.
I agree with the part that penalties, damage, and rewinding should be separate settings in the career mode, just like they are in free play.
Please consider upvoting this suggestion 
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Guess I belong to the 0,01% of people… I mean I can kind of understand why you only can turn of the penalities in free play but not in career mode. The challenge is lost as players would cut the tracks facing no consequences and you would be able to play though career mode in couple hours by “cheating” or similar. Forza Motorsport is not a Sim-Racer so I appreciate if it is close to real life.
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You can’t really cheat that much by cutting corners. It’s not like you can go very fast raking a zen garden in the gravel or mowing the lawn. And frankly, even if you shove the AI aside, you still have to do your laps. Deactivating penalties isn’t going to give you warp speed and teleportation.
Also, who gives a Cyprinus carpio if people “cheat” in singleplayer. In fact, as far as I’m concerned, there’s no such thing as “cheating” in singleplayer.
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Also agree that it would be best to give people the options to turn on and off individual elements rather than the three presets we have for career.
Personally, the penalties don’t bother me at all in SP. There’s no ongoing consequence to them so, even if you do pick up an undeserved penalty because of AI messing around, it makes minimal difference. You might drop a place here or there but it’s insignificant. If you are picking up penalties all over the place then it probably would help to improve your driving.
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Ok, I got your point.
I’m probably part of the 0,1% of people who prefer clean races without contacts, even against the AI.
Btw, we all know the frustration of getting an unfair penalty, that sometimes happens in this game.
However, it’s clear this game has been designed to promote clean driving and even the AI generally respects the player. There are other beautiful games that best match what you are looking for. What do you think about Forza Horizon?
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The other thing I’ve found with SP penalties is that as long as you’re able to get in front, you can always easily get the AI to drop back right before the finish line (often +1 second or more) just by swerving in front of them at the right time, which easily accounts for any small incidental penalties accrued during the race (including divebombing them at the second-last corner)
I wish that I can turn visual damage off. It sadens me to see scratches on a classic car.
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The penalties in career are so light that I’m having a hard time picturing how someone could take in so many that it forces a rage uninstall after two races
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There is a reason why real races are going on for hours: you can’t pass 12-20 cars in 10 minutes in real life. Every car you are going to pass blocks the optimal trajectory, so there is no easy way to pass it clean.
In game races last 10-15 minutes, so either you will gain a couple of places during the race, or you need to turn down AI to “dumb” level. Which is boring. Or you can play very agressively against challenging AI and have fun. In FM 2023 you cant.
Cutting corners wont do any good for you, in game on grass or gravel the speed drops dramatically.
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I loved Project Gotham Racing 4, but Horizon is not at the same level. It is too casual, too arcadish. There is not enough physics to make driving with racing wheel interesting.
The best racing game is mods for Assetto Corsa, and there is a reason why this old game has three times more online than ACC.
People fed up with all this Monza, Spa and so on long ago. For the past 20 years almost every racing game future same 15-20 core tracks. Driving Spa for 10.000 time with some GT3 car is not what get me really excited. What get me excited is driving 20 miles LA Canyons with traffic behind the wheel of M3 E46.
One of the best additions to this game is that you can start from a higher position on the grid if you feel like it. So you can race against stronger AI instead of starting farther back and having to race slower cars.
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Firstly, I want to say there are a bunch of race series that don’t have long races. Touring car races aren’t very long, half an hour in the case WTCC/WTCR. Formula E races are under an hour. Rallycross races are quite short. The reason you don’t see drivers routinely pass a million cars every race isn’t race a matter of race duration.
Beyond that, I do most of my Free Play races with AI level 8, starting from last, usually no car above my PI, and I don’t find you need to make contact to get ahead.
I think this is a valid criticism. Career difficulty options are lacking. That said, you can find happiness in Free Play, turn damage all the way to the max and deactivate penalties if you want.
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Yeah I wish that would be possible too. It’s just annoying, if it’s just visual and it has no effect, why we can’t just turn it off completely like in Forza Horizo 5?
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I know this is going to be an unpopular opinion, but, I’m gonna say it anyway! 
Rewind needs to just go away, period! Ain’t no “do overs” in sports! Rewind is fine for Horizon, but for motorsport it’s kinda lame