The RPG progression of upgrades is easily the most divisive thing coming to the series. And understandably so.
But right off the bat, I have to say, this SHOULD be committed to for at least a while. A year or two at least. The community, and especially myself (If I’m considered apart of it). Have bemoaned the stagnation of the series for a long time now. This is clearly a response to that. It changes a fundamental aspect of the game from how its worked before. But I think it may be for the better.
Yes, people who want every car at max upgrade 100 hours in are going to lose out on that experience.
But the tradeoff is genuine behind the wheel experience with that car and building it progressively. Not only does this give inherent value (good or bad) to the car that may otherwise wind up as a garage princess. But it gives a better understanding and goal of what you’re wanting to do with the upgrades on it.
Its not the first racing game to lock performance parts behind progression. Though its rare for them to lock it behind the individual car. But it is a stark contrast to how this series has worked. And if done well, I think will be the engagement the franchise has been missing for a long time now.
My biggest concern is the pace of progression. From the gameplay of track lapping in the Fairlady, It seems it levels at a pretty quick pace. Though I’d almost like to see it a bit faster. Maybe 3-5 levels per lap. Something that continually hits that dopamine loop, but also doesnt have you spending 2 hours with the same car on track if you have a clear idea of what you’re upgrading on it.
I applaud the innovation. I think it will be good for the gameplay in the long run. And I know people will push against it in the short run. But I hope they stick it out for long enough to settle with the detractors.
I dont like the idea of complaining about stagnation, and then the second they try something different everyone rejects it, rather than giving it time.
And it still could be a poor implementation, Not all innovation is good innovation. And if it isn’t, You can be sure I’ll be the first one slinging criticism here for it.
But if it was done well, It genuinely could be the first big innovation that carries through to the series for years to come. And that would be great.
Edit:
I’ve also come up with a solution to mitigate some of the pushback to the system.
An implementation of some kind of ‘discount card’ or ‘voucher’ or ‘token’ that you can win from beating a championship, or set of championships, or winning under special conditions, fairly difficult to get and rare.
But its a token that can be applied to any garage car that instantly puts it at LVL50 and allocates enough points to buy a good chunk of upgrades. Not sure the scaling of the points currently, but maybe like LVL50 + 30K upgrade points to that car, Meaning you can hold a stock of these cards, so that if you do find that you’re in need of fully specing a car for an online race or some other scenario and dont feel like grinding that car out for it. This can be that skip that mitigates the hurdle.
I never thought about getting Forza Motorsport because its only racing (no freeroam) and asphalt circuits. Then came the interview with Chris Esaki, and I added the upcoming Motorsport to my Steam wishlist.
I get that experienced players might have some reservation about the car building progression. But to new players coming from way less challenging Horizon game, this sort of training is attractive.
As a new player I need to master slow car and upgrade it as my skills develop.
While i agree that what they shown is lackluster for info, but this cycle has been this way since i joined here. They announce a game and then salt shake every bit of news until the very end. It’s nothing new really, just a lot longer wait in between.
I don’t like this idea of car progression. Let’s put 4 hours to level up a car since no one will have the same amount of time. There are 500 cars, that’s 2000 hours just to level up the cars. Yes, some cars are faster and this may or may not take place on how fast the progression with each car. But then if you are like me and like to test different builds without changing the car and have multiple of the and the get rid of them later like selling or giving to other players, you would have to level up that car again in order to do another build, or make a setup for the previous build and take some notes and then make a new build on the same car with different parts to see which one you like the most. If it becomes too grindy, it’s not fun either. I just wanna pick up the cars that i want, race the track that i want, with events that i want to make. When the progression gets too much into how much the fun i wanna have it’s just annoying. Maybe i am a minority because i’m old and don’t have too much time to play anymore but it’s how i feel. If the physics are good i will be playing in 2 or 3 years. If it’s too annoying the progression it’s probably not gonna last 1 year for me
I don’t like this “car progression” because its exactly the same as every other forza with 1 tweak that just makes it take longer. The cars are the same, the tracks are the same minus 12 of them, the upgrades are the same, and the tuning will undoubtedly be the same. Almost 6 years and this is what they come up with. Forza 7 was most likely one of the least played forzas and they think slowing down progression is going to gain new players, they need to hope they can keep the ones they had.
Other than motorsport 7 people have always been able to use whatever car they wanted in whatever class they wanted. Now they’re pretty much forcing this particular system on people when it wasnt necessary to do so. Theres only a handful of competitive cars which everyones going to have to use anyway, their pi system doesn’t seem to have changed so i expect this to continue. Maybe they shouldve worked on that.
I think new players are going to be pretty mad when the car they just sank 2-3 hours of grinding into turns out to be useless in everything but the career. Sometimes i wonder if the people making this game have actually ever played a forza game, or any racing game for that matter.
The car leveling up progression needs to be addressed by the dev team. With the last Forza Monthly showing how the multiplayer is gonna work you can see that the car progression really comes off short. It really brings more problems for long terms players than enjoyment. Even if they come and “fix” putting an option to borrow the car and make everyone use the same car still doesn’t fix the tedious and boring process for those who want to make their own path building cars and testing stuff. Please, considerer change this before launch or at least it’s the first thing to change right after because people will put down this game very quickly
Sure, while devs haven’t done themselves many favours by only giving us the highest of high level overviews, there’s an awful lot of people passing awfully emphatic judgements and condeming the game based on features they have no experience with yet.
Sure some of the changes are pretty big, but it’s all in the nuance and detail that we simply won’t appreciate until we get hands on with it.
Grind is grind is grind is grind. You can dress it up and give it the shiniest possible paint job, but at the end of the day, you can’t hide it, particularly in games that have no ending and continue in perpetuity as so many titles do nowadays. As several observers have pointed out, particularly those who set up racing leagues, having to grind out every single car to be able to test setups and parameters is going to get really annoying really fast. It doesn’t matter how long it takes - all that matters is that it’s time being taken away from your primary goals and objectives in order to satisfy some dev who decided they were going to reinvent the wheel. Of all the things I can see getting changed in this game as time goes on, this new CaRPG system is #1 on the list, and I see that happening far sooner than people think it will, because it’s an unnecessary impediment to quite a few endgame-related activities.
I wonder how much of this grind applies to the race cars?
Because they belong to the homologated series, do you buy them as complete cars or do they need to be grinded and upgraded? Or do you just grind to earn different parts that you swap out as a tuning option whilst maintaining the required PI score?
I dunno. It’s a racing game where I’m going to spend time racing and earning parts for cars which makes it worthwhile spending time with a car.
Everyone is different and it seems that will annoy a few people. But I wouldn’t bank on them changing such a core design mechanic anytime soon.
To clarify, do we know yet if car upgrades will be locked for players who only play OFFLINE? For instance, if I am offline and not playing career mode will all upgrades be available to me from the jump? I only like to do freeplay and drive around at different tracks by myself and I never play multiplayer.
It would be a major letdown if the upgrade system applied to offline solo players as well.
Its not really a core mechanic other than them saying it is. All theyve done is take away the ability to buy parts with credits. It most likely will have to change because i honestly dont see many people sticking around to do this kind of grind. If motorsport 7 was one of if not the worst selling motorsport games why would this game with less content and features do any better.
Personally i dont think this game is actually ready so when it gets delayed again theyll have time to fix it. I dont think its an intergral part of the game other than artificially inflating play time. The problem for turn 10 at this point is that in the past 6 years the only change they made for single player is this particular game mechanic and if they change it, it kind of shows they did nothing.
To act as though this game mechanic is a form of progression is laughable and i hope it does need to be changed. I know its a game pass game now and an attempt to turn it into a live service but this was a half hearted effort imo that wasnt properly thought out. They better start thinking how theyre going to reboot this reboot.
I doubt they’ve gotten many preorders. I honestly don’t care what happens they needed a way to slow down progression so they can drip feed the tracks they removed from 7 back to us and this is what they chose to do. I also dont think this game is expected to do much money making wise which is why it’s so barebones.
I think its here to keep a Microsoft game brand alive for a while and shed some dev cost from the horizon games. Id say it would be a graphical showcase for the console but it hasn’t really turned out that way, it doesnt look bad but its not exactly what i expected a generational leap to be, ray traced reflections are a waste of time and add nothing to the experience.
You’re a programmer are you? The whole game has been built around that core concept and I wouldn’t underestimate the amount of work that has gone into it, let alone what it would take to undo it.
If FM7 was as bad as you say it was, did they redesign its core features and re-release a few months later? Did they ever revamp the game significantly at all? Why would you think it would be so easy this time around?
Has any game ever been launched, then redesigned and relaunched shortly thereafter with completely new design concepts?
Sure games have released as buggy messes, and then been desperately patched to get playable, but they don’t redesign.
Personally, I love the new car progression system. I think it adds enormously to the game.
In prior versions credits and cars got thrown at you. You homologated a car immediately as you bought it and that was that, never needed to bother with getting into the nuances of the parts or the tuning really. It was all very shallow.
Now, the progression is tied to the racing. I love the way I will gain XP for nailing lines and getting faster through sections (with all the in game HUD showing me how I’m going). The progressive release of parts will let me see and feel the differences of individual parts and add to the experience of tuning and tweaking to go faster, allowing me to get invested in the process.
And the whole car grind will only take a couple hours per car, which is nothing compared to the time I expect to play.
I mean, I do TONNES of laps in only a handful of cars in ACC preparing for events and there’s no progression at all in that game, bar the satisfaction of getting better.
FM will offer so much more depth and breadth in an environment that is still casual and fun and I’m pretty sure I’m gonna have an awesome time doing it. I don’t think I’m alone on that either.
Invested tonnes of money, it flopped and they let it die. They didn’t double down and burn millions more to return it to its core did they? Despite all the fans complaining about it. Cos they built it as an arcade game from day 1 and couldn’t possibly unscramble it, and even if they could they’d never recover the money invested.
The dollar signs are way bigger in this game. They aren’t gonna spend a hundred milllion more in the vain hope of trying to redesign the game if people don’t like the first hundred million, they’d never recover their money and instead would just cut their losses.
But that isn’t gonna happen cos the game is gonna be fine and we’re gonna have a good time. People are just scared of change. Amd whether you pre-order it, or get it a few month after launch when its a well known product T10 will still get plenty of money.