One of my favourite things about X360 era FM titles is the ability to make a private lobby by yourself and set up custom races with AI. While being able to choose AI cars should’ve been a feature in Free Play, it’s great that it’s possible at all, not many games allow such freedom.
One question I have though is if they depend on Turn 10 keeping the servers up?
With X360 FM games being very old and servers very often being down I’m a bit worried this might not be possible to do at some point. As of now, despite everything being down, this feature still somehow works in both FM3 and FM4. I hope it will remain working into the feature.
Maybe it works because it’s our console acting as a server?
To be honest I can’t answer your question. Even though there are numerous people who play FM4 online I am a bit surprised that nobody replied.
Maybe you should ask at the official Forza discord server.
I only just noticed that when you are in “Community” tab in FM4, it says on the right, that the game couldn’t connect to the Turn 10 servers, and that I can create custom races but that other options (like Rivals) won’t work. The only feature that works are the private lobbies as of today. (Yet FM2 still has functioning leaderboards somehow!)
It could mean that Private Lobbies only depend on console connecting to Live, so as long as Microsoft allows Xbox 360s to connect to Live (hopefully a long time!) it might work fine. I’m not sure though.