I think it’s safe to say the homologation system is unpopular. Most people don’t bother with it and simply build cars for classes rather than divisions. The problem with this is that the AI are still restricted to homologated builds. So if you want to race against AI you either need to use a separate homologated build yourself or you’ll end up racing against a bunch of cars that are way off from what you’re driving. For example, driving an S800 build will put you in a race where all of the AI are driving NASCAR cars. And if you set the restriction to S class, the PI level of the AI will be all over the place making them way out of balance to what you’re driving.
This makes it extremely difficult to grind for credits because you need to have separate builds for multiplayer and singleplayer. This is extremely frustrating and I think it needs to be addressed.
3 iterations of the Motorsport Series on Xbox 1, and yet we still cannot completely seed the grid of cars as we the player sees fit. Apparently something that was possible in Forza Motorsport 4 on the Xbox 360. Don’t get me wrong, I love this game and the Free Play options in FM7 are a vast improvement over FM6, but they are still not completely free. There is no way to race against a division of cars unless they are homologated for example.
Honestly watching the replays after a race would also be so much nicer if we could choose the liveries of the cars we are racing against as well. Having 700 plus cars is nice and all, but we are still so limited as to how we can use them. 4 player buckets in Free Play doesn’t offer enough flexibility. In a perfect world we would have the ability to pick our AI opponents straight from our garage with tune and livery intact for the entire 23 opponent grid.
I appreciate that Turn 10 is still working on this game, but the drag and drift features do nothing for me. Perhaps a little work on the Free Play options would cover all bases, as they already said they are going to have a penalty system soon for multiplayer.
People don’t look at the settings enough in Freeplay imo. You can essentially create any race you want and more importantly save those settings. The other day I created a 2014/2015 Multi class race with 6 LMP1 cars, 6 DP or L.MP2 cars and 12 GT Cars and it was such a blast. The buckets really open up whatever kind of races you want.
Although I do agree with the OP as I’ve said in the past homologation SHOULD be optional since it would allow that much more freedom but having buckets helps. Time consuming yes, but for the most part you can set up pretty much any race you want within your own rules and restrictions.
I don’t think it’s safe to say that. I personally think the homologation system is one of the biggest improvements over previous Forza releases. The lack of homologation is one of the things I really dislike about FH4. It makes the multiplayer experience feel like a roll of the dice if I happen to have a car that is set up for the particular event. I hope that homologation is carried forward in future releases. FM7 is a racing game, and every serious real racing series that I know of has some form of homologation.
At least with homologated division based races, there’s more competition and more viable cars. Class based racing just promotes a handful of leaderboard cars leaving a whole mess of class cars completely uncompetitive or relying on completely fantastical class raising builds that wouldn’t work IRL. Real racing puts like cars against one another.
In none of the Forza Motorsports on the Xbox One has the AI ever matched your car’s performance. Career mode is the only place where they’ll do it, and FM6’s early events were even more limited than FM7’s homologated ones.
Class in multiplayer is a mess anyway, cars running all kinds of physics exploits, horrible. Almost Horizon-like in arcade level. Happens in homologation as well, but not as apparent. Homologation is a far better base to improve upon if they want to balance the cars, and the fact it isn’t perfect at present does not mean it’s inferior. The people who complain the most about it are the people who should probably be playing Horizon instead.
Besides, if you want to “grind for credits”, you should be doing Daytona Oval with an Escort FE anyway, not running your multiplayer cars.
Overall, I have found the homologation “classes” to be a good first effort, but they could be improved. Basically, the current class max PI, at least in some cases, needs to be adjusted upward, with a specific goal in mind. Within each class, the car with the highest stock PI needs to be upgradeable with most, if not all, of the tunable upgrades. As is, far too many cars in any given class must be driven essentially stock. I am not advocating for fully upgraded, race tire and race weight, max motor power. Just a chance for a minimal ability to upgrade and tune the car.
As an example of that, consider the Porsche Cayman GT4 in Sports Coupe class, bone stock it is a PI 673, Sports Coupe class max in Sports Coupe is 675. Not much room to work on the car there. Consider bumping Sports Coupe up to 700, or even 690, and now cars like the Cayman GT4 could be tuned and raced within their obvious class of natural competitors.
People don’t look at the settings enough in Freeplay imo. You can essentially create any race you want and more importantly save those settings. The other day I created a 2014/2015 Multi class race with 6 LMP1 cars, 6 DP or L.MP2 cars and 12 GT Cars and it was such a blast. The buckets really open up whatever kind of races you want.
Evan,
How did the 6 P1 drivatar cars do in your race? I can’t get them to stay on the track unless I set them up to be the Nissan LMP1 car or the 2012 Audi LMP1 car. The 2014 Audi Lmp1 & both Porsche 919s drivatar cars run off track for no reason. Are you seeing this same problem?