So ive been playing forza for a good few years now, and got to a stage where im competitive enough with a pad to get close to the top times, which got me thinking that to change to a wheel would provide a fresh challenge.
Said id give myself a few weeks practice to get up to speed and with a good bit of practice get a little faster, not even close.
I just cant get over how uncompetitive the wheel is compared to the pad.
Yes i understand the vast majority of people play with a pad but to give such an advantage to a pad over a wheel is baffling. I actually put the game down for a few months, having not played a racing game at all ive come back fresh to see if the habits of the pad have gone, but ive spent a good 2-3 hours on the forzaRC indy GP with the wheel, then took 5 mins with the pad and banged in a lap time a full 1 second faster. Havent touched a pad in 6 months with forza. You just cant put the power down or throw the car about as easy with the wheel.
Multiplayer is where i spend most of my time but i dont even bother with the wheel because it will be pointless for me.
Playing with a pad now is night and day compared to the wheel as its so much more enjoyable, just feel the wheel settings needs a bit of loving in future games.
I understand where you are coming from, however most Forza players use a pad so it makes sense for T10 to cater for the majority.
Forza 7 is my first game with a wheel having played F3-6 with the pad and it took me a week or so to get used to it. After a few weeks I was getting fairly competitive LB times in the career - and by competitive I mean about 3-6 seconds off the top time. This was about my level using a pad on F3-6, so I haven’t improved with the wheel.
But, by god, it is so much more fun. Throwing the '90s F1 Ferrari around a soaking wet Silverstone had me grinning like a cheshire cat. This is the most fun I have had with a Forza game, and probably any game. I have absolutely no intention of returning to using a pad.
Incidently, what wheel do you have? Also what time did you get on the GP circuit with the wheel? I’ve managed a 1.11.5xx. And try running the oval with the wheel, you will do much better with it.
My best with the wheel was a 1.11 dead, and within 5 laps of a pad i had a 1.10.1
I bought a wheel to play racing games a while back and for some games its on par or better than the controller, for example, Project Cars 2, but Forza Motorsport 7 is a different story, I suppose the wheel aspect of the game is more for fun, and while I do use my controller much more (because it’s better), I do still use the wheel from time to time just for fun. As this game isn’t a full simulation game, it doesn’t really benefit from having really good wheel support, unlike Project Cars 2, which is a simulation game, and is built for wheel. I personally only play games with wheel if they are optimised for wheel, which is why I play DiRT quite a lot. I do get what you’re saying but when I bought my wheel I didn’t really expect much from this game in terms of support for the wheel. Hopefully in the future they could make the game more optimised for wheel, but all I see is the game staying on the fun side for the wheel rather than realistic, as the game is simcade, not simulation. Still, I would expect the wheel to be close to the pad, but, alas, the pad is much better
Your post other than to complain is pointless. No mention of wheel type, FFB settings or any meaningful info at all. There is an 80+ page thread on FFB settings. I suggest you start there!
Its not really pointless. I have no need to discuss my FFB settings as everyones are unique and cater to their own preferences. And yes i have spent hours finding what im comfortable with.
Still doesnt change the original point i made that the wheel is not as competitive as the pad.
I have a 9.211 on the wheel without cutting tyres. Its plenty competitive. Sure its not 100% equal with gamepad, but, its better than it was.
I have been playing this game quite a bit over the last few days and coming fresh off of Forza Horizon 3, I can tell you that regardless of which car I use, I’m simply struggling to drive these cars in FM7 with my wheel. Why? Because every car suffers from a massive amount of understeer. Even hardcore sims like AC and IR don’t have this amount of understeer. All the Porsches in particular that I’ve tried have been abysmal.
At least in FH3, while there’s still some understeer in that too, it’s much more manageable and the cars steer properly. But in FM7 with a wheel, every corner is a struggle to make unless you’re going a few mph. It’s crazy. I’m using my Bodnar wheel and using FirstPlatoLV’s Forza Emu Wheel app and the ffb is good. I’ve tried all kind of degree of rotational settings from 900 all the way down to 270 and it still understeers. I agree with the OP that this game appears to feel like it’s catered more toward pad users with analog stick movements being more refined and beneficial.
Any tips to dial out the understeer? And which rotational degrees should I be using?
there is no understeer other thaan the standard setups(ALL ROAD CARS HAVE UNDERSTEER AS A SAFETY FEATURE) just learn to set up cars yourself or find tuners than can and use theirs
Yet somehow Rayzer was able to do this with the “uncompetitive” wheel:
Anyone know if he used a wheel for his #1 performance on the current Indy GP rivals?Yeah same here lol.
Using a G27 for quite some time now, i can still do 1 to 5 seconds better with a pad even when i didn’t play with it for weeks.
The biggest flaw with the wheel is when getting hit/rammed. It’s very easy to get back on the track with a pad, with a wheel it’s pretty much the opposite, a single hit and you’re out.
It’s also a lot easier to counter understeering or oversteering with the pad. With the wheel it ends with a 180 degrees spin 25% of the time.
It’s like there’s a lot of hardcoded assists using a pad that get disabled when playing with the wheel.
So much win in this post it’s not even funny. Summed it up PERFECTLY!
In theory the wheel should be faster, but it isn’t.
There should be separate leaderboards for wheel users or T10 should make it that pad users cannot be faster then wheel users.
The whole point of Forza for me is the reality using a wheel, it’s that which draws you in and puts you in the drivers seat. A pad is arcadey, childish and pathetic for any racing game.
Says the guy playing on a plastic toy steering wheel.
Well i’ve never used the controller so i am faster with wheel for sure, i think there is not a huge difference between wheel and controller, it’s just a matter of skills.
These two posts sum up exactly what I was going to say, for the most part. The wheel is plenty competitive in FM7, it is just a matter of what you are more used to using personally. It was also the same in FM6 and FM5, but given very lacklustre FFB in those 2 versions, it was much more difficult to be consistent enough to do that all the time through lack of information in the wheel. FM7, although not perfect in any sense of the word, gives a much more detailed feeling with the wheel.
As Dylan points out, its just a matter of skill. Some people will be fast no matter what input device they use, some will only be fast on one or the other; and some just wont be as fast regardless. On top of that as well, you will only get out of it what you put in. If you want to improve with the wheel, then you have to go back to basics. Get in the lower class cars and hotlap and race them, when you finally get comfortable and start posting competitive times that you are happy with, jump up a class or 2. If you try jumping into the fasters cars in the game right of the bat with a wheel, you just end up doing yourself a disservice and make things more difficult for yourself.
We’ve got both available and I have to say that I find both to be equally competitive in terms of lap times.
There are however two disadvantages I find to using the wheel.
The first is that I can’t respond quickly enough in some situations (e.g. catching a slide or correcting if someone taps your rear end) with the wheel. The controller is much easier to respond with as tilting the stick instantly gives you full lock in whichever direction.
The second is that using a wheel is a full-body experience and most of the time I want to just sit and chill and let my fingers do all the work. Don’t get me wrong, when you’re in the mood for it the wheel is far more enjoyable and immersive but most of the time I want to stick my feet up.
I’m better with a wheel,that is all.
For a long time after Forza 7 came out, I just used my wheel with some suggested settings from the FFB thread mentioned earlier here, and it was better than the default settings, though I was still a bit slower than my controller times. One day, I read a thread here, complaining about how poor the wheel is in comparison to controllers, and how all of the fast guys are controller users (which in and of itself doesn’t mean much to me since, for all we know they might be faster if they tried a wheel) and so I decided to really test it out for myself.
I turned on telemetry, and noticed that the wheel (Logitech G27) moved much faster nearer the centre than it did closer to its extents, so I experimented with how things changed if I lowered the linearity. Using the gamepad, I ran 3 sessions of 6 laps (for 1 green-flag lap and 5 flying) each at Watkins Glen Short Alt in an A-Class Lotus Esprit and added the time up to establish a comparison between controller and wheel results. I dropped the linearity on the wheel to 49%, ran three 6-lap sessions, added the time. Quicker overall. I dropped to 48%, repeated, so on and so on, before arriving at a linearity of 42%. By that time, it was turn-in/apex/track-out like clockwork, with none of the over-turning of the wheel on the entry which was scrubbing off too much speed and made hitting apexes inconsistent. I blew away my controller baseline time by almost 5.5 seconds and greatly lowered my PB. This could be COMPLETELY wrong or different for other people, but worked for me.
Total times over 21 laps:
Sess Controller Wheel (42% linearity)
1 07:17.379 07:14.912
2 07:16.695 07:15.332
3 07:16.174 07:14.580
Controller total time - 21:50.248
Wheel total time - 21:44.824
I’m sure one of the more knowledgeable wheel people will tell me that I did something stupid by dropping linearity, but it did work a lot better for me, and I was far more consistent. What can I say? In racing, I suppose that our times are the ultimate judge.
Here’s a few reasons the controller is far more competitive than a wheel:
-
The controller automatically adjusts the steering angle of the car for you to where you near enough get 100% peak friction all the time. So when you turn on a controller, you’re getting full grip. It’s very overpowered. On a wheel, you’re constantly finding the sweet spot.
-
The FFB and wheel in general in FM7 still has a lot of problems and isn’t as good as other titles like Assetto. It can feel unnatural at times.
-
SIM steering suits the controller far more than the wheel. On a wheel it is bugged I believe however on a controller it is perfect.
-
No soft-locking in FM7 makes high degrees of rotation feel unnatural and requires far more tweaking.
There are other reasons but these are the main ones. As for linearity, I agree, lower linearity seems to be the way to go. I run 46. The wheel has improved from FM6 and is more competitive, however unless your wheel can go to 180 degrees of rotation, it’s not competitive and even at 180 degrees it’s still of the controller by some margin.