Who decided to give the player so little agency?

Forza Motorsport Forza Motorsport (2023) Discussion
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This is the most frustrating and backwards Forza game yet and has retrogressed so much since FM4.

T10, answer me this: why can’t I freely look around when viewing a car? Why does the camera lock to the car and not let me feel like a person walking around a car? Why can’t I free look when painting a car until I select a layer to move when you could before? Why did you remove the advanced options to copy layers when pressing the left stick in? Why the hell after all these years can we not place layers on windows or every mysteriously blank spoiler?

Why isn’t there dedicated hopper options for every car class? If I want to drive a specific car in multiplayer I have to hope the weekly rotating lobbies fit that! How is this progressive and better than before?

Why can’t I choose specific AI to drive specific cars like in FM4? Why are you so against choice? I have to tailor make a specific car class to a specific PI because GT2 is labeled under Forza GT, along with GT3, despite being a multiplayer playlist (sometimes).

Why does my bone stock car not meet the spec playlist and not let me use it? Maybe tell me why it doesn’t meet the hidden requirements by having no modifications.

It’s so frustrating with all these small annoyances and the fact that you know better having made FM4. Although those developers likely have moved on to a better company.

The driving is solid and feels nice. The rest of the game and UI is dreadful. I just want to know why these CHOICES were made. Maybe focus on user experience next time.

Built from the ground up to run like crap, look ok, and frustrate the hell out of me.

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I only played FM6 Apex and FM7 before, but yeah the game feels VERY UNPOLISHED.

The menus are the worst, also the UI. It’s like they want you to hate the game for whatever reason.

I would know ALL THE SOLUTIONS to the MENU/UI problems. But hey we customers are worth …

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My least favorite part about the menus is that they’re usually responsible for the game crashing to desktop lol

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:point_up: :100:

This game’s UI is a master-class in how not to make a UI.

It’s so bare, so slow, so dull, & so inefficiently laid out for purposeful use.

Every action has a loading delay, which sometimes becomes infinite/frozen loading requiring a game restart.

The menus contain so little info on each screen that it requires loading through multiple sub-menus/tabs to get to things - with more delays to then back out of those sub-menus.

When not loaded onto a track, just the main navigational menu to get to the different parts of the game is unnecessarily demanding on the hardware.

The on-track HUD has no lap time history, no real-time delta, and it doesn’t even display lap time during timed multi-class races.

Etc., etc.

In the FRR AMA, T10 LoungeToy said:

“…getting any HUD or UI changes is actually the most difficult thing for us.
It’s very difficult and time consuming.
So something as seemingly simple as tire compound info can actually be one of the most difficult things to add in the game…”

…That’s unbelievable.
This game’s UI is so bare-bones that it’s hard to imagine how it could be “the most difficult thing.”

In terms of technical complexity, UI has historically been the relatively simplest aspect of software development, so it’s surprising for them to claim it’s “the most difficult.”

Hobbyist modders make better UIs than this.

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I agree 1 000 000 000 percent.

The excuses these guys give for doing any changes to the game are ridiculous. Oh we can’t simply add in the correct model into the game. That is the absolute biggest load of crap I have ever heard. How can you not change the asset values. Does every model have part of the main game code tied to each polygon and has to check all models and all polys each time a new part of the game loads? ptueey load of horse poopity.

One of the worst things about the UI is going from practice to events. You lose lap counter and times. Who is the bleeping brainiac behind this choice. That is sheer stuipidity.
Why do your tires on your UI not show wear anymore? Who is the idiot behind that decision?

The amount of pure incomps in programming this game is utterly asstounding.

I just started to play some ACC. mind blowingly different. The force feedback alone is way more immersive.

I tell you if I was the head of this ship, a ton of heads would have rolled, and I would have let the public know what I was doing week by week to gain back their trust.

The AI, I would have given the team one week to fix it, Not fixed. Team lead canned. Then next up. Rinse and repeat. All these team leads just wash their hands of what goes on below them.

One of my biggest beefs is going through the menus to do something to the car, then choosing the car. I think the first thing on the menu should be CHOOSING the car, isn’t it a car game?

The whole entire paint menus should be redone. Look at how hard it is to find your own layer groups. Who is the dumbo behind that?

The last 6 months I have been on here trying to bring up some engagement with players, but now I am almost done. I’ve been a huge endorser of this game since inception. I’ve called them out, hoping to accountability and they rewarded me with a 7 year ban.

Maybe I should get myself banned again and just play the game once a month to see if anything changes.

I wonder how that AMA chat went. I bet they probably were pretty picky on the questions they answered.

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I don’t know about one week. Maybe three. That’s how long it took Turn 10 to effectively fix the AI issues with Motorsport 6. Honestly, I’m kind of disappointed that Turn 10 has not shown that level of care and efficiency since 6, even when the same problems appeared in the next game.

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Because the bones of this game are over a decade old. Theres no room to add anything because it risks breaking everything else. When they added the radar they said they only have a little processing budget left before the fps would take a hit, im assuming this is due to the series s.

This game still uses tricks that were neccessary to allow the xbox one to run motorsport in 1080p@60fps. This franchise needed a real reboot, it needed to really be built from the ground up but it wasnt and this is where theyre at.

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That seems like a peculiar assumption. tricks for xbox one? What is that based on? I would bet going from solely Xbox One AMD Jaguar optimized to more generic support is far more likely the “built from the ground up” silliness and a decision that was far bigger than the decider realized in many aspects, especially the drag down impact and many costs.

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Linux is 40 years old, and constantly growing and expanding. Modular, extensible, reusable code has been the hallmark of quality and rapid evolution long before being credited years after in practice patterns of the 90s formed agile and was subverted by buzzword scrum bingo corporate shilling. It’s not age, but a deep smells. Fragility? There are common engineering practices addressing that, but indicators appear missing.

Plus, anyone who actually puts hand on time on anything else, especially sim wheel base players, like ACC, GT7, LMU, LFS, BeamNG, are gone, going or will be soon. There is such a counter productive echo chamber that it’s mind blowing. and it only takes a few minutes and laps on other titles… and eyes open, not a little but A LOT! The echo chamber of “it’s ok, and it’s really good” is not founded in reality. By comparison it seems deeply reliant on not having actually driven others and actively repeating gossip and hear say, along with massive and enormous amounts of cherry picking reviews/videos/and comments to remain in their own private idaho. I truly am bewildered by folks wanting to put up with frustration and drudgery and bury their heads in the sand, and for what? an ego? klout? sunk costs? but hey cults sell merch.

If you don’t ask for what’s necessary, but accept anything, I guess it’s clear the result.

Why is this continuing to happen? Is the root issue still unclear? Raising the bar … or what?

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Yeah, if it’s a matter of constrained hardware resources, I’d much prefer those resources be allocated to a more informative & useful HUD instead of all the animated helicopters, blimps, birds, track-side carnival rides, & other non-essential bits of distracting visual noise that are wasting system resources.

Indeed. After publicly saying pre-launch that this game was “built from the ground up” to be “the most advanced racing game ever made,” the company has since contradictorily acknowledged:
• The 3D car models are outdated & new cars brought into the game later will be modeled better.
• The “drivatars” (that they began working on 10 years ago) are still highly problematic and will continually need more work.
• The penalty system (Forza Race Regulations that they began working on 7 years ago) is still highly problematic and will continually need more work.
• The re-done car audio is “not where we would like it to be” and will gradually be re-done again.
• Some tracks had significant inaccuracies that were changed to more closely match their real-world counterparts.

…Nobody can rightfully blame consumers for having “high expectations” when the game’s messaging set those expectations high only to fall far short of them.

At this rate, it looks like this game could take 4 times longer to develop than any of its prior installments without ever impressively surpassing its predecessors.

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I will buy a RTX 5080 when it has 24 GB V-RAM thanks to non binary memory chips like 3 GB (Digital Foundry mentioned it in a video lately), and want to play the game with all maxed out settings in the future.

But I somehow got the feeling the game won’t feel polished with Raytracing etc. at all. I want this game to be the ultimate simcade game, but I got the feeling it will never be it.

It’s a simple racing game without much of actual gameplay like in a RPG or action game. I really wonder what the hell the problem is. Why they can’t fix the game etc. It’s so simple compared to other genres. I mean the ppl from Polyphony Digital are doing a SOOOOOO MUCH BETTER job compared to T10.

Maybe japanese ppl are just better if it comes to work or something. I am really having doubts about EVERYTHING if it comes to effectiveness etc. the west just can’t compete anymore. I don’t even wanna go into details why that is the case, I guess we all know deep down why.

TL:DR I wish T10 would be a japanese studio.

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Tricks like 2d wheel models to save processing power, using 4-5 different reflection techniques, not actually having dynamic time of day and weather, etc. If this was a new or properly updated engine these kind of things like this wouldnt be a thing anymore.

Kunos’ last 3 games have 3 different built from scratch engines. They are a tiny studio compared to turn 10, their budget is also much smaller than this games. Yet they still try to push the limits with each release, not just for themselves but for the genre.

This franchise peaked over a decade ago and they still cant bring themselves to actually move foward. This was supposed to be that game, or at least thats how it was marketed, but thats not what happened. Its the same game as fm5 at its core, the assets, the remaining features, the techniques and tools used.

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I dont think this game will surpass its predecessors. I think they hit a dead end when it comes to what can actually be added. They have added some new things to the engine like ray tracing, procedurally generated clouds and fog, but theyre not exactly impressive. Then theres rtgi, which is still not even in the game yet because it doesnt work properly probably because theres no overhead for it.

Since they added some things they had to take other things away. A few things are puddles, particle effects like the wind picking up dust on laguna seca for example and moving parts like windsheid wipers, which was a little over done but at least it was there.

This is a cross gen game that just never released on last gen. Gt7 is getting some upgrades on the ps5 pro, but being a cross gen game itself there are still limitations. But since they did a better job future proofing their engine they are able to deliver things like top notch car models, vr, 120fps on consoles and now a better implementation of on track ray tracing than motorsport.

At this rate the best case scenario is they may be on par with fm7 by the end of the year. The million dollar question is why this would be the case. The reason for a reboot was the apparent dead end of that formula, why would making a remastered albeit gutted version of a failed game be successful, the answer for that is, its not.

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I suspect my posts are not being fully comprehended. Good software and engineering is always the answer. Bad design or improper pattern and algorithm implementations can overpower a trillion times of hardware improvements. Hardware is never the solution, it is the expensive bandaid.

This is exactly why ACC/Kunos & Gran Turismo/Polyphony Digital are magnitudes better. They have been optimizing assembly and more high level software languages and greatly understand game design and usage and it is deeply rooted culture.

Culture is not geographic, it is a choice of what is tolerated. Tolerate excuses, poor decisions, prejudice - Then pay folks for a lacking delivery, and well that culture has been rewarded and will perpetuate.

Screen addicts have created a downward spiral sucker economy where they pay for garbage and complain, like they had no agency, when they just need to stop paying and using.

Falling for the latest techno babble buzzword scams is why cloud computing suckered millions of myopic incompetent decision makers into throwing away millions of dollars each year, despite wisdom warning not to do so, and now are having to spend millions to bring things back on premises. And they got huge reward bonuses for doing so. ?!?! "Y2K ", NFTs, social media, “AI”, frameworks, .net, etc. all the same.

Fundamental good design is timeless and ensures the highest quality foundation that lasts lifetimes.

a PC can have hundreds of terabytes of space, yet I can’t use it and 10 replays is the limit? It doesn’t make sense. And making excuses instead of solutions is a foundation that won’t last.

and I am not defending T10, I am a fair critique. I am greatly disappointed and FM23 is greatly lacking, but want to ensure things are clear and not undermine fair criticisms with vague or misinterpreted assumptions - LoDs in games ( level of detail - the “2D wheel models” ) is ubiquitous and necessary, but if done poorly can be both a performance issue and quality issue. GT7 ( and ACC) “pop” between LoDs happens, but it is very well tuned and you have to specifically actively look for it, and well they get 120fps at 1440p, so they did it excellent, the top of all racing games.

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Why does it load all the downloaded designs when you want to swap design on a car, instead of only the designs that fit the car. Why am i forced to look at a list of drivers afters finishing a race, instead of being able to spectate the remaining drivers.

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Few days ago I installed FM7, after maybe 3 years of not playing it…
And compared with it, new FM is very, very poor…

New game excels in one thing only, and that is track side object quality…
Everything else visual-wise is better in FM7!

GUI is infinitely better in FM7…

Graphically FM7 is clearer, and looks better even while being technically inferior…
Garage is better, Forzavista is better with no loadings, car paint looks better, you can actually see details in paint…
On the track car is getting dirty progressively, and more detailed. Asphalt looks better, grass is more dense and looks better, everything except track side objects looks better.

And on my PC it runs nearly 300 FPS, three times better than FM2023…
On Xbox One it runs natively in 4K! In very good detail level!

I can go on and on…

FM2023 doesn’t have any details, it doesn’t have any care put in it!
Take rain for example, I got rain in Yas Marina few times! What’s that? Do they don’t know where it is?

Where are the puddles? Without them rain is more of a skin to the game, not actual condition!

So many things missing…

How hard was it to take FM7, and just improve it?

Why cut game for 70% and call it done?

And in the end, how many years will it need to get to FM6/FM7 let alone FM4 levels?

10? 100?

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WOW, just wow. this is a terrible morning read. thx for some very insightful reviews that really answers a lot of the why and why nots of the forza game/franchise.

i’m still hopeful as this is my go to game. thought we’d have 120fps on console by now to be on par with GT7/PS5 (at least for XBsX). i dont care about RT that even a buddy with a RTX4090 still has stability/quality issues running.

sometimes i do, unfortunately, feel this is the porsche 914 or mustang II of racing games. FM has gotten better since release but is it too little too late given how much lead time T10 had to get it right and the bftgu pitch?

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The game could only run at 4K on the one X. The one X was a more powerful machine in terms of computational power than the series S. it just lacked the SSD.

I have often wondered how much the series S holds the game back.

Agree with your points though

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I think you have the wrong comparison going here. The 914 and Mustang II both have charming aspects going for them. This is more like New Coke.

As for things being too little, too late…well, I’m going to say this as I give this game a second extended chance. The improvements being made are simply not coming fast enough and they’re having too little of an impact. HokiHoshi sums it up a lot better than I will in his recent video, but as for my experience…the AI is still terrible. The career mode is still terrible. The cars are still very inconsistent in their handling, and that particular topic has been handled so poorly that I truly believe it has been done to force players into the upgrade and tuning menus instead of adhering to any semblance of authenticity. Races pay far too little for the time that some ask of players. On a related note, 35,000 credits makes sense when you’re Driver Level 25 or 35; at 356 or 366, it’s honestly insulting, especially after spending a half-hour, minimum, practicing and tuning and racing just to collect the 15-20k credits per race. Gran Turismo, for all of it’s grindiness, offers more for the same amount of time investment AND tickets that can be collected to win cars, parts, or more credits.

This is a very unsatisfying game to play, on multiple levels, and frankly, I don’t know how they ever fix this. At the bare minimum, Turn 10 needs to eliminate FOMO and start treating this game like they did Motorsport 7, and I would personally couple that with a reintroduction of Forza Rewards. The people who complained about having too many cars and too many credits? Stop listening to them. This is worse. This is genuinely worse. Running through the Mid-Engine Tour almost cleaned my wallet out because every single series I had to buy another expensive Ferrari or McLaren; meanwhile, I had an entire range of C8 Corvettes I couldn’t use. And for what? 18k here, 35k there, and a McLaren Artura that is absolutely dreadful stock.

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Had to end my self-imposed exile and log back in just to like your comment.

I’ve been running the open series using a controller rather than my rig because it’s so joyless to drive against the AI, especially with a wheel. Setting what would be a pole position lap during practice that is so much faster than the field and then choosing to start in last with the game still saying I’m projected to finish first and I’m still only getting ~5K extra is insulting.

Yes, I know I could turn the AI up from my usual 4, but I don’t want to because that is how I want to play the game.

Starting from last and winning should be 15k+. Completing a series should award a large amount of credits in addition to the reward car.

Players should have more ability to choose how they want to experience the game; separating credits from difficulty/assists and making it a toggle so that those who want to make less can choose that or those who just want to enjoy driving can have an increased payout can both have their fun.

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Good to see that after a while away nothing has changed.
As was to be expected.
I trust the devs as much as drinking from a sewer in the 1800’s in London…

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