I have tried and tried to find something to like about Forza Motorsport 6. Sadly, there just isn’t any reason for a serious race fan to play this crappy arcade racer. Unless, of course, you’re a fan of drift racing. I’m not, but I know a lot of people are. However, regardless of the popularity of drift racing in the gaming community, for the other 99.999% of racing disciplines sliding around the corners is the ABSOLUTELY LEAST EFFICIENT way to turn your car and to be avoided at all costs.
Ultimately though, that is the least of Forza 6’s problems.
It all starts with the races themselves. The developers made the moronic decision to assign a starting position mid pack and require the driver to finish each race in third place. This, when combined with the length of the races forces the driver to absolutely wreck their way to the front. There is no time for patient overtaking or strategy. Which is the heart and soul of actual racing. But no, rather than make each series an actual series delivering points for finishes and crowning a winner, it is race/crash your way to third or better, rewind, restart, or run it again.
Of course everybody complains about the drivatars. Mostly because they just crash into you at every opportunity. But because of the idiotic 12th place start to 3rd place finish over 2-8 laps, there’s no real possibility to develop a drivatar style that performs otherwise. And the entire “drivatar system” is just a mask to hide the rubber band racing style that Turn 10 delivers. I can have an 4 second lead over the car behind me, run 0.2 seconds slow in a sector, and have the following driver crash into me in the next corner. Meaning that they magically made up a 4 second gap after the slightest missing of an apex. Higher difficulties don’t actually match you up against better drivers, it just stretches the rubber band that much tighter.
Then there is the traction control/stability management, and damage settings. If I turn off the traction control and stability management, it is turned off for me, but not for the drivatars. Which means I just handicapped myself even further than Turn 10 did with the race set-up. If I turn the damage to simulation, the drivatars crash my car to ruin before turn 1, and only take about 10% of the damage that they inflict to me. There is simply no reason to make the race impossible to finish when it simply forces you to re-run it endlessly unless you finish 3rd or better.
Then there is the rain. At first glance it looks like this is the great equalizer. And I LOVE driving in the rain. The puddles added a great dimension to the driving strategy. Until, that is, I got to the all rain series in the Professional racing volume. And it becomes clear that the drivatars are NOT affected by the puddles. Leading a car, I was going wide to avoid a puddle, only to have the drivatar car accelerate through the puddle passing me. The next lap, following the same car, it goes through the same puddle at speed, but my car hits it and turns dead right. Proving that Turn 10 has made a very pretty arcade racer that penalizes the player every step of the way, but not the NPC cars.
At this point it becomes clear as to exactly why Turn 10 wants the players to spend so little time actually driving their cars. Every ounce of development went into the graphics of the game, and absolutely no effort was put into the gameplay itself. But hey, it is certainly the BEST paint booth simulator on the market!!!
It’s mind boggling that the people at Turn 10 can’t seem to figure out that racing is a strategy based team sport. And the strategy comes from it taking more than 5 minutes per event. Races, even on a console, should NOT be able to play out over an average commercial break. I understand that serious simulation racers are a niche product, and Turn 10 needs to make the game appeal to as broad a base as possible, but this game is a sad joke. Especially considering that for patient racers whom want a longer race experience, all Turn 10 has to do is create the option as to how long the player wants their career events to last. It’s a difficulty multiplier that should be on the assists page and multiply the credits received for choosing longer events.
Now let’s talk about the “RETURN OF ENDURANCE RACING” to Forza Motorsports 6. LMAO. Nine endurance races. And the player can’t choose their car style, tune their car, change the weather, or the time of day. This is NOT a triumphant return to endurance racing! This is Turn 10 saying, “#!@% YOU, you players aren’t happy with car bowling, and want endurance racing? well how do you like that!?!” There is no excuse for not having an endurance race at EVERY SINGLE TRACK CONFIGURATION IN THE GAME THAT HAS ACCESS TO A PIT ROAD!!! Furthermore, the player should be able to choose which car class(es) run the event, the length of the event, the weather for the event, and the time of day for the event. All of these things already exist within the game itself, and doesn’t require any more work for the developers than creating an option interface. It’s not like this is a shooter where longer experiences require more levels and a deeper story. Since the programmers were too lazy to develop dynamic weather and time of day, I can accept that the endurance races in the game, as is, couldn’t really support a race of more than four hours. But that is plenty long for even the most hardcore racing fan to set up and enjoy the experience.
However, the endurance racing SHOULD support up to (and include) 24 hour races. The PS2 was able to accomplish this in ‘24 Heures du LeMans’ by simply auto saving at every pit stop, and allowing the player to quit before leaving pit road. Upon returning to the game, you just picked up where you left off in the pits. It was a blast, and felt like a real accomplishment. Now don’t worry, I read the F.A.Q., and am aware that Turn 10 said that they didn’t do this because it wouldn’t be “realistic” because one driver doesn’t actually run a 24 hour race. But let me share with you guys a few MORE things that aren’t realistic:
1.) Car Bowling
2.) A Rewind Button
3.) Mod Cards
4.) Static Starting Positions
5.) Forced Podium Finishes
6.) Magic Fairy Pit Crews
7.) Rubber Band A.I.
So as long as I am expected to overlook the blatantly unrealistic racing conditions, and as long as I have to pretend that a pit crew exists to service my car, I can also pretend that we are making a driver change at the same time!!! Just don’t make some lame excuse about realism to cover for the lazy and sloppy job that the programmers did.
If Turn 10 wants to make a drift racing game, then fine, but don’t promote it as a simulation racer to steal the money from my wallet. This is a limited drift racer, with no real career, and nothing to hold a serious racing fan’s attention for more than a couple days. On a scale of 1 to 100, I would give Forza Motorsports 6 a “5”, simply due to the pretty graphics. The absolutely LEAST IMPORTANT aspect of the game.