I’m primarily a SP guy and would only go into multiplayer for achievements sake so I’m only curious about 2 things?
How does this stack up vs 6 gameplay wise? Haven’t heard too many good things when it’s been mentioned on the FH4 forum.
And
Is the career structured the same as FM6’s? Coming from FM3 + 4 I thought the Stories Of Motorsport was an absolute disgrace + incredibly lazy with every volume being the exact same 4/5/6 races for all 6 car divisions available within it.
Without having played FM6 I believe the single player career mode is not very different from previous games. The “Forza Driver’s Cup” is split into 6 categories. In each category you select the racing division where you want to race for the next 4-6 races and earn points. You can move on to the next category, if you have enough points in one category without having to finish all divisions. The only variety you get are the somewhat more exotic divisions (like racing trucks, old Formula cars or buggies) but you are still racing on the same tracks. There are also a few special events, like driving into bowling pins with a limousine or winning a 1-on-1 race in the same car, but those events are few.
Personally I didn’t enjoy it all too much especially after playing Project CARS before. You don’t get to play the full racing weekend, where you can also qualify, you are simply put somewhere in the back of the pack and need to find a way to overtake everyone (the easiest way is by lowering the AI difficulty) if you want to score more points to progress faster. Some of the divisions are not fun to play, forcing you to use boring or terribly handling cars and the AI difficulty is mixed: on some tracks or conditions the AI is unfair while on the others no challenge. It felt more like I was ticking off a checklist. If you take a look at Project CARS, there you have a career mode where you have a calendar for a driver’s year and you select the championships where you want to sign up. You get to play the whole racing weekend with the training, qualifying and the actual race, making it less annoying when you don’t have to start from the end of the pack.
I have FH1 through 4, and FM5 and 6. The other day I bought FM7. Here’s what I’ve noticed as an FM7 noob on Xbox One S into 1080p non-HDR screen:
Bad:
Good:
Its worth getting on sale. I didn’t bother with the deluxe or ultimate versions.
I think FM7 has a much better single player mode than FM6, you get a forza edition car for finish each championship as a reward, there’s a lot more variety and a nice structure with different divisions in each championship (No repetitions) with 4-6 races in each division. You even get one championship in each cup with division of your choice, I like that! Only gripes I have are:
Some divisions are not fun i.e. the division with the buggy’s is awwwwwful lol.
The endurance races are included, you get one (or two) in each championship (I think!), I hate endurance races and wish they were separate from the championships
The use of homologation is a nice idea but badly implemented. You can’t always run the cars with certain upgrades but sometimes you are forced to have upgrades like second largest tyre size which doesn’t make sense as I usually have full tyre size. I wish you could choose the parts yourself.
The PI changes are annoying. S class single player PI is 750 for most single players race in S class but playing online the PI is 800! So if you like a certain car and want to use it in single player and online you have to keep changing the upgrades to keep it competitive and it’s just annoying unless you complete the single player before going online.
As for online, well it’s worse than FM6, there’s no custom lobbies to be able to get the online achievements by yourself, the menus are slow, laggy, buggy and I don’t like the drivatar movements in the race suits. I hate the way they move, it always looks like they want to go for a wee lol. I suppose the online collision physics are much better then FM6 but I found it really boring after a while tbh. Once I finished most of the single player I just went back to FM6
TLDR: FM7 is worth it for the single player which is mostly excellent, online not so much. I think the standard edition is a good enough buy.
Single player is boring as all hell… I gave-up after the third championship thingy.
Online is only fun if you like getting dive bombed by idiots in every braking zone.
Even though Forza 7 is on sale right now, I would say forget it and wait for Forza 8 instead. It’s only about 6 months away.
If you like to get rammed by AI (with or without aggressiveness turned on in settings), go ahead, play SP. I know I gave up.
I need to get this out of my chest:
MP? When it works, it’s fun, no doubt about it. But even when it works, the fun is very limited because the regulation system is absent in class lobbies and everybody is free to cut corners and crash you. Sure the devs have cleaned up the MP a little bit, but new crashers keep coming.
When MP DOESN’T work is the real problem: since day 1 I keep seeing the frozen interface while trying to scroll through car makers. As a result it takes too long to choose a car and you won’t be put in the upcoming race. When the freeze is REALLY bad, you get kicked out of the lobby.
Nothing has changed, bugs have not been fixed.
I’m sorry to say this but FM7 is a beta and we are the beta testers. No other FM title has topped the 4th one.
FM4 > FM6 > FM3 > FM5 > FM7
FH4 isn’t all that great either. FH4 has a really good single player element, but it’s over pretty quickly. FM7 single player isn’t as good as FH4, but it’s the best FM single player on XBOX one and one of the best for FM as a whole. I personally liked the grind to win or purchase the majority of cars in the game and I used career to achieve that goal.
FM6 has the worst single player. It’s probably best to watch YouTube videos of FM7 career structure and layout.
I liked being able to increase lap count (only a few settings but “long” is usually a 7 lap race). This allowed for use of unbeatable drivatars without a need to crash and bang to the front. I never really had issues with the AI.
Also, FM7 introduced homologation and cars will be auto upgraded. They aren’t tuned and upgrades can be removed if you want to custom build. Auto upgrade will default to more handling and sometimes the car is pretty good but usually it is inefficient use of PI.
The problem with FM7 is that it was originally designed around homologation instead of car classes. While that has been changed a bit, leaderboards are a bit weird. If your car meets homologation then for any race your lap time will update to the homologation leaderboard. If not, your time updates to a leaderboard without any restrictions. This homologation leaderboard can only be found in free play.
Lap times for classes can only be done via rivals. Racing will not update class leaderboards times.
Like RavingWolfy said, forget FM7. Wait for FM8, then wait some more too gauge the “true colours”. If you are after a proper SIM then unless FM8 is streets and streets ahead of FM7 forget it too and go for another title - there are some outstanding SIM’s out there. If you are looking for a sim/arcade hybrid my guess FM8 will probably be good. We’ll have to wait and see.
After playing for a few weeks now, I’d say that Single Player is far more enjoyable than in FM6 or FM5. But I started out with a decent amount of CR from Forza Hub. Some of the single player events are a real rush and not a grind! The exception being the endurance showcases - I’m not looking forward to these.
For me, it’s 100% worth getting - just had a look at the time played stat under the progress tab of the official club menu;
I’ve apparently sunk 44days 18hrs 12 minutes in to this game since launch and I’m 18th on my friends list under that stat. 67 of 81 friends have played for more than 24 hours. Value wise if you start comparing that to buying a movie off the xbox store, it’s a no brainer.
I don’t do a great deal of multiplayer, single player career was pretty good. Free play whilst nor perfect, can still be fun. When you’ve done all that there’s an almost endless amount of hotlapping to be done in rivals.
Is it perfect, no, are there bits of how the game works, which I don’t like - sure. But value wise, I certainly can’t complain.
Only if you’re not looking for a propper SIM. Like I said earlier, if one’s after a sim/arcade hybrid it’s good but certainly not if the goal is to drive a SIM.
When Forza 8 comes out they may give away 7 and officially (don’t even start) EOL it as in you will not be able to buy DLC like a week later. Rotating Leagues and lobbies may stop at that point. That is what they have been doing lately.