Forza Motorsport 8 –
What I’d like to see
With the Xbox Series X upon us this holiday, a lot of the
usual commenters online are speculating that Forza Motorsport 8 is a sure
release alongside Halo Infinite this holiday season. I’m of the opinion that
Microsoft is better suited to release Forza Horizon 5 alongside the XSX just
due to the mass appeal of that game. That said, I do have thoughts on FM8 if
Microsoft were to release that game at the end of this year.
My feedback here is mostly based on Forza Motorsport 7 – a fine
racing game, I think, which was LARGELY underappreciated. At the time of its
release, the only topic amongst the usual commenters like the media and “hardworking”
Youtubers is that the microtransactions ruined that game. The truth was, at
release, yes there was a microtransaction system, but it did not have any
effect on the actual racing. At worst, it made access to some cars more
difficult, but the cars you already get with the base game were already very
competitive. Eventually MS did take out the microtransactions, but, as usual,
nobody talks about the good news and everyone just focused on the bad news for
the Forza series.
I’ve been playing Forza Motorsport since the first one on
the original Xbox. I have some idea of what to expect from a Forza game and how
specifically to ‘enjoy’ a Forza game. Forza games have no storyline, the whole
point of a Forza game is actually the gameplay, the enjoyment of racing against
AI or humans and just mastery of a particular car or track. By its very nature,
a Forza racing game is repetitive. You do the same thing over and over again.
You drive around a track, in circles. The track does not change much. The whole
point of it is mastering the controls, cutting corners properly to get fast
times, and the satisfaction of hitting each corner consistently.
A lot of reviews and critiques of Forza don’t realize this.
They just list a set of features and once the repetition of the game hits, they’ll
start calling it ‘boring’.
On my end, I understand the idea of what makes a Forza game
fun, and what exactly Turn 10 / MS would need to work on to add on to that fun.
I hope they largely ignore commenters / Youtubers who have no idea how racing
games work. I guess that’s my first feedback, because there’s a lot of trash
opinions out there that are really not worth listening to, if they don’t get
what makes a racing game fun.
On to my next points, which are largely suggestions /
improvements to systems inside Forza Motorsport.
TUNING
When you go to the Tuning section inside Forza Motorsport 7,
it is largely unchanged from past games. It even uses some tip text from the
previous games which looks like it was just copy pasted from the previous
sequels.
FM has to put in better effort to teach new players how to
use this part of the game. I’m the first to admit that, while I largely enjoy
the driving in the game, I cannot figure out how tuning works. That’s because
the game does not explain this very well.
There has to be some kind of effective tutorial for players
to use this part of the game effectively. There also has to be some way to tell
the player how to interpret or see the effect of any changes they’ve done to
the car’s settings.
At the very least, please don’t copy paste the tuning text
from past games in the FM8….
LEADERBOARD SYSTEM
Please let the player keep a LOCAL leaderboard for various
track/car combinations. When I say LOCAL, I mean, some database inside the game
that is not uploaded online, so that a player can compare times between their
different owned cars and car tunes.
One challenge with tuning is that, you don’t know if the
changes you made actually made your car better or worse. The ONLINE leaderboard
just has your best time for a combination car/track. That means you only
remember one time per specific track/race setup. If you needed to compare times
between the cars in your garage, you’d have to have a pen and paper ready and
write down the times yourself….which is a big hassle.
I do a lot of rivals racing and I know I’ll probably NEVER
beat the guys in the top 100. Those guys have godlike race setups, use clutch
and I don’t know what else to achieve crazy fast times. At the very least, let
me enjoy competing with myself and my own cars, by letting me compare my own
times on various courses/classes.
They could go the extra mile and let you race against
different ghosts you have of different cars on the same track, even slower
ghosts. The point is, this is all saved LOCALLY so you have a database of your
own performance across different race situations.
The local database an also remember your car build, tune
setup and there must be some way to compare tunes across your own local setups.
This should solve the problem above with Tuning where a player has no idea if
the changes they are making is even helping them race better.
Another suggestion would be, to let clans or groups set up
special leaderboards which are invite only or public, which players could participate
in. They could make it a weekly thing where if they want to make a competition
inside their own group or clan, they could just post it online and then the
only thing the leaderboard does is to save the times/ghosts temporarily. Maybe
link this on some website somewhere so people can view the different times
getting posted, daily.
QUALIFYING – RACING
I think this feedback was given by many other racing players
– make the campaign allow the player to do a qualifier like in F1 races, so
that they can determine their own grid position. Basically if FM wants to be
more respected as an actual racing simulator, they should try and follow some
of the actual racing rules in real racing leagues. I’m surprised this hasn’t
been done yet even after 7 sequels. Of course, they can default the ‘no need to
qualify’ option since there are going to be players who will complain about the
tedium of qualifying events. But the option of qualifying will improve the game’s
reputation with sim racers.
DECALS / VINYLS
Allow decals and vinyls on windows of cars, even if it gets
ridiculous. It really worked well for NFS heat, and in real race cars, decals
are allowed on windows anyway. It will just give more options for designers and
that’s always a good thing.
Also, I hope that with the XSX, that added power will allow
for more detailed and SHARPER custom decals and vinyls. I love Photo Mode in
FM7 and it always sucks to zoom in to a car and see jaggies on decals. With
more memory and power present on the new console, I hope that decals/vinyls can
have sharper resolution and less / no jaggies.
ENGINE SOUND
NFS heat had a really good engine sound implementation and
it even let you customize it. I hope the just outright copy that from NFS heat….no
shame in it! It’s a really cool feature that needs to be in Forza too.
SPOTIFY INTEGRATION
This suggestion is for every Forza game from now on.
Integrated Spotify. Basically integrating it means that the sound is properly
balanced with the car audio, and the sound can adjust in specific scenarios. For
example, if an in-game character begins talking, the sound lowers so you can
hear it. If you use the Spotify App, the game does not do this--- so it has to
be integrated directly in the game so that sound adjustment is handled by the
game itself.
MAKE FORZA HORIZON’S
RADIO STATIONS PART OF MOTORSPORT
Motorsport can get stale because of how repetitive it is.
The radio stations in FH really help add variety to that game. Why not just add
it to Motorsport too? Since basically both games have a shared universe anyway.
Let both games mention each other. They’re essentially the same universe, just
different disciplines. I think the franchise will be solidified more if both
worlds acknowledge each other’s existence.
CUSTOM GARAGES
PGR had this feature where you could position your cars in a
garage and just take pictures with all of them. Both Motorsport and Horizon
could benefit from this. Actually, FM8 really could, since this will give you
something else to do other than race. Maybe you can upgrade your garage so your
menu screen will look different as you progress through the game. You could
adjust the lights in your garage or how the lights blend with your cars, you
could put things in your garage to compliment your cars…..just give the player
more creative things to do to highlight their vehicles more. NFS heat does a great
job of this, and I hope Turn 10 is looking for inspiration from other titles.
MORE FANTASY TRACKS
To help remove the monotony / repetitive nature of sim
racing, add more crazy fantasy tracks. Yes this seems like more of a Horizon
thing, for sure, but it’s just that real sim tracks have to have tire walls and
all these safety features, which granted, should save real people from dying in
car accidents.
Forza Motorsport is a video game. OWN IT. That’s what I’d
say to Turn 10. You don’t have to have regulation spacing on tracks. You can
put walls which would probably kill a real driver --- but nobody dies in a
Forza game…. Come on guys. Just take advantage of that fact and you can make a
more exciting simulation racing game.
Race through New York, Tokyo, San Francisco – there’s so
much Forza can do creatively, that doesn’t need an open world. Look to PGR for
inspiration. Add cool landmarks / vistas to drive by. You can design a track
like an arcade game, but keep the sim elements to basically challenge the
player. This isn’t taking over Horizon’s turf, by any means. FM is still a
track racer, and the point of it is lapped races. Just give the player better
scenery to drive by.
I’VE BEEN DYING TO
SAY THIS SINCE FM1 – AWD AND RWD SHOULD NEVER RACE TOGETHER
This has been bugging me since FM1 and FH1 – why is it that
RWD and AWD cars can race together or even share leaderboards together? I think
it’s clearly established by this point after nearly 20 years of Forza, after so
many sequels on both sides, that AWD cars and RWD cars just cannot mix. AWD
cars will always win. Even with the crazy understeer on some AWD’s, they can be
tuned to effectively destroy RWD’s every time. And after all the sequels and
patches and tuning and arguing online and everything, it’s pretty clear by this
point, you cannot mix AWDs and RWDs together.
If Turn 10 insists to continue mixing them, then some
adjustment to the current class system needs to be done so that AWDs get more
points to their performance index and once you add an all-wheel drivetrain to a
car, you can’t plow through the competition in lower classes.
Winning a race division should never be ‘drop all-wheel
drivetrain into car’ = win. This shouldn’t be possible. At least let the player
put in more effort if they’re going to put in an all wheel drive car.
CONCLUSION
So we’re all waiting with baited breath to see if MS is
going to release a new Motorsport or a new Horizon game. I am happy to see the
series succeed so much after many, many years. I still remember the days when
the game would be compared to Gran Turismo and everyone calls Forza the lesser
franchise. It’s good to see Forza finally emerge victorious – Gran Turismo is
so far behind when it comes to cars, driving gameplay and features, it’s not
even a competition anymore. GT is basically a joke of a franchise now.
That said, there is always room for improvement, and I give
these feedback as constructive criticism for the Forza series. I want to
continue playing these games for 10, 20 more years. And I want to say I really
appreciate these games, they’re so much fun and they just never lose any value
for me. In between big story-game releases, Forza is just a great way to
unwind. In a sense, it has achieved probably what the developers set out to do –
let you experience what it’s like to own these incredible cars. I’d say that,
if I needed to get my mind off things, going into my garage and rolling into my
GTR is probably a great stress reliever – if I could afford one. At the very
least, Forza lets me have that fantasy.
Thanks Turn 10.