Forza Motorsport General Discussion Thread

[Jezza819]

Just a couple of questions before Sunday when I get home and can start the game myself.

At the start of the game, do you have just whichever starter car you have picked? Or do you also have a basic garage with some cars in it that you can earn some points with?

Speaking of starter cars. I'm thinking about starting with the Civic. Has anyone else started with the Civic? Or has it predominately been the Mustang most have started with?

 

[Kelpy D]

Was anyone able to bypass or fix the sudden crash after the "You're up to date" window disappears on the start screen? (PC Version, XBOX store), although I'm able to play offline?

I've tried repairing Gaming Services, running it on admin privileges, and nothing happens.

 

[SuperSportX]

Just a couple of questions before Sunday when I get home and can start the game myself.

At the start of the game, do you have just whichever starter car you have picked? Or do you also have a basic garage with some cars in it that you can earn some points with?

Speaking of starter cars. I'm thinking about starting with the Civic. Has anyone else started with the Civic? Or has it predominately been the Mustang most have started with?

I started off with the Civic and no you start with the starter car + a few Forza Edition cars and the race day pack cars, for the career mode you can only use the civic on the first championship so I would keep a few of the lower end cars atleast as they will come in handy later. You also start with $500,000 which is enough to purchase any car in the game that's in the Autoshop.

 

[ClydeYellow]

So, first impressions after a couple days of "eat, sleep, race, repeat" - and I've been neglecting the first two quite a bit:

• First things first, the physics. Turn 10 has talked a lot of talk about the new model underpinning their simulation as the best thing since sliced bread. It would be easy to mock them if they didn't walk the walk - but on a pad, Forza Motorsport feels a lot less like its predecessor, and an awful lot more more like Assetto Corsa, to the point that when driving the same cars, on the same tracks, in similar conditions, I ended up clocking similar lap times (and making the same stupid mistakes - me, the Eagle T1G and the 90 at Watkins don't mix too well, as it turns out). Of course the game doesn't aim to be the be-all, end-all of hardcore racing sims, but I have a feeling it could be if they wanted it to - and even a more casual coach sim can obviously benefit from a robust underlying physical simulation;
• Another thing they've hyped up to no end was the new Forza Racing Regulations. And again, they had a right to be smug: Forza probably has the best adjudication system on the market right now, the track limits are superbly consistent, and the penalties I've seen the FRR hand out seem to be mostly fair. In the Featured hoppers the seems to be working... So far. Having a virtual marshal ready to punish infractions seems to be keeping players on the straight-and-narrow, and the racing I've had in the Touring Car hopper is probably the best I've had, like, ever. But then again, the game's in early access - and I suspect the people playing now are, for the most part, hardcore racers who don't need penalties or incentives to race clean. Hopefully the safety ratings will do a good enough job of keeping the griefers and plain incompetent drivers that will flock to the game in about a week safely confined to E-rated lobbies;
• For all the flak Turn 10 catches about its outdated models (get rid of 'em, I say: I can live without the S15 Silvia or the Lancer Evo VI!), the animation work they've done for this game's quite good. I was happy as a child on Christmas morning when I took the Bugatti Type 35 for a spin and noticed that it got an accurate shifting animation! I wish Playground could learn from that, but this segues into the next point, which is...
• Playground and T10 clearly don't communicate as much as they should. Many highly-requested or appreciated features of Forza Horizon 5 should have carried over to Forza Motorsport, but alas, didn't; and there's no way T10 didn't know some some choices they've made would've gone down like a cup of cold sick unless they weren't listening to their British peers;
• The paint booth is a catastrophe, at the moment. Lighting conditions are awful, and T10's twisting the knife in with a "lighting options" button that does nothing; the ability to set the vinyl material separately from the base, first introduced in Forza Horizon 5, is gone; stock wheels retain their base finish when painted in a glossy color (what is this, Forza Motorsport 3?) and so few race cars have paintable windshield banners and spoiler it feels like a fluke when they do. This is not to mention the many glitches which are turning an already miserable experience into a hellish slog;
• Finally, a word on the graphics, which are... Inconsistent. When Forza Motorsport looks good, it looks great; but in some lighting conditions, it falls into a sort of uncanny valley. It doesn't look outdated, just weird. I suspect that some fine tuning may be in order.

Honestly, the game has many issues, but it already provides a very engrossing experience, and has certainly exceeded the (admittedly, rather low) expectations I had.
What remains to be seen is whether Turn 10 will be able to convince the player base that they can support their title on the long run. To do that, they'll need to pull a tour-de-force in the next few months to iron out the kinks in the game: otherwise, they run the very real risk of losing the confidence of players, and seeing their user base evaporate. And what a bloody shame it would be if one were to find this game suffer from empty hopper syndrome six months from now...

P.S. it appears I'm the only one in my friend group that hasn't been met with horrible LOD culling issues. Those needs to be fixed yesterday, and I'd love to hear how they made it past three years' worth of testing...

 

[Nacho Libre]

Brief morning report: I got back to PC and no AMD drivers have been released so far (I would expect them next week after the general release). I still get a notice that my CPU is not supported, and still, I can launch with no issues. And my CPU is offended.

Anyways, if I leave the video settings on high/auto, on the benchmark it will get to 70 fps on average. But if I put the Digital Foundry recommended settings for mid-tier cards, I get to 80 fps on average, and I've seen higher when I'm actually racing. Not bad, and now my CPU is furious.

 

[skazz]

Brief morning report: I got back to PC and no AMD drivers have been released so far (I would expect them next week after the general release). I still get a notice that my CPU is not supported, and still, I can launch with no issues. And my CPU is offended.

Anyways, if I leave the video settings on high/auto, on the benchmark it will get to 70 fps on average. But if I put the Digital Foundry recommended settings for mid-tier cards, I get to 80 fps on average, and I've seen higher when I'm actually racing. Not bad, and now my CPU is furious.

Yeah the DF recommended settings are very good, and look very decent too.

About the only thing I disagree with them on is Ray Tracing. I think that this game introduces far too much shimmer, smearing and jaggies if you use DLSS, DLSS+DLAA or RT. With all of them off, i.e. running at native resolution with the default TAA, the game has very few jaggies and still looks good (with HDR enabled at least). And what's more it has good frame rates and good stability.


P.S. Anyone suffering from weird lack of smoothness while driving should make sure to use "unlocked (vsync)" setting, since DF explained that this is currently needed to give you smoothness.

 

[RandomCarGuy17]

I had a question and I wondered if someone here would know as I guess I wasn't paying enough attention to the news.
How come some of the cars on the Forza Motorsport car list aren't in the dealership. I.E. The Porsche 993 GT2 was listed on the official Twitter page, but I didn't notice it under the Porsche section here on FM8.


Here's the past I was talking about:

 

[Stupornaut]

This game has surprised me a couple times in completely new ways I never expected:

-the penalty system led to a moment that would've felt like a vengeful triumph over those idiot drivatars in a previous Forza, but actually made me feel guilty here. In the final turn of a race at Laguna Seca, I managed to winnow my way in through a just-narrow-enough window between the curb and the first-place opponent to knock my way through and overtake them, but I sideswiped them hard enough that I was penalized, and what would've been a last-second victory in a title that didn't punish dirty racing wound up leaving me in second place instead. It was a real disappointment for me because it robbed me of the achievement for finishing first in a car with no upgrades, but it also felt like I was being reprimanded for trying to get away with something I shouldn't have. Since this is the title I've decided to become a Git Gud no-assists online-ready wheel racer with, I'm pretty OK with that.

-the track-mastery aspect is actually tweaking my preconceptions. For one thing, it led me to realize that Catalunya, a circuit I used to dread trying to wrangle in 360-era Forzas, has somehow become a circuit I've figured out how to absolutely nail. I was surprised to find out how many times I could hit 10.0s on some of the segments when tracks I thought I knew like the back of my hand (especially Mugello and Suzuka) weren't nearly as accommodating. It could be a bug, but it could also be me figuring some things out.

-I kind of saw this coming, but I actually do like the crawl-before-you-can-walk approach to car building, if only because I'd grown to love the idea of driving cars stock in Assetto Corsa and the upgrade system in Forza got me into the habit of going straight for top-of-PI builds that didn't actually do much to teach me how to drive a car that might be slower or tougher to handle than I'd like. It's weird, but it feels like the car evolves along with me and I love experiencing all these different gradual progressions of it before I finally get it to the familiar fully-customizable point that previous Forzas just let you get to right away. I can see why it's unpopular, but I can also see why T10 did this, and it's exponentially more fun in terms of building a connection between the driver and their car than the cordoned-off FM7 homologation system was.

I also get the disappointments, whether they're in the sense of "necessary" compromise (if their new physics engine means they still have to rebuild a lot of tracks before they can be game-ready, so be it), inexplicable steps back (the livery system needed to be overhauled and instead it's maybe half as functional as FH5's), or the promise of new potential ideas that never materialized (the early previews had me expecting a more GRID-style sense of racing-team dynamics and rep-building). But I don't see this being as content/update-starved as FM5 or as aimlessly flailing in its lootbox/casual gamification as FM7, and the optimistic side of me thinks this'll be somewhere between FM4 and FM6 once all the growing pains are over with.

 

[FordGTGuy]

 

[PJTierney]

• Playground and T10 clearly don't communicate as much as they should. Many highly-requested or appreciated features of Forza Horizon 5 should have carried over to Forza Motorsport, but alas, didn't; and there's no way T10 didn't know some some choices they've made would've gone down like a cup of cold sick unless they weren't listening to their British peers;
• The paint booth is a catastrophe, at the moment. Lighting conditions are awful, and T10's twisting the knife in with a "lighting options" button that does nothing; the ability to set the vinyl material separately from the base, first introduced in Forza Horizon 5, is gone; stock wheels retain their base finish when painted in a glossy color (what is this, Forza Motorsport 3?) and so few race cars have paintable windshield banners and spoiler it feels like a fluke when they do. This is not to mention the many glitches which are turning an already miserable experience into a hellish slog;

I get the sense that creative tools and features in Motorsport games has always felt like a bit of an afterthought whereas for Horizon (especially 5) it’s the driving force behind many of their updates. Motorsport hasn’t had a creative hub in over a decade.

For me, Forza Motorsport’s user experience when it comes to livery/logo creation is simply unplayable. Nothing is massively broken, but there are dozens of small quality of life things that would speed up the process immensely, and not having those makes everything a slog.

 

[Beebo]

Apparently PTG had tried to sway them to add some QOL stuff but there wasn't any progress there. I hate to say this again, but maybe post launch..

 

[Tired Tyres]

I won a race at VIR, la la la. Okay it was a smaller version and I was driving an MX-5 but a win is a win, and I'll take it on my personal nemesis track

 

[Famine]

How come some of the cars on the Forza Motorsport car list aren't in the dealership. I.E. The Porsche 993 GT2 was listed on the official Twitter page

That particular car is one of four that are single-player rewards - as you may spot in our Guide and the pinned Master Car List thread in this forum.

 

[-Fred-]

-I kind of saw this coming, but I actually do like the crawl-before-you-can-walk approach to car building, if only because I'd grown to love the idea of driving cars stock in Assetto Corsa and the upgrade system in Forza got me into the habit of going straight for top-of-PI builds that didn't actually do much to teach me how to drive a car that might be slower or tougher to handle than I'd like. It's weird, but it feels like the car evolves along with me and I love experiencing all these different gradual progressions of it before I finally get it to the familiar fully-customizable point that previous Forzas just let you get to right away. I can see why it's unpopular, but I can also see why T10 did this, and it's exponentially more fun in terms of building a connection between the driver and their car than the cordoned-off FM7 homologation system was.

It also lets you understand exactly what each upgrade does to the behavior of the vehicle at a single time, which definitely helps figuring out what upgrade is more important for your car's behavior or your driving preferences.

 

[AlexWilmot]

Can anyone on Series S confirm that the game runs well and doesn’t fee limited by the console?

 

[skazz]

I won a race at VIR, la la la. Okay it was a smaller version and I was driving an MX-5 but a win is a win, and I'll take it on my personal nemesis track

It was a nemesis track in FM7 because of all those corners and FM7's terrible lift off oversteer and issues with touching curbs.

Now it's a perfectly decent track and you can ride the curbs smoothly.

 

[Bogie 19th]

I get the sense that creative tools and features in Motorsport games has always felt like a bit of an afterthought whereas for Horizon (especially 5) it’s the driving force behind many of their updates. Motorsport hasn’t had a creative hub in over a decade.

For me, Forza Motorsport’s user experience when it comes to livery/logo creation is simply unplayable. Nothing is massively broken, but there are dozens of small quality of life things that would speed up the process immensely, and not having those makes everything a slog.

It makes me wonder why they just don't allow users to import their own liveries that they made in Adobe Photoshop (or even Microsoft PhotoDraw 2000!). They already have to police for inappropriate images, so I don't see how this would be any different.

Or would external images be a security risk for files that are infected?

 

[Pearl Jam]

So, more hours spent with it today and it’s getting more enjoyable each time now I’m levelling up cars ( bizarrely the Golf even though it wasn’t one of the starter cars) it may not have the WOW factor graphics wise but running the Miami career race at sunset looked gorgeous on my PC and smooth as silk so I’m more than happy, hovering between 4 and 5 on the difficulty setting depending on how familiar I am with the track and how many wines I’ve had 🙈
The thing that has me hooked right now is driving with a wheel, at first it felt a bit floaty and vague although still very enjoyable but having come across this setting on Reddit it’s now an absolute joy to drive and feels planted, any time I go off or decide to visit some up close tree foliage I know i’s my fault and not the game. I use a G29 but hopefully this helps other wheel users too👍🏼

 

[Nacho Libre]

Can anyone on Series S confirm that the game runs well and doesn’t fee limited by the console?

It runs quite well on the S in performance mode @ 1080p. You may notice some softness to the image likely due to internal upscaling, but it's hardly noticeable.

 

[R55NA]

I keep driving through these Bonus Boards but I am not getting any XP! Is this a bug?

 

[Bogie 19th]

The segment indicator in the upper right of the HUD is my new nemesis. I am racing Leguna the same way I always have, and my segments are 4.5-7 on average. Looks like I have a ton of room to improve. I haven't even had a 9 yet. Right now it's my favorite addition to the game.

 

[AlexWilmot]

It runs quite well on the S in performance mode @ 1080p. You may notice some softness to the image likely due to internal upscaling, but it's hardly noticeable.

Cheers! I can live with 1080p since I use a PC monitor, now I just need a console 😅

 

[Stupornaut]

So, more hours spent with it today and it’s getting more enjoyable each time now I’m levelling up cars ( bizarrely the Golf even though it wasn’t one of the starter cars) it may not have the WOW factor graphics wise but running the Miami career race at sunset looked gorgeous on my PC and smooth as silk so I’m more than happy, hovering between 4 and 5 on the difficulty setting depending on how familiar I am with the track and how many wines I’ve had 🙈
The thing that has me hooked right now is driving with a wheel, at first it felt a bit floaty and vague although still very enjoyable but having come across this setting on Reddit it’s now an absolute joy to drive and feels planted, any time I go off or decide to visit some up close tree foliage I know i’s my fault and not the game. I use a G29 but hopefully this helps other wheel users too👍🏼View attachment 1293032

Yeah, these are good settings that work for my Logitech G920. I think I tried taking the advice of the person on that thread who emphatically said that Center Spring Scale should be 0, but I tried it with both 0 and 160 and the latter seems fine to me.

 

[meganinja]

• some liveries are butchered and I really hate that. The Coca Cola Nissan lost the coca cola license or something? (lol) The Nissan Altima supercar even lost the Nismo livery all together (??????) And the week 1 car pass VW Golf touring car barely has any stickering left on it, it’s pathetic when you compare it to the real car it’s based on.

That is also part of problems of licencing, its kinda of annoying actually

FM does have Forza Horizon type "FOMO" events called Featured Tours

I mean it has but it also doesnt
Unlike FH that all cars are generally locked to the playlist, the new game will throw most update cars straight to AutoShop, its likely that the star-of-month extra cars, such as the Acura, will be throw to new career events as times goes on

Yeah, we know, but currently there's only one Featured Tour per week and this week's, although great to play, left me wanting more.

I think that is funny beacuse it is kinda anti-FOMO, you need wait for some weeks if you want play it all from start to finsh at once

 

[Abelardo]

Hello, does anyone have the position movement of the different cameras working for them? I have tried it in the game options and I don't notice anything... the camera does not change position no matter how much I increase or decrease the values.

 

[CeeJay69]

If anyone uses DPI scaling on their PC, make sure to disable it on the FM exe. You can find it in windows by opening the xbox app and on the FM page clicking "manage", then "files" tab, and then "browse". Similar process for steam but everyone knows how to open the install folder on steam by now probably. Then do this:

I gained 20fps by doing this and I can run MUCH higher settings. My fps originally was so bad people with 3060 Tis had better settings than me on a 3080. I still get a lot of microstutter though, it doesn't fix that.

 

[skazz]

Hello, does anyone have the position movement of the different cameras working for them? I have tried it in the game options and I don't notice anything... the camera does not change position no matter how much I increase or decrease the values.

You have to enable the button above to get FoV changes to actually eork

 

[meganinja]

Xbox Japan did a video explaning the game for newcomers, they had bring idols as quests and explored them a lot the "Fall in Love with the Cars" theme of the new Motorsport

The video is in Japanese, but ther has the automatic subbing if you feel curious

 

[FordGTGuy]

I get the complaint that you unlock upgrades at the same level with every car but they left out how each car requires a different balance of upgrades.

For instance, I'm not going to invest a lot of points into brakes for a Miata but I'll add some power. Mustang GT doesn't need power but it needs brakes and suspension upgrades to handle the weight.

I think the system works really well.

It's nice that it locks tires till the higher level as a big mistake people make is installing tires they don't really need on the car; causing them to waste PI.


So, unlike Youtubers like to say, each car is not the same experience when upgrading.

 

[RandomCarGuy17]

That particular car is one of four that are single-player rewards - as you may spot in our Guide and the pinned Master Car List thread in this forum.

Oh, it's a prize car. That's great, thank you!