Forza Motorsport General Discussion Thread

[deththrasher]

This is just like the rumours of GT7 coming to PC. I wonder if either event will ever happen...

Both will probably happen

 

[Morbid65]

My club also races on Mondays. Fortunately we didn’t have many issues with this update, though there is a bug in Multiplayer where the first time you enter Practice/Qualifying you’re locked to 100% fuel.

So far we have mainly just had people miss the races because their update didn't work properly, but the stuttering thing had people stressing a bit in the build up.

Our group has been running since FM1, so we still have some PTSD from the FM7 update that broke most of the kerbs in the game and made it so touching them totaled your car (which happened to line up with the week we were running Long Beach, so that was a no-go), or the time they made it so cars didn't ghost in pitlane anymore and would hit each other and get stuck... While they haven't broken anything that bad yet with FM8 we are still a bit worried with every update.

So far the worst in FM8 was when they accidentally made it so you could keep driving after running out of fuel. Normally wouldn't have been that big of an issue, but we happened to be doing a series in a car that was very fuel weight sensitive (~2secs per lap at some of the tracks) so if our group had less integrity it could have been more of an issue as there certainly would have been an advantage in abusing it.

The 100% fuel bug has been around for a bit with the meetup lobbies, not surprised it carried over to the practice/qual lobbies. Quitting the event menu and going back in generally seems to fix it in the meetups, but we have had a few people who still get a different amount of fuel in their tank than they set and have to leave and rejoin a few times to get to right.

I did all that and I was still stuck; then my console just decided to reboot.

Oh, well - thankfully, I was in no rush to play Forza, or I'd be a lot more annoyed by having to redownload the whole game...

Hm that's worrying... Hoping I won't have that issue to look forward to, I live out in the country and my internet is slow so it takes me around 10 hours to download the game which means I can't redownload it between 10am when the patches launch and 5pm when our Monday night league starts.

 

[sirjim73]

We have league races on Mondays which unfortunately T10 moved their update day to back in April or whatever, and after the update the other day we did have several people experiencing stutters in a meetup style lobby while practicing, on both PC and XSX. Once we got to the actual races though it seemed to be okay for everyone.



Did it get stuck on "Updating..." or "Starting update..." or whatever it says before it actually starts downloading anything?

I've had that for every FM8 update since May where it caused me to miss a league race while the entire game downloaded again.

If the download won't start and you restart the console (or apparently leave it sit on "Updating..." for too long according to one of our league members who experienced it), then yeah you will have to redownload the whole game, which for some people isn't a big deal as they have fast internet.

I've posted it in here a couple of times and always debate posting a PSA before updates but it doesn't seem too many people experience the issue, but if it gets stuck on "Updating..." if you pause the update, then resume the update, it should start downloading like normal. It will often take several clicks of the "Pause all" in the Queue and "Pause update" specifically on the game and a few minutes of waiting, but it should eventually change to "Paused" then you can either click the "Resume all" thing in the Queue or specifically on the game.

Hopefully this can save you some time on future updates.

Thats a useful post thanks. Hasn't affected me, luckily, but will hopefully help others.

Not really applying rigorous logic here, it's more of a hunch that I've had for a while and came from discussing with friends how Horizon 5 wasn't nearly as polished in its first year of life. That seems to be the pattern with all the latest Forza games, both Motorsport and Horizon. With Forza Horizon 4 and 5, we started seeing serious bugs squashed, multiple new cars per season and things like new game modes, parts and features around that mark. I am starting to doubt it's coincidence. Year One is Car Pass content, pre-planned stuff that they didn't implement at launch, and some band-aid fixes and improvements, and Year Two is where the game finally starts to come together. How did we start FM23's Year Two? With the first all-new track they added since the launch of the game (although Sunset Peninsula is returning from FM4, and one could argue Road Atlanta is an "all new" replacement to Road Whateverlanta as well), more new-to-FM cars than in the last six updates combined, a brand-new drift mode, and highly-requested options for private multiplayer lobbies.
I know, I know, Forza Motorsport's developed by a different studio, and one can't just assume they'd hold similar post-launch development schedules just because their product's name starts with "Forza", but I'm not surprised to see a similar tempo with T10's updates.


I did all that and I was still stuck; then my console just decided to reboot.

Oh, well - thankfully, I was in no rush to play Forza, or I'd be a lot more annoyed by having to redownload the whole game...

I can certainly see logic in everything significant in the first 3-6 months after release being pre-planned, that seems to be how all modern games are released.
Stretching that to a year seems a bit of a stretch, but if you assume the first 6 months are preplanned or "urgent" changes , it would take some time to develop further changes from scratch, so you're probably not far out.

It also fits the structure of other games such as The Crew where they have annual "battlepasses".

Taking this further, that might suggest the next 12 months from now is already "pencilled in", we have a "roadmap" for the next 6 months to some extent, from the blogpost, the 6 months after that might be "loosely" set out so that things can be adapted if considered necessary/beneficial by T10.

 

[r_outsider]

So...not only do they bring Mustang month, but they bring the Dark Horse, Cobra R, '67 GT500 and Trans Am Mustang along with it. Yep, I'm definitely finding the time to play during this update. The Cobra R and GT500 make it worth it to me.

They go a long ways towards addressing some oversights and weird choices, IMO. Now, if we could swap the '13 Shelby for the Boss 302 of that generation, and get the FR500 in there, we'd have some content Mustang fans around here.

 

[Ryan81]

When I log into FM23, it says that all players who have the Deluxe or other edition of the game will get a Ford Mustang Dark Horse '24 along with the 3 Formula Drift cars. I see the FD cars in the showroom and the standard 2020 Ford Shelby Mustang GT500. No sign of any free cars or the Dark Horse even though I have the Deluxe edition. Is it still too early in the UK to receive them?

 

[Nielsen]

When I log into FM23, it says that all players who have the Deluxe or other edition of the game will get a Ford Mustang Dark Horse '24 along with the 3 Formula Drift cars. I see the FD cars in the showroom and the standard 2020 Ford Shelby Mustang GT500. No sign of any free cars or the Dark Horse even though I have the Deluxe edition. Is it still too early in the UK to receive them?

Just a few more hours until it’s available. The exact time is written in the official article.

 

[nukleabomb]

Some of the improvements in the new update compared to launch. Improved lighting, grass, trees, foliage, textures, draw distance, reflections, effects, RTAO and image quality

Left launch vs right update 13

Any improvements to visualtarget preset?

 

[JohnyGT]

Good god this update is really a good one. If you check history of my posts in here you will see that I had all the launch problems from start and I was critical about game and still I am but these last two days .. I HAD FUN 😃 really

Actual 100% Fun that's unreal for game that Motorsport 2023 once was at launch.

Don't get me wrong i think game is still a mess but at least somebody in Turn 10 started to clean this mess slowly. I spend like solid 5 hours today in a free play lobby with my buddy on Nordschleife battling out 1v1 in some old and modern sports cars and it was blast.

If they change more i'm actually thinking about buying full game but that's big if. Game pass works for me now but i hope at least for people who still played this game for the last year or so actively and didn't leave that FM2023 will redeem itself even more.

 

[RolexGTP]

November and December will really tell the level in which this game goes in the future. If they really hammer down the AI, PROPERLY, they add another 20-30 cars in the next 2 months with many being new to FM, they squash a lot of these bugs some of which have popped back up in this most recent update then 2025 should be a great year with a lot more good stuff to come. That also comes along with them listening to us and providing needed changes and additions in freeplay and multiplayer. We already know they plan to add a lot more permanent race events for career sometime next year and past reward cars will be available again sooner or later. This is called ending the year off with a bang and rolling off into the next year on a good note. We shall see, hopefully this update wasn't a one off...

 

[sirjim73]

It was confirmed by @ManteoMax in official forums that this "series" is only a 3 week month and that "series" 14 starts on November 6th (west of Lisbon)/7th UK Europe et Al. Which is interesting since last series was 5 weeks and all have been 4,5 or 6 weeks previously.

This means less time to get the Open Tour reward and Featured Tour reward.

 

[PJTierney]

It's probably a workback schedule so that they don't need to push an update out later in December. They can then do a 4 week series to get up to December 2 patch, then probably an 8 week one to cover the holidays (because hotfixing a game during holiday season sucks) and follow up with the next patch on January 27.

A December 2 patch would give them 1-2 weeks cover incase anything breaks badly, before various internal and external departments shut down for the holidays (usually 2nd or 3rd week of December).

 

[skazz]

In brief testing I definitely had the impression that the AI was more aware of me than ever before. Still some weird braking though (and suspiciously slow lap times around Sunset so maybe it was track specific).

 

[Nacho Libre]

Serious question for you all. In hindsight, would it have been better to delay the original release of the game to address the many technical issues (and graphical broken promises) it launched with? Or the game is better now because from its original launch state there has been a real and steady effort to address the issues, which has included player's feedback?

 

[Kedmasterz]

No drifting leaderboard alongside the new drift mode ?

 

[RolexGTP]

Serious question for you all. In hindsight, would it have been better to delay the original release of the game to address the many technical issues (and graphical broken promises) it launched with? Or the game is better now because from its original launch state there has been a real and steady effort to address the issues, which has included player's feedback?

If they did delay it, it would have likey just launched last week and would we really want to wait a full 7 years for a FM game? Some might say yes but a good chunk of players would have not liked the idea of delaying another year, myself included. I do think they should have had more content included even being released last year, they had many years to get at least a little more added in from 2017 to 2023. How they are handling it now to me is just fine because last years launch was the baseline and now we can fully compare a year later the state the game is in now.

 

[Nielsen]

Serious question for you all. In hindsight, would it have been better to delay the original release of the game to address the many technical issues (and graphical broken promises) it launched with?

Yes, but the problem is industry-wide.

Or the game is better now because from its original launch state there has been a real and steady effort to address the issues, which has included player's feedback?

I don’t necessarily think the game needed a bad launch in order to reach its current improved state. However, I think some Turn 10 higher ups got sacked following the poor launch, and their possible departure might have been a blessing for the development team’s ability to work on the game efficiently.

 

[JohnyGT]

November and December will really tell the level in which this game goes in the future. If they really hammer down the AI, PROPERLY, they add another 20-30 cars in the next 2 months with many being new to FM, they squash a lot of these bugs some of which have popped back up in this most recent update then 2025 should be a great year with a lot more good stuff to come. That also comes along with them listening to us and providing needed changes and additions in freeplay and multiplayer. We already know they plan to add a lot more permanent race events for career sometime next year and past reward cars will be available again sooner or later. This is called ending the year off with a bang and rolling off into the next year on a good note. We shall see, hopefully this update wasn't a one off...

Game desperatly needs track day feature back. To jump in lobby with random players and just enjoy the tracks by their own pace. Also all those events that just vanished after each series ended should be permanently added to career and bringing the wheel spacers from Horizon would be good idea too.

 

[AttackDickie]

November and December will really tell the level in which this game goes in the future. If they really hammer down the AI, PROPERLY

They should use Vintage Le Mans Sportscars at Limerock before they talk about AI improvements, because I get excited then either race in that division or do a race at Limerock and it's the same old story

The end of the race at least looked pretty when the sun started to set.

 

[ShavedBadger]

They should use Vintage Le Mans Sportscars at Limerock before they talk about AI improvements, because I get excited then either race in that division or do a race at Limerock and it's the same old story


View attachment 1398048

The end of the race at least looked pretty when the sun started to set.

Well there's your problem right there see that's the Nurburgring.

 

[PJTierney]

Serious question for you all. In hindsight, would it have been better to delay the original release of the game to address the many technical issues (and graphical broken promises) it launched with? Or the game is better now because from its original launch state there has been a real and steady effort to address the issues, which has included player's feedback?

It's better now.

While some things could have been addressed, one of the challenges of game development is that there are more playtime hours amassed in a day post-launch than in years of QA pre-launch.

Even if you had 100 full-time staff for all that time whose sole job was to play the game and find things, their work would be dwarfed by having hundreds of thousands of people playing the game in the live environment.

Let's say Forza Horizon 5 had 100 QA testers, 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, for 3 years. That's 600,000 hours of playtime, and in reality would be a lot smaller because they'd spend half their working hours documenting and reporting bugs*, dealing with meetings, emails etc.

Let's hypothetically say that the game had a million players on Day 1. They would match that QA team's 3 years of playtime in 36 minutes.

At some point, you just need to get the game out the door, and commercial concerns mean that you can't delay a game forever while a studio bleeds money.

Also, let's not forget that Forza Motorsport was already delayed by 6-8 months as it was initially announced to release in Spring 2023, before arriving in October.

Some things can only be improved in a post-launch state, both from a bug and design perspective. Design-wise, players played the game in a different way than what the designers intended, which is why the Car XP system was effectively binned in favour of the old Credit upgrade system. You can't always factor for things like that pre-launch.


* QA typically don't fix bugs (Dev QA might, but that's a smaller team), they report the bugs back to the game designers, programmers, producers and release managers who do the work, refer it back to QA, who then test again and confirm if it was fixed or not. QA's main role is to make sure that what the rest of the studio is making is actually working. (granted, I am vastly oversimplifying things here but you get the point)

 

[Nacho Libre]

It's better now.

While some things could have been addressed, one of the challenges of game development is that there are more playtime hours amassed in a day post-launch than in years of QA pre-launch.

Even if you had 100 full-time staff for all that time whose sole job was to play the game and find things, their work would be dwarfed by having hundreds of thousands of people playing the game in the live environment.

Let's say Forza Horizon 5 had 100 QA testers, 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, for 3 years. That's 600,000 hours of playtime, and in reality would be a lot smaller because they'd spend half their working hours documenting and reporting bugs, dealing with meetings, emails etc.

Let's hypothetically say that the game had a million players on Day 1. They would match that QA team's 3 years of playtime in 36 minutes.

At some point, you just need to get the game out the door, and commercial concerns mean that you can't delay a game forever while a studio bleeds money.

Also, let's not forget that Forza Motorsport was already delayed by 6-8 months as it was initially announced to release in Spring 2023, before arriving in October.

Thank you, that is great insight. I've said this before, but much grievance and gnashing of teeth could have been avoided if FM had been launched as a "Game Preview" (Hey, it works for Steam PC releases and worked for Grounded too!)

 

[PJTierney]

Thank you, that is great insight. I've said this before, but much grievance and gnashing of teeth could have been avoided if FM had been launched as "Game Preview" (Hey, it works for Steam PC releases and worked for Grounded too!)

I think Forza's too big of a brand to get away with the "let's officially label this as unfinished" tag.

Also, in my opinion, major bugs/crashes aside, it was a "content complete" game at launch.

Granted some of the features were a bit barebones but it shipped with 500 cars and dozens of track layouts, and the core pillars of the game (Physics, Career, Rivals, Upgrades and Multiplayer) were all present. It just wasn't the polished and feature rich experience we've come to expect but as a "Minimum Viable Product" it ticked all the boxes.

It's definitely in a better state a year on though, and a year from now could be one of the best Forza Motorsport titles ever made. Hopefully Microsoft don't aggressively cost-cut the team in the coming months, they're turning the ship around.

 

[ShavedBadger]

I can't help but wonder what might have been, as it seems there's the bones of a much bigger vision for FM than what we got.

 

[Nacho Libre]

I think Forza's too big of a brand to get away with the "let's officially label this as unfinished" tag.

Prologue! such a classy word, of course they should have named it Forza Motorsport Prologue (GT got away with that one)

 

[AttackDickie]

Well there's your problem right there see that's the Nurburgring.

Laguna Seca was no better. I have to force the AI to go B class to keep half the field on the circuit.

 

[Nielsen]

It's better now.

While some things could have been addressed, one of the challenges of game development is that there are more playtime hours amassed in a day post-launch than in years of QA pre-launch.

Even if you had 100 full-time staff for all that time whose sole job was to play the game and find things, their work would be dwarfed by having hundreds of thousands of people playing the game in the live environment.

Let's say Forza Horizon 5 had 100 QA testers, 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, for 3 years. That's 600,000 hours of playtime, and in reality would be a lot smaller because they'd spend half their working hours documenting and reporting bugs*, dealing with meetings, emails etc.

Let's hypothetically say that the game had a million players on Day 1. They would match that QA team's 3 years of playtime in 36 minutes.

At some point, you just need to get the game out the door, and commercial concerns mean that you can't delay a game forever while a studio bleeds money.

Also, let's not forget that Forza Motorsport was already delayed by 6-8 months as it was initially announced to release in Spring 2023, before arriving in October.

Some things can only be improved in a post-launch state, both from a bug and design perspective. Design-wise, players played the game in a different way than what the designers intended, which is why the Car XP system was effectively binned in favour of the old Credit upgrade system. You can't always factor for things like that pre-launch.


* QA typically don't fix bugs (Dev QA might, but that's a smaller team), they report the bugs back to the game designers, programmers, producers and release managers who do the work, refer it back to QA, who then test again and confirm if it was fixed or not. QA's main role is to make sure that what the rest of the studio is making is actually working. (granted, I am vastly oversimplifying things here but you get the point)

Fair points, but you’re generally ignoring the flaws that would have been obvious to the developers even without any pre-launch testing or post-launch player feedback.

• Underwhelming graphics during the first six or so months on the market. Poor light conditions etc.
• Rebuilt circuits delaying their return, resulting in little variety at launch. The process of catching up will continue into 2025.
• FOMO events, which will be partially addressed by the end of 2024.

They knew things like these could and probably would lead to a somewhat negative reception, but it was still decided upon to launch the game before these issues had been addressed to a mostly satisfactory degree, which is where we more or less are now.