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?
I mean, if they had slapped an "early access" label on the game, I think most people would've been fine with how it launched. And since it's on Gamepass, it actually cost me way less than the average Steam EA.
I think the days of games releasing in a finished state are mostly over. Most developers are unable (or unwilling, which is understandable, because developers are companies that must make sound financial decisions) to shoulder the full costs of developing, testing, and refining a game before a launch that could go poorly and leave them tens of millions of dollars in the red.
On the other hand, player feedback has become a much louder voice in our era, dominated as it is by social media and streamers. Even if a game released in a well-polished state (and God knows how far Forza was from that threshold), people will find things to complain about; even a "perfect" game won't be "finished" at launch, because
people fully expect to pay for a service as well as a product.
There's simply very little incentive to spend the time and resources to release a "finished" game. Sometimes you'll get a passion project that releases after 12 years of development and is mostly perfect on day one, but heh, that's the exception that proves the rule.
As for Forza, I'm overall happy with the improvements we've seen in the first year of the game; I guess we'll see where year two takes us.
The main issue right now is - as I predicted
way back then - the dwindling player base.
Forza Motorsport 4, which is often lauded as the "peak" of the Forza series, was in every aspect but one an inferior game to FM23, let alone the
FM24 we're playing now: that aspect was its community, which had coalesced around FM2 and FM3 and made Forza more than just a Gran Turismo clone by leveraging its UGC and multiplayer functions.
Forza Motorsport 5 (and, I suspect, the downfall of the fm.net forums, and of forums as a digitalized social space in general) was, in many ways, a watershed event that led to the dispersion of that original community.
Since then, Forza's player base has been steadily declining - a trend that's been often blamed on the quality of the games, as if the 360-era Forza games were paragons of polished and immersive gameplay (and I remember having a very different opinion way back then).
Forza Motorsport 7 seemed to reverse the trend a bit (no doubt also thanks to the momentum gathered through the esports craze, that seems to have largely subsided by now), but then the community had to wait six years for FM23. To tie back to the question on whether the game should have been delayed: as it is, it was a case of "too little, too late", a game that released to a mixed reception became the straw that broke the camel back. Would a year of improvements made it a better game that nobody ever played?
The question now is, can this decline be reversed? Could Forza, through a mix of reasoned improvements to its mechanics and new, eye-catching content additions, bring back some of the players that have left, attract new ones, and become a hub of socially-emergent gameplay again? I certainly hope so, but only time will tell, and T10 can only deliver on one side of the equation.
