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?
See my other comments below. I feel the bigger issues were design decisions rather than technical issues. Having said that the game was in a much better state by Easter, so another 6 months might have helped (caveat being the PJT input below).
Another 6 months would have meant another 3/4 tracks, including Nordschleife. Imagine the impact on early post release publicity if Nordschleife had been the first track added to the game or the last one teased immediately pre release.
"Coming April 2024, FM23, featuring ..... surprise! Nordschleife!".
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)
In my opinion, there were some major changes from the prior version which needed some kind of player feedback before release (the new Insiders thing (or some other approach) should have been at least considered before release to get feedback on these major changes (maybe it was and they ignored it, who knows).
The CarXP issue would have been the same with a later launch, agreed. It was a poor design decision for which the consequences for the players reactions were poorly thought out. I actually like the system to some extent, but any person could see from day1 that it was a bad idea to not have an alternative.
I don't play multiplayer, but it was always a dreadful design choice to have it included for MP as well as SP, too.
The QA point is very valid and with the sheer size of games now, there are always going to be a lot of bugs that "get through" QA on any modern game (or piece of software). I think reasonable people understand that.
Even then though there were some shocking bugs at release. The game crashed every time you purchased upgrades and that took 2/3 months to resolve - just playing one race and buying upgrades afterwards should/would have found that one? that's just off the top of my head.
It is the same with all games though, for the reasons you stated.
I do think the biggest issue in terms of player retention has been design decisions rather than graphics/bugs personally.
I mean you yourself do not do Liveries in this game because its so difficult/inferior to do so, even now? For another example.
(I miss them, you've done some great work in the past)
(PS can we get shared liveries in EA WRC pretty please... that's the one thing i miss the most from the KT games which had a great setup for this (admittedly they seemed to just lift it from GTSport but i don't think any players cared about that)
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.
@Nacho Libre has documented the graphics improvements very well the last 12 months. Many tracks had graphics glitches and the lighting was poor at releasee.
I disagree....
FM23 was the first version of Motorsport to be released once Gamepass became a thing, so their FOMO was a deliberate choice based probably on FH and other series. It may not be liked by all, but they haven't significantly altered the FOMO since launch so they must believe it's doing something for their Gamepass numbers...
Graphics were indeed not fully optimised at launch, but that was clearly due to them transitioning to a completely new game engine. Calling them underwhelming is not reasonable - they were still console-leading on the Xbox and in my experience they beat pretty much all racing games on the PC too. Yes, there were issues with lighting, but it was never awful, just inconsistent. And yes, ray tracing sometimes feels like a step backward, but it does on most raytracing games right now.
As for the rebuilt circuits: They explained this all before launch. Their new physics broke their old circuit meshes, so they had to rebuild everything. Their new physics are however MUCH better than earlier FM games, so we can give them plenty of slack here. I am glad they did this since the changes are wholly positive.
The biggest issues with the PC release seems to have been the endless crashing and memory leaks from what I've read. I'd consider memory leak issues on a maybe ? £50M+ game pretty major. PC release is very difficult though, because of so many different combinations.
The problem with the rebuilt circuits is that yes it was all explained and I think some (including you and i) gave them slack for that, but unfortunately those explanations didn't get headlines/publicity on websites/forums, all people read was that there were "only 17 tracks" (can't remember the starting number).
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.
You're comments about the decline of driving communities are valid, but as for FM4 aspects better than FM23 at launch, without even thinking i can come up:
1. AI
2. 1000 career races (FM23 still has 90)
3. No fixed CarXP requirements for unlocking parts (I don't play multiplayer, but this really did not go down well with MP players)
I can't remember whether FM4 had drag or drift events (neither of which I like much, but would still be improvements over FM23).
They're back.
Personally, I hope moving forward we get more variety for the monthly events, like 5 series but using different divisions or themes for each one. Esp as I only get to use some of these divisions in free play and also, I love Lancias, but I appreciate not everyone would want 5 different Lancia series. I'd be more behind a Mustang month if it came with Willow Springs. (I like Sunset's flow but as a location/venue it does little for me.) I think with WS I would have even happily done the 10 races at night in a Mustang in the challenge hub.
The last series had narration intro for the first week, but not the following weeks. Need to wait to week 2 before we know if that's changed or not.
Wow, thats a long post!
