Forza Motorsport General Discussion Thread

[Jezza819]

I really must have blanked Sunset Peninsula from my mind because I didn't remember anything about it except maybe the banked part but I don't remember any of the infield portion. It's ok but I don't like fictional tracks to begin with.

The first races in the GT showed a PI limit of B max but in the race there were A level Camaros, why was that the case?

 

[RogsR34UK]

I actually did remember some of Sunset Peninsula, though of course it has been updated somewhat.

Could someone point my in the direction of the Mediterranean Drift Rivals event because I searched out the Rivals Menu Option and there was no sign of any Drift stuff.

 

[ManteoMax]

I actually did remember some of Sunset Peninsula, though of course it has been updated somewhat.

Could someone point my in the direction of the Mediterranean Drift Rivals event because I searched out the Rivals Menu Option and there was no sign of any Drift stuff.

The Drift Rivals were causing a game crash so we've temporarily removed them. They'll be restored once that's fixed.

 

[ShavedBadger]

Don't know whether this has been noted elsewhere but it's pretty cool that the new Mustang has the GT3 Bodykit as a conversion option.

 

[GBalao888]

Don't know whether this has been noted elsewhere but it's pretty cool that the new Mustang has the GT3 Bodykit as a conversion option.

Building a makeshift version is the best way to wait for the actual Mustang GT3/GTD. Not to mention, it's gonna be a whole lot of fun as it would transform the 2024 Mustang GT into a cornering machine.

 

[Mirai]

It’s good to see T10 finally getting this game to where it should’ve been at launch
Hopefully year 2 focuses on brand new content and further enhancing the overall experience

 

[PJTierney]

I'm pretty sure he's speaking in the context that FM23 is the first Forza released to fully utilize Game Pass for its own purposes.

First Motorsport, yes.

Forza Horizon 4 was the first major first party title designed to exploit Game Pass, its live service offering is far bigger in scope than Forza Horizon 3.

 

[ClydeYellow]

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.

 

[EngieDiesel]

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.

That's more the decision of publishers than developers. Publishers are the ones with the money, so they're the ones usually imposing unrealistic deadlines and expectations while withholding the funds needed to bring a game to a finished state. Most developers would rather have a launch date of "when it's done" and a budget that lets them make the game how they want it, but realistically that causes a whole other raft of problems (see Concord for the most recent example).

 

[TheAdmiester]

Can't seem to find the drift rivals events even though they're supposedly live. Are they hidden away in a weird place or are they just missing?

 

[nukleabomb]

Can't seem to find the drift rivals events even though they're supposedly live. Are they hidden away in a weird place or are they just missing?

They were taken down because they would crash the game

 

[AttackDickie]

So last night I was doing chapter 2 and 3 in the mid-engine tour, and I noticed that the narrated intro videos weren’t there. Is this another good thing they are giving up on in order to reduce development costs?

The narrator giving out various facts about the circuits isn’t present on Sunset Peninsula. I don’t miss her one bit, but the inconsistency adds fuel to the reports claiming that Turn 10 has lost employees or contractors since the launch of FM.

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.

 

[CarlosRGDias]

FM DURACELL - DARK HORSE 2024 - October,17

 

[Morbid65]

I wonder if the shorter cycle to the next update means we can expect less content in it... While that would be kinda understandable, it would also be kind of a drag for them to spoil us with more cars for the shortest cycle but then go into a regular 4 week cycle that feels kinda empty like the 4 or so prior updates have been.

Unfortunately we can't kill 2 birds with one stone with the Challenge Hub races this time. The "Mustang Challenge" series races we need to do for the Saleen are multiclass (or they are this week anyways), but they don't count as "Multiclass Series" races for the TA Mustang.

While I think the Challenge Hub is a good idea, it needs some expanding/tweaking I think. I think you should be able to mix and match multiplayer races and the "Featured Career" stuff to earn the FOMO cars, that way when the available multiplayer options don't appeal to you then you can still go and AFK the career nonsense for that week.

I also don't like them being too specific with which multiplayer series you have to run, and I'd like to see less focus on the multiclass hoppers. Don't get me wrong, I love multiclass racing but most players in Forza don't have a clue how to negotiate traffic properly, and I've yet to have a single fun race in any of the public multiclass lobbies as they always either get broken up by crashes or people quit (or usually both), with most races finishing with less than 3 cars in each class. It would be better if we could just do whichever multiplayer lobby sounded fun.

For example, I figured I'd knock one race out tonight. There was a 30 minute GT2 series at rainy Road Atlanta that I thought sounded fun and would be an excuse to use the C7R and listen to its new sounds, but that wouldn't give me any progress in the Challenge Hub, so instead I went into the 18 minute Mustang Challenge series. At one point the lobby was up to 8 people total across the 4 classes, but by the time the race actually started only 3 of us were left, but hey we were all 3 in the S class "Modern Mustang" group! But wait, I was the only one with an upgraded car, one other guy had a stock GT500 70 PI below my car, and the other was running a B class stock '24 Mustang GT. The B class guy crashed into the wall at turn 2 of lap 1 and immediately quit, and the other quit about 5 minutes later already 50 seconds behind me, meaning I had to drive around by myself for another 12 or so minutes to get my Challenge Hub credit... So yeah not fun at all, although I guess the goal of the "eNgAgEmEnT" isn't to be fun really. If I could have done the 30min race they would have got 30mins out of me and maybe more because I (probably) would have had fun and wanted to do another race, but instead I only did 18mins and immediately shut the game off annoyed.

 

[Rob192005]

I don't know what I did in a previous life to be made to drive a car like that.

 

[sirjim73]

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!

 

[Jezza819]

For the last race I put race exhaust and intake on the '24 GT and it got the sound close to what it should probably sound like as stock.

 

[Rob192005]

Glad to be out of the monstrosity that was the 2024 Mustang and am now in a real car.

 

[Nielsen]

Hopefully year 2 focuses on brand new content and further enhancing the overall experience

Hopefully there will be a nice balance between old and new. I’d hate to lose Monza, COTA, Sonoma and many of the cars still left behind in FM7.

 

[GBalao888]

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)

You forgot the fun and diverse variety of cars, which was the selling point of FM4. It had up to 659 cars representing the very best of car culture and motorsport during that era.

A lot of these toxic so-called fans pressured Turn Ten to cut down on SUV's, pickup trucks, vans, offroaders, rally cars, buggies and even oddballs, and a lot of other cars, even those focused for the game, such as performance cars and race cars from both FM4 and to an extent, FH5, have yet to make their way into the game.

Their argument of "qUaLiTy oVeR qUaNtItY" made the game feel light on content even if FM8 launched with over 500 cars. At the end of the day, Motorsport is supposed to be the bigger game compared to Horizon. These idiots keep advocating for the "fun" stuff to be left out on the latter.

While these "fun" cars may not be a priority at the moment, I'm hoping Turn Ten slowly adds some of these back for FM8 year two.

I can't remember whether FM4 had drag or drift events (neither of which I like much, but would still be improvements over FM23).

FM4 did have drag racing, but drifting was only through changing a feature in the HUD.

 

[skazz]

As many have no doubt already pointed out, there's a very visible drag strip through the center of Sunset Peninsula.

 

[PJTierney]

As many have no doubt already pointed out, there's a very visible drag strip through the center of Sunset Peninsula.

That's two drag strips in the game now to my knowledge, Hockenheim and Sunset.

 

[Nacho Libre]

On PC seeing some stuttering in the animations before the races (track preview, pit car view, grid flyover) but they clear when the races start. But this is with an Nvidia card, I wonder if Radeon cards are affected too.

 

[AttackDickie]

Glad to be out of the monstrosity that was the 2024 Mustang and am now in a real car.
View attachment 1398170

What's up with that shade of blue monstrosity though? Or is that Forza just being Forza?

 

[Nacho Libre]

What's up with that shade of blue monstrosity though? Or is that Forza just being Forza?

Looks like a custom paint job and damaged panels.

 

[Bilu]

Has anyone tried dlss on Balanced in 1080p? Does it look bad?

 

[Nacho Libre]

Has anyone tried dlss on Balanced in 1080p? Does it look bad?

Well, it looks bad at 1440p in static objects in and around the tracks, such as the fencing and lamp posts, but in general is noisy. TAA is better.

 

[skazz]

Well, it looks bad at 1440p in static objects around the tracks, such as the fencing and lamp posts, but in general is noisy. TAA is better.

Have you tried 1440p DLAA versus TAA? At launch TAA was less noisy, but I was wondering if that's changed.

 

[Nacho Libre]

Have you tried 1440p DLAA versus TAA? At launch TAA was less noisy, but I was wondering if that's changed.

Yes, I run TAA exclusively and is the cleanest image I can get at 100% scale resolution. Even DLAA is just too noisy.

 

[nukleabomb]

Enhancing the Car Sounds of Forza Motorsport

Nick Wiswell, Audio Director at Turn 10 Studios shares an update on the changes we’re making to audio for future and existing cars in Forza Motorsport.

forza.net

Nick Wiswell, Audio Director at Turn 10 Studios shares an update on the changes we’re making to audio for future and existing cars in Forza Motorsport.

Hi everyone,
I’m Nick Wiswell, Audio Director at Turn 10 Studios, and today I want to give you all some details on the audio changes you will hear in Forza Motorsport with the release of Update 13, Mustang Month, and our plans for future updates.
With this blog, I will personally address some of the feedback you have been sending us since we released the game last October. We hear you, and the plans that we are sharing today are in direct response to this – thank you for sharing your honest thoughts.

First, I’d like to give you some insights into the team we have assembled, and some important changes we have made to deliver the best audio experience possible when racing.

I’ve been at Turn 10 Studios since 2010, and I worked directly as Audio Director on Forza Motorsport 4 through Forza Motorsport 6. After that I moved into publishing focused roles working on Forza Horizon and Forza Street, and then into a more technical role before returning to Forza Motorsport full time in March 2023.

When I rejoined the team last year, most of the game’s audio content was already complete, so our efforts were focused on refining the assets we already had. After closely listening to your feedback, we have started incorporating new tools and processes into our audio workflow so we can deliver great sounding, authentic content moving forward. To ensure we have the best people we can leading these efforts, Turn 10 Studios rehired one of our former Sound Designers this past spring to help deliver these new plans.

To give you some context, this sound designer worked on Forza Motorsport (2005) through Forza Motorsport 3, as well as both Forza Motorsport 4 and Forza Motorsport 5 from a central Xbox audio team role. He then joined Polyphony Digital to work on GT Sport and Gran Turismo 7. I first met him when I was at Bizarre Creations working on the Project Gotham Racing games – Xbox’s premier racing game before the days of Forza – and I’m excited to work with him again. Between us, we have made a lot of great sounding racing games – and from some of the posts I’ve seen online, some of you would agree with this!

So, with a new audio leadership team, which includes another lead for our technology and development investments, we are set for the future.

To the state of audio in Forza Motorsport: I will admit that from an authenticity perspective, the game is not where we would like it to be. There are many factors that led to this, but we hope we can set things right going forward. Our goal is to fix these audio issues and ensure that all new cars added to the game are built authentically and uniquely. To achieve this, we have been overhauling our authoring techniques and pipelines so that we can update as many of the most egregious car audio issues as possible.

The initial work on this is now complete, and from Update 13 onwards, all cars added to Forza Motorsport will be built to this newer specification. In addition, a number of cars that have been flagged as inauthentic, both internally at the studio and by the community, will be updated over time.

The cars we are initially updating are with the release of Update 13 include the following:

• 2022 Pagani Huayra R
• 2014 Chevrolet #3 Corvette Racing Corvette C7.R
• 2001 Acura Integra Type R

We have also made changes to the cockpit audio on the 2010 Lexus LFA, following its update in a previous release.

As we look forward to future updates, we will weigh factors such as community feedback, internal priority, upcoming featured cars in game and the availability of suitable recordings.

I’d also like to add that there is a lot of speculation about how the car audio is made and where it is sourced. It is all created from recordings of real cars, either captured on a track or on a dyno. Our library contains over 750 vehicle recordings, and more are being sourced and added every month. The changes we are making are built around how these recordings are being processed and edited, and the way we assemble the recordings back together at runtime to be controlled by the in-game physics engine.

I’m not going to give too much of our secret sauce away, but it’s based on the combined experience of our audio team and software engineers, and we are very happy with the changes we are making.

We hope you like them too, and as always, we look forward to feedback from the community. Also, I’ll be speaking with you all next month – November 7 at 3pm PT – on the official Forza Discord server to go into more detail on our audio development workflows as part of the next “In the Garage” AMA. I hope to see you there.