I don't like Turn 10's methodology. Forza 2 and 3 were both half-assed products. If all you wanted to do was race and drift - and it seems like half the community are drifters, then it was a great series.
But suppose you wanted to create or recreate race cars. In FM2, the livery editor was bad. Layers would shift around. This means when you made a racing name to put on the car, some of the letters would move around the minute you took it out to race or snap pics. And each time you took it out, they would shift a little more. Lovely carbon fiber panels would look broken. You had to fix it every time, or wait for a break to go back and reload the original, if you had the presence of mind to save it in the library, and sometimes even
that wasn't sufficient, you had to fix it further. If you didn't save it, look forward to an hour or two of fixing by hand. And if the livery was locked because you bought it from someone, you had to hope you could get them to fix it, or you were screwed. This irritated a lot of car artists, like me, and some quit to wait for FM3.
There was an Auction House with a nice list of features, but it had issues... see below.
Car models were also hit and miss. Some were just not quite right. A number of them didn't work well with the livery editor and were a pain to get right.
Physics were a mixed bag. While GT4 had overbearing understeer, most cars in FM2 had dominant oversteer, which to me is worse and makes taking turns even more treacherous in the game, mostly because I could never get comfy with the driver views. Drifting was too easy, which made most drifters think they'd found heaven, but it was almost one button drifts. Modding didn't always follow the laws of physics, and you could abuse the physics model, resulting in T10 wiping leaderboards periodically as people took advantage of exploits. While engine noise was pretty good, I hated the farty tire sounds, recorded from a Buick with low tires so they could get long samples to work with. A Miata that sounds like a 4x4?? Ew, which baffles me, as FM1 had perfectly fine tire samples.
The online system was pretty good. Graphics were very good. Not as good as Prologue, but still nice to look at. Mysteriously, replays weren't as well produced as in FM1, though the 30fps display was polished nicely with post processing. I missed the drivatar from FM1. But what really shocked everyone was the cutting of promised 12 car racing, and all the tracks and race modes from FM1 and more were cut to even
less content. DLC tracks didn't even incorporate into the game offline save as time trial events. And if you lost your online link to the Auction House or made the mistake of turning off your 360, it could result in an inadvertent perma-ban on your account, which was a pain to undo.
There were a lot of things I would have done different.
Oh well, then came Forza 3. An all around better game? Well, sort of. There were a lot of tracks to choose from, but they milked a number of tracks badly to have around 100 courses. Like, I think one track had
twenty some odd variations. The livery editor wasn't just fixed but improved greatly, and car artists rejoiced. The Auction House was improved, and a Store front was added, allowing you to sell up to 18 items in various categories, even tunes.
And then, we learned that online was gimped. Considering they used much of the code from FM2, and even had the same 8 car races as before, this was baffling. Cars were ported directly from FM2, which would have been fine, except almost all the same bugs came with them. And some new car models were noticeably better. Graphics were... odd. Some backgrounds did look cartoony, and none would make you think you were looking at a real course. Some car interiors were decent, others were just awful and looked unfinished. Replays were almost as lackluster as those from FM2. Cars other than yours in-race were built with very simple car models, which you could see in Photo Mode.
Physics were still a mixed bag. While tweaked a bit, and fairly realistic understeer finally appeared, the mods still didn't completely reflect real life physics, and you could still exploit the engine with certain cars. File handling was also frooked up. While you could save hundreds of decals, liveries, pics and videos, if you had 130 or more, suddenly it bogged badly. And the process to save a pic and getting it sent to your photo sharing site is a hellish ordeal I'd only wish on the truly evil among us. I still don't like the driver views and those same wretched tire sounds were ported over.
And there's more on both games, but I don't want to spend all afternoon on this. Needless to say, Microsoft's usual rushed, buggy practice is in full force with every Forza.
So now... we have GT5 with 800 some odd Standard cars of lesser detail. This is rather unusual, to say the least. This is a bit unfair of Kaz to lead us on like this, but I'm not sure what else he could do. Making those tracks and the Premium cars did take a hellish amount of work, like two years to finish Rome and Madrid? Who knows how long the Nurburg Complex took to complete?
The blame rests squarely on Polyphony and Kazunori's shoulders for this, with a caveat.
He did insist on doing all the work in-house. This insured quality and secrecy, as well as cost control, and I'm not sure that farming out work on the Forzas did Turn 10 any favors. More people were hired, and it ended up costing over $60 million to produce, even porting over 80% of GT4 cars, and that was last year's figures.
Plus, SONY did force the Master to produce GT PSP first, which he clearly didn't want to do. He mentioned a few times what a pain it was to take something like GT4, make it even larger, and then squeeze this game from possibly 6 - 9 gigabytes down to
one. They weren't up to speed on the PSP, so development required a lot of learning and aspirin. From time to time, the entire team had to drop work on GT5 to focus on GT PSP. If anyone thinks this took less than a year to produce, I'd like to see the production plan.
I understand why the cockpit folk are upset, but what are you going to do? I'd suggest you ask for those blacked out interiors. I also understand those who wish for just a couple hundred Premium cars or so, and scrap the rest. But really, why say that?
Look, I'm all about the content. I want a lot to buy, race and do. Those of you who don't want the Standard content... well, ignore it. You'll still have some 200-plus Premium cars to play with. The rest of us will have a thousand on hand to race and enjoy. And who knows, maybe we'll be able to race 20 or more Standard cars in an event, even online.
I'm still racing GT4, still loving it despite the weaker physics, and still buying the Collector's Edition. We still have a few months to go yet. Just wait to see what Kazunori has in store for us. And by the way...
TURN 10 in just TWO YEARS (four years) made 400+, 1 MILION POLY (twice as much as PREMIUM GT5 car) CARS (200K poly) WITH COCKPIT and NOW AFTER 3 YEARS it is closing with DLC to 500.
Fixed.
All here are guessing because they have only released a tiny video of standard models nothing else.
I said even if it for photomode only. 
