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- breeminator
- breeminator
There was a recent thread asking for GT Sport to be made similar to Forza. As someone who feels so strongly about this subject that I have recently resolved to never again power up my Xbox One X, I feel the need to express the opposite view.
GT Sport and Forza are completely different to each other. FM7 and the Xbox One X came out around the same time as GTS. I'd owned a PS4, but it was stolen in a burglary, and my plan was to wait for a GT game on PS4, then buy a console bundle with the game. But, when the time came, the Xbox One X seemed so far ahead of PS4 Pro, that I was drawn to the Xbox side, and bought an Xbox One X and FM7. Yes, at first it seemed broadly similar to GT, but I quickly learned to hate the whole exclusive car concept, with cars that you can't obtain unless you do insanely dull and boring stuff all the time. So, GT Sport, please continue to make all cars available all the time. GT Sport has gone a little in the direction of Forza with the mileage exchange. This is just about tolerable because I've never seen one of the mileage exchange cars be the meta for a sport mode race, but all the same, I'd prefer it if that concept disappeared from the game, and certainly wouldn't want to see it extended to cover more content.
Then I tried FM7 online racing, and it doesn't have a proper ranking system, but the leagues sort of do it to some extent. But it had a huge problem with course cutting, course cutting was totally OP because not only do you win that race, but it dirties your lap time, making you start lower on the grid in the next race than if you drove clean. The way the ranking system works, you want to ideally always start last, so driving dirty is a win-win, you both get more points for that race and you get more points for the next race. So I would do races where I am not kidding, I was the only driver in the entire field who recorded a clean lap time, and hence I was the mug who started on pole for the next race. Then you had the ramming with impunity problem, with absolutely no mechanisms at all to even try to deter it. So, GT Sport, please continue your work towards supporting high quality online racing. I know it can be improved, but you're heading in the right direction.
Then there's the original tracks. I hate Maple Valley, Rio and Dubai in FM7. GT Sport, please keep giving us fabulous original tracks like Dragon Trail and Sardegna. Feel free to give us a track along the lines of Prague in FM7, as that one is rather good.
Anyway, I branched out into Forza Horizon, and played through FH1, 2 and 3, doing enough to max out my reward points in the Forza Hub. Doing that didn't fully expose me to the horrors that awaited me when I got FH4, and it became the first Horizon game that I tried to "properly" play right from the start. Giving credit where it's due, the graphics in FH4 are absolutely incredible. But I've come to realise there are more important aspects to games. FH4 takes the "make the player do insanely dull and boring stuff" to the extreme. If you want to have access to all the cars, you have to run the game up and complete the chores it dictates to you, and you have to do it every single week. You might have to, for example, drive 10 miles in a specific car as one bit of the week's chores. Oh, you wanted to qualify and race in a daily race today? Sorry, hard luck, you're going to have to spend that time doing these chores instead. It really does feel like the developers hate the players and the game is their way to express that hate. And you cannot ignore the cars that are obtained in that way, as some of them are totally OP and you will absolutely need to have them to be competitive. It's a bit like if you tried to do the last FIA Nations race and you couldn't use the SF-R Concept or X-Bow because you didn't play the game and complete the chores during two specific weeks many months ago.
FH4 totally blows away FM7 in several areas. The design of the map and the tracks is absolutely fantastic. The original tracks in GTS, to me, have more of the character of the tracks in FH4 than those in FM7, I'd say FH4 even exceeds GTS in the area of original tracks. FH4 has a proper ranking system, basically the same as GTS's DR. And FH4's tracks are cut-proof, you simply cannot ever shortcut a track in FH4. So it addresses some of the weaknesses that FM7 has, but it still doesn't do much to address ramming, and it has the huge problem of not scheduling races for specific time slots, matchmaking occurs on-demand, and this basically totally breaks the ranking system at higher levels because there is very little chance of top players ending up in the same race as other top players. So they quickly stop bothering, which just makes the problem worse. So, GT Sport, please continue with the excellent approach that regularly brings the top players together, both in the scheduled time slots for daily races, and the less frequent FIA races that add a higher level incentive to take part that is totally absent from Forza. The other thing about FH4 is you cannot choose to only do ranked races without freeroam rush, and frankly, for me, that just kills the whole thing dead.
Then you have upgrades and tuning. FH4 is a building/tuning contest to a huge extent. It's nothing like GTS BOP, the differences in performance between car A and car B, when both are upgraded and tuned the best they can be, can be enormous. And the difference between an average user's attempt at building/tuning a car can be huge compared to the best possible building/tuning of a car. And it's not about knowing how to do these things in real life, the way to get the best performance in the game is to reverse engineer the equations it uses and exploit them. It's just not fun. You can spend days messing about with just one car, trying lots of different build and tuning options to find the best way to exploit the shortcomings in the PI system. I'm not sure just how many cars there are in the game now, but going through every one of them to do this is nigh on impossible. The game does now have leaderboards that help with crowdsourcing which cars are the best for which class and track, but there is no way to download the build/tune someone used to do a leaderboard performance. You can download a tune by that person, but they could make it different and inferior to what they actually used for the leaderboard performance. It's all a complete mess. So, GT Sport, please continue to focus Sport Mode on closely matched cars in stock form with no tuning permitted.
Related to it being largely a tuning contest is the limit of number of cars you can have. When you enter a race, you have no idea what class or tracks you will be racing, and you cannot apply a tune to a car once you find out, so you need multiple copies of cars, pre-tuned for different things. This means you are constantly banging up against the 750 car limit. I was spending more time managing my garage than playing the game. Every time you want to clear out your garage, you have to go through car by car, checking against a web page to see which cars can and can't be bought in the game. Obviously you must avoid deleting any cars that can only be obtained by doing chores during a specific week, as if you accidentally delete one of those, you can't replace it. You can easily spend 1-2 hours going through your entire garage doing this. And you have to do this every few hours of gameplay, as the game keeps giving you wheelspins and extra cars. It really was the last straw for me when in the most recent livestream, they responded to the complaints about this by saying that they have no plans to increase the garage size limit. All it needs to make it much easier to prune the garage is a little icon for each car to show if it can be bought in the game or not. This was requested a very long time ago, but they've never done it, so you still have to painfully consult a list on a website alongside the game, and the cars aren't sorted the same across the two within each manufacturer, making it a slow, tedious process.
Then you have the inability to change settings such as traction control once you know what you'll be racing. If you're racing an AWD lower class, you'll want TC off. If you're racing a powerful RWD monster, even the best players need TC on. You cannot change this setting after the point of knowing what you'll be racing. They mentioned this request in the most recent livestream and asked if the request could be made more specific. I'm not sure how much more specific it can be. The fact the developers don't even understand the request shows you how little they must actually play the game. So, GT Sport, please continue to a) allow us to know in advance what car and track we will be racing so we can set in advance any settings that cannot be changed after entering a race, and b) allow us to change settings such as TC during a race.
I think I've ranted enough. I feel better for having typed some of that. For me, the main difference is that GTS feels like a game where the elements fit together into a coherent whole. Forza feels like they're focused on individual elements in isolation and don't have the same grasp of how those elements interact. GT Sport, please continue to focus on providing a game where the elements combine as a coherent whole.
GT Sport and Forza are completely different to each other. FM7 and the Xbox One X came out around the same time as GTS. I'd owned a PS4, but it was stolen in a burglary, and my plan was to wait for a GT game on PS4, then buy a console bundle with the game. But, when the time came, the Xbox One X seemed so far ahead of PS4 Pro, that I was drawn to the Xbox side, and bought an Xbox One X and FM7. Yes, at first it seemed broadly similar to GT, but I quickly learned to hate the whole exclusive car concept, with cars that you can't obtain unless you do insanely dull and boring stuff all the time. So, GT Sport, please continue to make all cars available all the time. GT Sport has gone a little in the direction of Forza with the mileage exchange. This is just about tolerable because I've never seen one of the mileage exchange cars be the meta for a sport mode race, but all the same, I'd prefer it if that concept disappeared from the game, and certainly wouldn't want to see it extended to cover more content.
Then I tried FM7 online racing, and it doesn't have a proper ranking system, but the leagues sort of do it to some extent. But it had a huge problem with course cutting, course cutting was totally OP because not only do you win that race, but it dirties your lap time, making you start lower on the grid in the next race than if you drove clean. The way the ranking system works, you want to ideally always start last, so driving dirty is a win-win, you both get more points for that race and you get more points for the next race. So I would do races where I am not kidding, I was the only driver in the entire field who recorded a clean lap time, and hence I was the mug who started on pole for the next race. Then you had the ramming with impunity problem, with absolutely no mechanisms at all to even try to deter it. So, GT Sport, please continue your work towards supporting high quality online racing. I know it can be improved, but you're heading in the right direction.
Then there's the original tracks. I hate Maple Valley, Rio and Dubai in FM7. GT Sport, please keep giving us fabulous original tracks like Dragon Trail and Sardegna. Feel free to give us a track along the lines of Prague in FM7, as that one is rather good.
Anyway, I branched out into Forza Horizon, and played through FH1, 2 and 3, doing enough to max out my reward points in the Forza Hub. Doing that didn't fully expose me to the horrors that awaited me when I got FH4, and it became the first Horizon game that I tried to "properly" play right from the start. Giving credit where it's due, the graphics in FH4 are absolutely incredible. But I've come to realise there are more important aspects to games. FH4 takes the "make the player do insanely dull and boring stuff" to the extreme. If you want to have access to all the cars, you have to run the game up and complete the chores it dictates to you, and you have to do it every single week. You might have to, for example, drive 10 miles in a specific car as one bit of the week's chores. Oh, you wanted to qualify and race in a daily race today? Sorry, hard luck, you're going to have to spend that time doing these chores instead. It really does feel like the developers hate the players and the game is their way to express that hate. And you cannot ignore the cars that are obtained in that way, as some of them are totally OP and you will absolutely need to have them to be competitive. It's a bit like if you tried to do the last FIA Nations race and you couldn't use the SF-R Concept or X-Bow because you didn't play the game and complete the chores during two specific weeks many months ago.
FH4 totally blows away FM7 in several areas. The design of the map and the tracks is absolutely fantastic. The original tracks in GTS, to me, have more of the character of the tracks in FH4 than those in FM7, I'd say FH4 even exceeds GTS in the area of original tracks. FH4 has a proper ranking system, basically the same as GTS's DR. And FH4's tracks are cut-proof, you simply cannot ever shortcut a track in FH4. So it addresses some of the weaknesses that FM7 has, but it still doesn't do much to address ramming, and it has the huge problem of not scheduling races for specific time slots, matchmaking occurs on-demand, and this basically totally breaks the ranking system at higher levels because there is very little chance of top players ending up in the same race as other top players. So they quickly stop bothering, which just makes the problem worse. So, GT Sport, please continue with the excellent approach that regularly brings the top players together, both in the scheduled time slots for daily races, and the less frequent FIA races that add a higher level incentive to take part that is totally absent from Forza. The other thing about FH4 is you cannot choose to only do ranked races without freeroam rush, and frankly, for me, that just kills the whole thing dead.
Then you have upgrades and tuning. FH4 is a building/tuning contest to a huge extent. It's nothing like GTS BOP, the differences in performance between car A and car B, when both are upgraded and tuned the best they can be, can be enormous. And the difference between an average user's attempt at building/tuning a car can be huge compared to the best possible building/tuning of a car. And it's not about knowing how to do these things in real life, the way to get the best performance in the game is to reverse engineer the equations it uses and exploit them. It's just not fun. You can spend days messing about with just one car, trying lots of different build and tuning options to find the best way to exploit the shortcomings in the PI system. I'm not sure just how many cars there are in the game now, but going through every one of them to do this is nigh on impossible. The game does now have leaderboards that help with crowdsourcing which cars are the best for which class and track, but there is no way to download the build/tune someone used to do a leaderboard performance. You can download a tune by that person, but they could make it different and inferior to what they actually used for the leaderboard performance. It's all a complete mess. So, GT Sport, please continue to focus Sport Mode on closely matched cars in stock form with no tuning permitted.
Related to it being largely a tuning contest is the limit of number of cars you can have. When you enter a race, you have no idea what class or tracks you will be racing, and you cannot apply a tune to a car once you find out, so you need multiple copies of cars, pre-tuned for different things. This means you are constantly banging up against the 750 car limit. I was spending more time managing my garage than playing the game. Every time you want to clear out your garage, you have to go through car by car, checking against a web page to see which cars can and can't be bought in the game. Obviously you must avoid deleting any cars that can only be obtained by doing chores during a specific week, as if you accidentally delete one of those, you can't replace it. You can easily spend 1-2 hours going through your entire garage doing this. And you have to do this every few hours of gameplay, as the game keeps giving you wheelspins and extra cars. It really was the last straw for me when in the most recent livestream, they responded to the complaints about this by saying that they have no plans to increase the garage size limit. All it needs to make it much easier to prune the garage is a little icon for each car to show if it can be bought in the game or not. This was requested a very long time ago, but they've never done it, so you still have to painfully consult a list on a website alongside the game, and the cars aren't sorted the same across the two within each manufacturer, making it a slow, tedious process.
Then you have the inability to change settings such as traction control once you know what you'll be racing. If you're racing an AWD lower class, you'll want TC off. If you're racing a powerful RWD monster, even the best players need TC on. You cannot change this setting after the point of knowing what you'll be racing. They mentioned this request in the most recent livestream and asked if the request could be made more specific. I'm not sure how much more specific it can be. The fact the developers don't even understand the request shows you how little they must actually play the game. So, GT Sport, please continue to a) allow us to know in advance what car and track we will be racing so we can set in advance any settings that cannot be changed after entering a race, and b) allow us to change settings such as TC during a race.
I think I've ranted enough. I feel better for having typed some of that. For me, the main difference is that GTS feels like a game where the elements fit together into a coherent whole. Forza feels like they're focused on individual elements in isolation and don't have the same grasp of how those elements interact. GT Sport, please continue to focus on providing a game where the elements combine as a coherent whole.
