Editorials Part 3:
Out of the Gate:
Forza Motorsport 1
I want to compare Turn10 and Microsoft's first attempt at a racing simulator to Mass Effect 1. The story, voice acting and character development for ME1 was good, but the gameplay was pretty awful. FM1 is similar. I like the tracks and handling and cars, but...the difficulty right now is leaving much to be desired. It doesn't know if "medium" should be easy or just a smidge below impossible. Especially with the stock single make races. I've never understood it when everyone is in the same exact car and every car is stock how everyone accelerates faster than I do. We're all the same car and all stock, that really shouldn't be a thing.
I also, hate that the game punishes you for playing on easy. You can do it, but you give up like 50% of your earnings and that's a little harsh for the first outing of a sim. That's not accessibility, that's just bullying, really. I know people complain about how taking certain things off easy in FM7 doesn't boost your rewards and, I agree that's dumb. I think easy with every assist on should be the base and turning off things or having harder opponents should increase pay. Which is what most other Forzas did.
Also, the BAR menus. It's there in Forza 1. They got rid of it in Forza 3, but someone must of said "Nah, that's TOO organized. Let's go back to the clunky, horrible bar menus. But, it's okay 'cause we'll just do it by make and have drop down menus and add the ability to just jump to a certain make." FH4 kind of fixed it, but...I don't understand why Forza insists on them. It just means finding the vehicle you want a lot harder. I mean, Gran Turimso hasn't had the bar menu for a while now. They've used lists and GTS I think something that's pretty good with the ability to sort by several means and to view things in either a list or grid format. And groupings are always by grid. Most racers use the grid format. Although, AC uses the bar and PC uses a list. But...yeah, it's not that good in AC, either.
But, I feel that the main reason why Forza uses the bar is because of time constraints during development.
So, I think some of the unique tracks and cars helped sell Forza 1 and it...WAS improving up until about Forza 5 and then I think it REALLY started suffering from not enough development time. Hopefully with the state that Forza 7 was in and taking an extra 3 years to fix it, perhaps Microsoft will give FM8 more dev time. I mean, you gotta think that Gran Turismo has had like 5 years between the last few iterations of their games and even THAT doesn't seem like enough time.
Forza 1 as a good effort. Good enough to get many sequels. Like Mass Effect 1. And those sequels improved on the things that were bad in FM1.
