As you’ll have read in our glance back at the last 12 months, 2022 was another jam-packed year in the racing game world, and 2023 looks like it’s going to continue in the same vein.
Even just accounting for the things already at least firmly penciled in, it’s going to be a busy year for the agnostic racing game fan. Along with that, we’ve been gazing into our crystal ball and reading the tea leaves to see what we think you can look forward to as 2023 gets its boots on.
Forza Motorsport 8
With a “spring” launch window established, 2023 will be the year of the Forza Motorsport reboot — officially known by the SEO-unfriendly title “Forza Motorsport“.
It’s been years in the making, with the not-eighth game coming five and a half years after 2017’s Forza Motorsport 7 and breaking the biennial cycle of FM titles. However we don’t really know all that much about it yet, even at this relatively late stage.
The Turn 10 team has only spoken in broad terms about new tire and suspension models, and a new multiplayer experience. We’re expecting some more information in early 2023, with the first opportunity being a Forza Monthly in the first week of January.
The End of Hardware Shortages
Several different factors conspired to create a shortage of silicon semiconductor wafers over the past two years, resulting in reduced microchip production across the phone, automotive, and video game industries. The ninth console generation has been marked by an incredibly short supply of consoles and other hardware — and that looks to be over.
Both Sony Interactive Entertainment’s president Jim Ryan and Endor/Fanatec CEO Thomas Jackermeier have signalled that upstream supply issues are at an end, and hardware should start to flow more freely in 2023. That may mean you can finally walk into a store and pick up a PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series, and order that racing wheel you’ve been eyeing up since mid-2020…
PlayStation VR2
Firmly inked in for a February launch is the second generation of Sony’s PlayStation VR. A considerable technological leap over the previous device, the VR2 features twin 2000×2040 displays, foveated rendering, and controller haptics.
Of course one thing fans really want to know is whether there’ll be PSVR2 support in Gran Turismo 7, but Kazunori Yamauchi would only say “I can’t talk about it”. That’s not a “no”, and considering GT Sport had limited VR support and the VR2 launches within days of GT7’s first anniversary we may yet see an announcement on this front.
Gran Turismo: The Movie
Gran Turismo will get a new release in 2023, but it won’t be coming to your consoles (or to PC). Instead it’ll be in cinemas, as the Gran Turismo film will have its premiere in August.
Based not on the game but on the real-life experience of GT Academy winner Jann Mardenborough — who won the GT5-based event in 2011 and went on to race in the top class of Le Mans — the Neill Blomkamp-directed movie will star Hellboy’s David Harbour and Pirates of the Caribbean lead Orlando Bloom.
Test Drive Unlimited: Solar Crown
Originally slated as a 2022 release, the third game in the TDU universe will finally land in 2023. If you think six years between Forza Motorsport releases and nine between numbered GT titles is a gap, it’s just the 12 years since Test Drive Unlimited 2…
TDUSC will thrust you into a wealthy world of status symbol cars, high class casinos and hotels based on a 1:1 recreation of Hong Kong island, as two “clans” battle for street supremacy and the Solar Crown title. We’re expecting to hear more from Nacon over the coming weeks on this one.
Rennsport
A brand new entry to the racing game world is promised for 2023, with Rennsport set to land late in the year. However the title has already missed one milestone, with the promised closed beta moved back from December 2022 to January 2023 as stated in a recent event on Discord.
As things stand we’ve not actually seen much concrete information on the title, other than a statement of being “ultra-realistic” and with visuals based on Unreal Engine 5. There’s been a handful of images and videos, mainly featuring GT3 racing cars — and the Porsche Mission R concept for some reason — and only Hockenheim and the Goodwood Hill Climb course shown so far.
Morris Hebecker, CEO of the developer Competition Company, has promised extensive modding support and digital ownership (although emphatically not NFTs), esports in association with ESL, and a free-to-play core with further content available for purchase. Hopefully we’ll hear some more specifics over the coming months.
Annual Releases
It doesn’t take Nostradamus to predict that the regular annual releases will get their… well, regular annual release. Although there’s no release dates or specific announcements yet, without a doubt we’ll be seeing F1 23 in the summer and that’ll likely be joined by a new version of the sport’s management sim, F1 Manager 23.
The WRC franchise changed hands as the clocks ticked over to midnight, with Codemasters taking control from KT Racing. Whatever name the game eventually sports, this one is likely to come sooner rather than later as it will need to pick up Esports WRC duties too.
Gran Turismo Developments in 2023
March will mark a year since Gran Turismo 7 was launched, and we could be seeing some changes over the course of its second circuit around the sun. We don’t know what, for sure, so treat the following as speculation based on our experiences.
First and foremost, it’s likely that Gran Turismo Sport’s servers will be closed down at some point in 2023. With nine months of continuing activity, Sport has survived far longer than any other superseded title to date; GT5’s servers closed down six months after GT6’s launch, and GT6 followed suit just as quickly following Sport’s release. How this will affect the game, with its always-online requirement remains to be seen.
2023 could also be the year of Gran Turismo Sophy, a new AI system developed for Gran Turismo by Sony AI with novel machine-learning techniques. We don’t yet know how Sophy will be implemented into Gran Turismo, as the AI is far too fast for ordinary players at the moment — Sony AI will need to solve the issue of scaling its pace — but having experienced it for ourselves it’s something we can’t wait to see.
Another possibility for 2023 is Gran Turismo 7: Spec II. We’ve seen “Spec II” versions of both GT5 and GT Sport launching in the games’ second years — 14 months for GT5, 23 months for Sport — and given GT7’s relative sales popularity and large number of updates so far (20GB by our count), Sony may decide to bundle them up onto a disc and incentivize it with some bonus credits from the microtransactions selection.
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