The new Forza Motorsport is very well made but unbelievably dry and flavorless

Look, I'll admit that this game is not necessarily in my wheelhouse. I'm an unapologetic Forza Horizon guy. I'd rather tear up a beach in a Halo Warthog than politely do three laps around a real world circuit in a Honda Civic. But I can enjoy simcade games and I had a decent time with last year's Gran Turismo so I thought I'd check out the new Motorsport via Game Pass.

If Gran Turismo felt pretentious and silly then Motorsport feels like visiting the house of a rich and extremely uptight classmate, where you're allowed to sit at the table and have a glass of water but you can't touch anything or speak loudly or have any unsanctioned fun.

Not only does the game require practice laps before each race as it very slowly unwinds its progression, but IT HAS NO MUSIC. NO MUSIC IN A DRIVING GAME! I'm not saying it needs Horizon's suite of radio stations with funny DJs and eclectic rap and pop songs, but how about just slapping the music from the Horizon classical station on there? Gran Turismo has music. Who wants to run practice laps with no music before every race? And to the extent those people exist aren't they playing even simmier games?

Maybe this is designed for online races and they don't really care about the single player, but I feel like this game was made for a very small crowd of hardcore racing fans. I have not seen a lot of discussion around its launch or Microsoft touting how many players it has but maybe it's doing well. Still I'm kind of bewildered that they spent all this time to make the game and while the graphics look great and the handling feels very good they seem to not have spent any time on adding flavor to attract more casual fans.

Are there a lot of fans of this kind of self serious super dry racing out there or is everyone just going to sample it and go back to Horizon? So far under 40% of players have finished the initial series of 3 races, which seems like a steep drop off but is not unheard of for Game Pass.

That's how i feel about it too, it's extremely dry, and i'm into serious simulators.

The series has progressively become more and more by the numbers with every entry after 4, menu design becomes more boring, music has faded away almost completely, Gran Turismo attempts to create a car museum-esk lounge experience for you to touch and sniff the history of motor vehicles but Forza doesn't attempt much of that anymore, it doesn't really attempt anything, i figured they were ditching the sequel number and rebooting it for a reason but i don't know what that reason is.

Tracks are missing, cars are present but currently unavailable to the player with the promise of free updates in the future but you just know some of them will be dlc, graphics downgrades, incorrect downforce physics for race spec cars, a multi page bug list, this is definitely a 2023 game.

If there was passion behind this project it doesn't show, it almost feels AI generated :P.

Before his paternity leave, Jeff Gertsmann pretty much hinted at the game being like this too. Judging by your comments, he might have been right. I haven't started it yet, because I would need to free up space on my SSD and I'm still playing Starfield. I will still give it a try at some point. The last Forza Motorsport I played was a pretty good demo you could download from the Microsoft app store years ago. In fact I think it was the free edition Forza game exclusive to the store as a way to advertise it back when it first started. So I will give the game the benefit of the doubt.

@cikame: The game feels like it was made for someone, but I feel like it's a very specific type of person and there aren't a lot of them.

I thought Gran Turismo's weird cafe where you run into a bunch of retired car designers who talk to you in text about various cars was silly as heck but it had a kind of goofy earnest charm to it and at least made it feel like the game was really passionate about cars and car culture.

Forza replaces it with...nothing. Just racing and basic menus and some tutorial stuff. And it's wild because Horizon has a ton of personality and Turn 10 and Playground work together so you'd at least think someone from Playground would have given some pointers on adding some kind o personality even if it wasn't Horizon's wild PG party vibe.

This seems like a crazy argument to me. The main Forza games have always been dry, and when they tried to add personality in the past it was stuff like that Jeremy Clarkson shit in 5. It's been a while so it's easy to forget that these games have always been in the same category as stuff like Project Cars and the F1 games. If anything, Forza is the warm and fuzzy version of that kind of game because of the wide range of difficulty options.

Don't forget that clinically sterile menus has been the series brand since Forza 3.

@borgmaster: First of all there's no argument here. It's literally just a description of my experience. There's a question posed as to how well it will do with the mass audience but that has nothing to do with prior Forza games.

Secondly...you're wrong. I mean you're not wrong that Forza has usually been somewhat dry and hasn't always done attempts at personality well, but you're wrong that this isn't a departure. For one thing the biggest thing that makes it feel SO dry is the lack of music, and Forza has definitely had soundtracks in the past. For another, Forza has tried to have some flavor in the past like with 6's "Stories of motorsport" campaign that tried to situate the gameplay within the context of the sport's history.

It's never been Motorstorm or Split Second but it has attempted to do something along the lines of what Gran Turismo 7 does and encourage people to care about racing and have a sense of drama, as opposed to dumping you into 3 music free laps of forced practice in a series of races with absolutely nothing beyond the gameplay.

There's a difference between "white bread toast" and "uncooked flour" in terms of dryness.

It's impressive that they've managed to make an even more soulless game than the last one. I watched a couple streams of the game and it just seemed boring. It's like they want to go after the hardcore racing sim audience but also don't commit to doing that fully so it ends up being a game that isn't appealing to sim people but also is too serious and sterile for the more casual audience. By trying to appeal to both audiences simultaneously they've ended up appealing to neither. I loved Forza Motorsport 3 and 4 but have bounced off every one of them since 6 (I never played 5). I even bought the FM6 themed Xbox One because I was so excited since apparently 6 was supposed to be a return to form after 5 but the game itself was just dull (the Forza Xbox did rev when turned on though which was amusing). There's just something that's been missing in them. I'll try this one but I can't see myself playing it a ton. At least it seems like they got rid of the attempts at a story mode, which is a big part of what ruined the last games for me. Just give me a big ol' grid of races to choose from and let me race.

And yeah the Forza games did used to have soundtracks and at least some personality. The first Forza in particular had a bunch of instrumental versions of classic rock songs. Of course none of them come close to Gran Turismo 2's soundtrack or Gran Turismo 3 having Judas Priest's "Turbo Lover", the most racing song-ass racing song in existence (so much so that the Indy 500 uses it sometimes as their theme song). The less said about Snoop Dogg's "Dogg Turismo 3" the better.

It's so frustrating for me because I used to love these games so much. I played through Forza 1 and Forza 3 multiple times each. It honestly seems like the better thing to do here is to just go back to Forza 3 again rather than play the new game and be disappointed again.

@borgmaster: Sorry that's more than a bit reductive, it would be weird if FM did something like a Dirt 2 animated trailer park menu or a PGR4 luxury house with an arcade machine, but there's nothing stopping them from having some style, nice menus, mood music, anything, that's what Gran Turismo does with it's world map, jazz, silly car wash, history lessons and a photo mode designed for creating car pinups, it creates a car culture vibe that gives it its identity.

Forza has done this before, FM3's menu was beautiful opening with your chosen car parked on a mountain road, with lovingly slow camera pans showing off the next gen graphics and upbeat chill electronic music that saw me vibing in the menus for way too long, the rest of the UI was extremely clean sticking with a minimalist red, white and grey theme matching the Forza logo, advancing through the menus was met with a warm electronic pulse while going back took on a slight negative tone like closing a book, whoever came up with the game's style was probably proud of what they achieved.

FM4 continued in a similar fashion though it's dark menus while delivering less eye strain are less interesting, satellite photos of the race circuits are a neat touch and it was the introduction of Autovista with Clarkson voice over and i really enjoyed that, they put more effort into that than they needed to really, most notable however is its full electro chill soundtrack by Lance Hayes.

I don't need to describe the rest of the franchise i'll just show you this picture from Netflix, i mean FM5.

What's the difference between Exotic and Specialized? Or Sport PT and Sport Compact? ... What the hell does clicking on "Racing" do?

Whatever, i just wanted to show off some of the style i liked in FM3 and 4 and that little additions can go a long way.

It's a shame but I feel like the two things Forza did well are now kinda redundant.

• Handled with more nuance than the pre-GT Sport-rismos. Partly because you had actual triggers to use, secondly because they just had a more interesting driving model.
• Circuits had a depth to their surroundings. The things in the distance felt like actually there instead of being a painting and the track surface had more detail to it.

Now that Gran Turismo uses triggers, the handling has reached a level I'd consider great. Graphically, whilst I still think Gran Turismo lacks that track detail, it does phenomenal weather effects, car models and they no longer sound like lawn mowers.

I've also wondered why Forza never got into license tests. They're not just a 'learn to drive, stupid' tool but a good way to show off handling and scenarios that will come up in races.

@cikame: I'm also going to have to respectfully disagree that this is a disappointment or a regression. From the onset Turn10 made it very clear that they were doing a "back to basics" campaign with the game. The mainline Forza games are about leveling up your Drivatar, unlocking new car grades, getting nerdy about car parts and decals, and playing online race league matches. Those are the things the sim, non-arcade, racing fans wanted Turn10 to go back to and re-emphasize and honestly, they delivered on that.

The mainline versus Horizon relationship has ALWAYS been a Star Trek vs. Star Wars thing. Science fiction was the main numbered games and Horizon was science opera.

First off, and I say this as part of the moderation team, but you should keep in mind ways of disagreeing with users other than calling them "wrong" when, as you suggest later, there's more nuance to this discussion. I'm not logging this down; I want the tenor here and elsewhere to avoid that in the future.

To the topic, I do think there's been a gradual moving of the goal post with the mainline Forza games as the Horizon games have become increasingly more popular. The first three Forza Motorsport games barely had a story mode and that's partly because the game was emulating Gran Turismo which wanted to buck the story modes of games like Ridge Racer because they wanted the focus to be on the cars. The issue with the music might seem weird, but this was actually requested by many in the Forza and Gran Turismo sim side of the fanbase that felt the music distracted from hearing realistic engine and gear shifting sound effects. This is actually a thing many on the sim side care about and guess what, they showed up to the public betas and feedback sessions to say that.

@zombiepie: First of all not to get into a "he started it" thing, but the very first sentence of his comment was "this seems like a crazy argument to me." Responding "you're wrong" is, if anything, a de-escalation. It is not ad hominem (whereas "you make crazy arguments" is, implicitly) and squarely addresses the claims made. Even by soft and friendly Giant Bomb standards just calling someone "wrong" is way short of the level of hostility that slides. I am all about keeping the peace but if someone says "your argument is crazy" I'm going to match that energy at least half way.

I do not understand the music point. I'm not saying you're wrong here because I don't actually know the facts of what people requested, but if they did request that it makes no sense.

If you want to hear the race sounds you can...turn the music off. Forza Horizon lets you turn the radio off. Gran Turismo 7 has a "play race BGM" toggle in settings you can flip off if you don't want music. Requesting that the game not include music at all because you don't want to have to spend the literal 5 seconds it takes to disable it seems pretty unreasonable to me.

@ben_h: "Judas Priest's "Turbo Lover", the most racing song-ass racing song in existence".

This is facts.

Oh dear, I wished if this game could of done a lot better along with Gran Turismo 7.

Honestly, I couldn't make it past the unskippable, long-winded, masturbatory narrations of "what it means to be a car" at the beginning of the game. I sat through the first one it throws at you on launch, did the tutorial race, pick a jumpsuit color, and turned the game off partway through the second one it throws you into after that.

@brian_: I don't understand why all these games (and Grand Turismo does this too) feel like they have to explain what cars are to us as if they're the mystical amulet of Zoranthion in a fantasy RPG. The difference is that the mystical amulet of Zoranthion does not exist so we've never heard of it and do not know why it is important. Anyone playing Gran Turismo or Forza is going to be familiar with cars, even if they do not drive. And a lot of it is this purple prose about how amazing it feels to drive. I've driven a number of cars, including some that I've driven in video games, and that has never been my experience.

Real life driving is mostly slightly anxiety provoking because of the responsibility of navigating a giant mass of metal that could easily kill someone, especially driving in urban environments. "Cars connect us to the primal concept of movement."

No. They help me get my flat packed computer chair home from Ikea!

@brian_: I accidentally turned on the Accessibility option to narrate all of my selections in the Microsoft George voice, so the opening narration(s) were delivered in a hilariously stilted voice. But yeah, it’s just fucking cars. I don’t think we need an explanation beyond “it’s really fun when the car go big fast”.

I couldn't handle the narrated tutorials. I uninstalled after finishing the upgrade tutorial.

I understand if they put these in for newcomers but they should have an option to turn off or at least skip the tutorials.

To be fair, IMO, on that race sounds thing, I was like humm, yeah why not just have the option to turn it off then i realized were talking about a sim, with dedicated fans. More WorthaBUY reviewer type gamers and if you read his comment section these gamers can be extremely picky about anything in their game not being what they want even if the option is there its a front on them that you even dared to include dev time to putting tracks in when it might have taken time away from making the tire grip sound better on their powerful speakers. Not to make fun of them, these games are serious. We just had that film about a racer becoming a real racer due to how realistic these games can get, GT movie.

I agree though on paper it sounds funny since yeah. But there is reason behind it. They may want the tone to be consistent, to know all racers arent listening to ingame tunes, to remove all silliness. Kinda like how people will never watch a cartoon but will watch a “serious” movie thats later shown to be a remake of the cartoon cause they just fall more to that being their thing. Guess that example doesn't work but you get it. ha. Anyway always thought Motorsports was for the serious crowd and forza was for the fun. Kinda like how my buddies wont touch any arcady nba game with a pole and i thing realistic NBA 2k isn't as fun as say nba street or jam. If you mix the feel of the games people get pissed no matter how illogical. And those same “serious” gamers nearly puke playing games with modern cool kid lingo and all that color and stuff forza does. Again, go to comment sections of some games and they explain it better, people are just literally that picky. I know a friend that will claim fortnite is too repetitive, and when i asked and explained more modes exist than the normal royal and they create levels and they add new weapons and powers he flipped and quit it forever as to him the games must stay sterile and stagnant or their bad. You'd be surprised how many reviewers ask for games to advance and the reason they dont change too much is because you guessed it the larger audience is casual and doesnt want to skip a year of their favorite game and comeback and everything feels too unfamiliar. They want it like that. Motorsports is reviewing well because they gave the fans what they want, and didnt try to cater to everyone (including nonfans) and fail like (sonic sometimes does XD)

I barely notice the music when it's there in GT7. I'm too busy grinding out that Le Mans race with the big (BUT NOT BIG ENOUGH, SIR) payout.

The first thing I do in a racing game is turn off the music even in something like Horizon.

In Gran Turismo's defence, the Music Rally mode isn't a complete shitshow. I'm not sure it needs to be there but it has a vibe.

I am totally down for a dry Forza-ass Forza as opposed to the fake bubblegum pie-in-the-sky Horizon experience. That said, the unlock mechanics and practice laps sure seem like a uhhhh choice.

I know you can skip the practice laps by exiting out of it, but the game clearly doesn't want me to, given it doesn't present the option in the menu so I've been doing it but it kills the pacing of the cups. I am enjoying the driving, so I'll keep chipping away at it but I'm basically gonna do 1 race a day cuz practice + race is like 7-9 laps which feels plenty per session.

Quick Resume/Suspend doesn't really work, which is my biggest beef with the game. QR seems to work when out in the main menu, but I suspended after practice a few times and every time it crashed when I resumed. I had to redo practice runs several times because of this...I'm too used to jumping back into games quickly on consoles now. The fact that I have to boot up the game every time is a hassle, especially for a 1st party game on a system that features QR.

No music is silly but I kinda like having the excuse to listen to a new album i've been meaning to check out via Spotify.

I forgot that Forza 4 wanted you to become a criminal, lol.

Ok, so I downloaded the new Forza to try it. You aren't kidding. It took over a a half hour just to finish the tutorial. Most of the things they explain are obvious and in previous Forza games would not have required a tutorial. It's fine that they have a heavy-handed tutorial but there needs to be an "I've played Forza before" button so badly. The last Forza game was also guilty of this.

The game also badly needs a difficulty detection setup like other racing games do. They just give you a slider but no context for what each position is. I moved the slider up a couple ticks and was still like 6 seconds a lap faster than the AI. Other racing games now have a system where you do some laps and it detects roughly what difficulty you should start at based on your lap times, which works great.

In general there's a lot of things in this game that seem unnecessary. Before each race there's a couple things to button through and after there's a podium ceremony to button through. It's all just so sluggish and tedious. Just let me race. The racing bit of the game is good. Everything around it though is not. The menus don't really show you what each series is until you go through a loading screen into it. There's a distinct lack of information density in literally any menu. It's all form, no function, which is frustrating for a racing game.

The more I play this game the more this stuff sticks out. Nearly every menu in this game has at least one or two either unnecessary or redundant screens to button through to get where you want to be. Every time. They at least start to give you the option to skip some of the cutscenes after you first view them but by even having an option to skip it seems like somebody at Turn 10 was like "Hey guys, this cutscene takes literally 30 seconds to watch and shows up before every single practice session right? Isn't this a bit much? Shouldn't we just show this the first couple times?" but then someone else pushed back so they compromised with yet another thing to skip through.

Then there's the Drivatar system. I am increasingly convinced that the Drivatar system is a self-fulfilling prophecy of ending up crashy because the game forces you into unavoidable crashes, thus making your Drivatar also crash a lot. I try to start further back for a bigger podium bonus and at least once per race I get driven into by the AI. I get PIT manoeuvred constantly. Even worse the AI doesn't demonstrate clean and reasonable racing so players won't learn how to drive correctly. I had a race yesterday where one of the lead AI cars slammed on the brakes in the middle of Eau Rouge at Spa at the start of the race, which caused the entire field to crash and forced me off track to avoid crashing. I took the lead then just cruised to a win. At this point I'd rather they just ditch the Drivatar system and put in a reasonable AI that allows the player to properly learn how to race before engaging in the multiplayer they seem to want people to use.

The practice session is not only as bad as everyone's saying, but actually even worse if you've played other racing games that have practice session systems. The system of "I dunno drive for 5-10 minutes and try to do one lap fast" gets boring extremely quickly and teaches you nothing beyond the basic flow of the track. By comparison, the F1 games give you a series of objectives and modes during practice that do actually help you improve your race craft and learn the track properly. They force you to do a lap smoothly so you don't wreck your tires or go through gates at a certain speed to show you the correct way of going around the track. The rewards for completing these objectives and modes are meaningful beyond just being XP to level up a largely pointless levelling system (In F1, completing practice gives you resources to upgrade your car and team). None of these systems are new. They've been in the F1 games for years. The Forza people either need to commit to making the practice system good or make it entirely optional without giving the player shit for skipping it.

Now that I've put a lot more time into it I think even more so that my previous point that this is a game that wants to appeal to two different audiences (casual and sim audiences) but in doing so fails to appeal to either holds true. If the game was truly serious about wanting to appeal to the sim crowd and get people into racing sims, it would go through a lot more effort to teach players to race properly. At the same time it puts up way too many barriers for casual players. You can't just pick your favourite car and do a bunch of races in the single player campaign. Everything has to be unlocked which means you're forced to drive a bunch of new, boring, heavy, expensive European sports cars that all drive the same for several hours before you can get to the fun Japanese tuner cars, shitboxes, and old muscle cars that were a staple of old Forza. The original Forza Motorsport started by letting you pick from a series of Japanese tuner cars and racing down a mountain. They knew what racing fans wanted. It doesn't seem like the folks making decisions about these games do anymore.

Forza now has the cork-sniffing of Gran Turismo but doesn't back that up with anything of substance. It's painfully generic and soulless. One can only watch so many cutscenes of a camera slowly panning over a car before they want to see something else. It's so disappointing. It's all show, no go.

The music is the first thing I turn off in any racing game. I want to hear the full sound of the cars.

While I could see why they would put music in Horizon, I do not think it is necessary for the mainline Forza games.

Also, I want my sims to be "dry": the fun I have is buying new cars, upgrading them, while trying to shave tenths of a second of my previous lap time.

Just played a little bit of the new Forza Motorsport. First of all, the lack of music while doing the driving doesn't bother me. This maybe because of my experience with the F1 games and how they also don't have music playing during the races in favor of realism of hearing the different car engines and tires screeching. Secondly, I so far don't see what the negatives are about. This is the same style of Forza Motorsport game I remembered from the last couple of entries. I never owned an Xbox console, so I never played the early Forza games which apparently, based on some of the post on this thread, had licensed music. I like the many features and options in the game players can fine tune to fit their personal play style. As a beginner, I'm currently using the handicaps the game starts out with. I will probably turn up the difficulty and take some of the training wheels off as I get better at the game.

The only issue I have with this game so far, is the performance. It's clear that this game needs some patch work. Its the main reason the game is getting negative reviews on Game Pass, both on Xbox and PC. Many people are reporting that the game is crashing or not even starting. And many with really beefy PCs claim graphics on Ultra settings is not much different than Medium and High settings.

Overall, the game is what I expected. I likely won't stick with it for too long, but that's more so because of other games I want to play taking priority, not because I think this new Forza Motorsport is a bad game. Clearly, the developers were trying to making this one as sim heavy as possible, similar to the F1 series, as an opposite to the more arcade like Forza Horizon. And I believe this is the main reason many are turned off to this game besides the performance issues. The people got too used to the Forza Horizon games and forget just how true to life the original Motorsport series was.

And with that said, the game not having a lot or any tracks based on real race tracks doesn't bother me either, because they all look the same to me. Yeah, I said it.

Ok so I've played more of this game. I've also just spent several hours playing the new EA WRC game made by the Dirt Rally people. The WRC game is a great example of how to balance giving the rally sickos like me what they want and what the casual players want. First and foremost, it has a completely optional rally school that teaches the basics of rally racing (it took me a bit less than an hour to complete. Think the Gran Turismo license tests but optional). It also has all of the assists you'd ever want and even simplified co-driver calls for more casual players. The game is designed from the get go to be approachable for casuals but at the same time doesn't cordon off the sim people from doing what they want out of the gate.

The driving in WRC is great. It still feels like Dirt Rally but it's Dirt Rally with an actual budget. Every car I've used feels distinct in just the right way. I haven't played the game with my wheel yet but with a controller the game seems more responsive and predictable than the Dirt Rally games. Codemasters put in a bunch of extra effort in the F1 games to make the games much better with a controller from F1 2020 onward. It seems those types of efforts have been made with WRC as well. Contrast that with Forza where with a controller every car's default setup seems to be to understeer a ton and you are blocked by the stupid car levelling system from getting parts to unlock doing any setup to alleviate handling issues.

Since I have my wheel set up I also played Assetto Corsa Competizione and Forza back to back. Forza with a wheel is definitely better than with a controller (the wheel seems to unlock a much wider range of steering input, which is bizarre and is probably partly why the Forza feels so understeery and vague with a controller) but compared to a much more sim-ish game it's obvious not going to be quite as good. Playing Forza and another more serious racing game one after another emphasizes just how awful the Drivatar system is. In ACC, the AI (which can be tuned in terms of both difficulty and aggression) goes out of its way to avoid collisions with you. It will never slam on the brakes randomly or run you off the track. More importantly, the ACC AI drivers seem to acknowledge that you exist. They do basic defence and adjust their racing line based on what you do, which allows you to drive more aggressively without risking crashes. The Forza Drivatars don't do that. A lot of the collisions I somehow get in are a result of the Drivatars just driving straight into my car or copying Sergio Perez's most recent move in F1 by turning in and acting like my car isn't there beside them on the inside. I usually play with rewind off, but in Forza it's almost a requirement because you can't rely on the AI to not punt you out of corners or suddenly cut you off on straights. It's such a bummer.

I agree with OP's sentiment that it's pretty dry and lacks any sort of personality - though I must admit that I'm not a car guy. I was hoping they'd finally fix the 3rd person camera or add an option to lock the horizontal view to the direction of the car (Gran Turismo fixed that since 5) but it's the same as previous Forza and Horizon games, so playing in 3rd person chase cam still feels like controlling an unresponsive/laggy drunken camera instead of the car. You can definitely get used to it but it's an inferior experience IMHO.

Visually disappointing as well. I generally don't care about graphics but since I didn't care about much else in the game I was hoping to at least enjoy the scenery. I have a pretty beefy CPU with a modest GPU (rtx 2080) which I figured would be good enough for high settings at 1080p (with DLSS) but noooo... At "auto" settings it's one of the fugliest racing games I've played. It can't hit consistent 60fps at medium preset at 1080p with raytracing disabled so I have to use low setting or leave it at "auto" which makes everything look like blurry mess. It's especially disappointing because Forza 7 and Horizon 5 looked way better and ran better on older machines.

I'm still playing it mostly due to sunk cost (didn't buy it since it's on Game Pass but I still spent 100+ GB of bandwidth) but I can't imagine sticking with it for much longer.