Dear motor racing fans

Here it is!

Here are my short thoughts:

This trailer looks pretty good so far with a cinematic feel for the purpose of advertisement, and I'm going to bring up my personal pros and cons.

Pros:

• Some cockpit view footage but need to show more of it.
• A new car featured in this trailer and set to debut in this installment is Cadillac V-Series.R (LMDh race car).
• The impressive roster of cars and tracks is shown in this trailer.
• The graphics look awesome.
• New & impressive home space.
• Nice car upgrade menu screen and reminds me of Project Cars 3.
• Pitstop animation (I hope it will be included in the final release).
• The release date is confirmed (October 10th, 2023).

Cons:

• I have a bad feeling it's going to be Simcade in terms of handling model just like Gran Turismo 7 (For PlayStation 5 & PlayStation 4) plus they're meant to be more optimized for controller pads than racing wheel peripherals, while there are no words on the developer's confirmation on the handling model is going to be...
• No words on will the penalty system be included, which is used for punishing rammers, track cutters and wall riders.
• This trailer is more focused on street cars like Corvette, Camaro and others (Showed for 55 seconds) than circuit spec race cars like

  Cadillac V-Series.R, Porsche Mission R and many others (Showed for 19 seconds).

Here is the link to an article for more details:

New Forza Motorsport will release October, includes Le Mans and Spa | Traxion

Sidenotes:

• I'm so going to prefer Le Mans Ultimate and RENNSPORT more than this and Gran Turismo 7, because their handling model appears to be more leaning towards Sim Racing while the Le Mans Ultimate demo is exclusively playable in the real 24 Hours of Le Mans 2023's gaming booth, plus Forza Motorsport and Gran Turismo series both have been leaning towards Simcade for a long time.
• Meanwhile, Le Mans Ultimate and RENNSPORT are both going to be more optimized for racing wheel peripherals rather than controller pads.
• I can tell Turn 10's development teams have been working so hard on this and we'll find out how will it turn out when it gets released plus I'm expecting the handling model is going to improve all over its predecessors, just like how Gran Turismo 7 did.
• However I wouldn't mind this and Gran Turismo 7 won't feature the best crash physics and damage model ever, because they're both not born to be banger racing and demolition derby games.

P.S. Please don't get offended by my opinions on this and Gran Turismo 7.

I’m pretty excited for it! Simcades are much more up my alley personally, but I hope it skews more towards hardcore people than it looked initially.

I would also add to the Con section: saying “we’ve got this” in the trailer. Some places still write like it’s 2017 I guess.

I'm ready for more simacde proper Forza, so I'm excited for this. I hope it's a bit more stable on the Deck than the last Horizon was, but that's about my only worry with it. They seem to have both series pretty well figured out.

@allthedinos said:

I hope you will enjoy it and Turn 10 will be able to improve it via post-launch updates.

I guess it will be able to run so well on the Steam Deck and the ASUS ROG Ally, if you love circuit racing plus more of a controller pad or handheld user, then this game is going to be perfect for you to play and I hope you will enjoy it.

Anyway, I'm more of a racing wheel peripheral user as it gives me more precision and realistic feel on Sim Racing (iRacing, Assetto Corsa Competizione, etc) and Simcade (F1, Gran Turismo & Forza Motorsport series).

I hope they will mention the handling model plus penalty system for both, single-player and online multiplayer modes on Forza Monthly!

Graphically the game looks great, but all these top racing games have looked good for over a decade now. I'm interested in hearing more about the "car-building career mode" tomorrow. The last few Forza games have doled out cars at such quantities that I never had a good sense of progression. Hopefully this new career mode will slow things down a bit in that regard and force me spend more time with a single vehicle.

I agreed that Simcades always need good career mode with RPG-style progression.

It looks like any other racing game ever

Not much to say, looks like it runs at 60fps so that's good...

Ok here's another thought, it would be cool if it had a style, when i think of Gran Turismo's "style" i think of varnished wood, glass coffee shops, jazz music, motor museums, but also high octane racing teams, the pride and love of racing, time attacks and split times.

They're going as far as "rebooting" Forza Motorsport but so far it looks the same as before, it would be cool if they came up with an interesting aesthetic, soundtrack, UI design, anything to make it stand out, that's something i remember from FM3 and 4 and the rest blur together.

Like @cikame just said, the game can look as good as it wants (and it appears to look as good as GT7 does, which of course is the bare minimum) and it can differentiate itself on the track as much as it wants (the trailer implies more impulsive AI and shines a spotlight on some kind of damage model) but, fully admitting I've never played a Forza nor owned an XBox, the menus sapped all the energy out of the trailer for me. I'm not even saying GT7 has the most evocative menus in the world, especially compared to GT2 or GT3, but man...Forza sure makes it look boring to fuck your favorite car.

And again, GT7 has extravagantly plain menus considering the franchise's history (for the unaware, the franchise has mostly become more and more minimalist with each entry, which has been both charming and boring somehow), but something about Forza's menus gave me such a stark, modern (specifically EA) sports sim vibe that I immediately presumed the most interesting thing to look at in this game would be the various ways the cockpits are either more or less accurate. And I'm actually not a car guy at all, and again don't even own an XBox, so...

I'm just impressed that as consumers we seem to fully understand that racing graphics are exuberantly, universally good, yet producers seem to neglect draping all these pretty cars with their visceral engines and physics in equally enjoyable menus.

@nodima: "I can't play a racing game unless the menus are evocative" is a first for me. That's a real Goldilocks claim. Like GT7's always online component is WAY more of a problem than some mediocre menus.

Also GT7s interface, while evocative in some ways, kind of sucks to use. The worldmap menu is annoying, buying cars is a fiddly pain, finding events can also be a pain, etc...

I want my menus to be functional, not evocative, because I want to get through the menu stuff to actually, you know, play the racing part of the game.

@bigsocrates: I hoped describing GT7's menus as "extravagantly plain" might make my thoughts on its menus clear, but even then there are weird bits of character like pulling up to the café with a car multiple (apparently mostly made up? also very weird!) people want to explain to you, or the way a car revs its engine while the controller emulates its feel after making a pick in the garage...or even the infamously weird historical slides...that don't rescue GT7 from its blandness but absolutely make it feel cohesive with everything else that it's doing.

Again, the rest of the presentation once again inspired me to think short and soft about adding an XBox to my apartment for the first time for the sake of Game Pass (though the short got longer and the soft got harder...pardon these poor choices of words) but in the interest of indulging GTF's premise, Forza to me mostly looked like a game I'd already played over 100 hours of, only with a moderate damage model and even more boring menus. The fact that I don't and likely won't own the console matters more to my opinion, of course, in that it matters very little at all...but assuming the game is about tinkering in the same way as GT7...

Gran Turismo has lost a lot of its romantic qualities over the years, but even compared to GT7's vapid (but singular) personality Forza seemed dull off the track. What we saw of the menus seemed almost arbitrary, as though cars should just upgrade themselves and players shouldn't think twice about any of it. And again, again, I'm aware anybody could also look at GT7's customization screens and think the same thing. But personally, I see GT's screen as something like a Baseball Reference sheet. Those glances at Forza's menus looked like "Madden but cars, and less pictures too!"

@nodima: I can tell GT7 made the Gran Turismo franchise lose its identity plus it felt much like an MMO game rather than a single-player experience game.

@bigsocrates: I'm not so satisfied with GT7's interface too, plus why can't the designers take a look back at something like Gran Turismo 4's interface? which looks much more organised and easier to navigate plus a majority of single-player career races all mainly have a single-file lineup of cars rather than a double-file lineup during rolling starts.

In the real world of motor racing's rolling starts, something like Le Mans, NASCAR, etc. We always get to see two lanes of cars slowly lining up and following each other and then pushing onto full acceleration when the green light or flag shows up as the race starts but not a single lineup unless it's race restart after the yellow flag.

Here is my wish for the future of the Gran Turismo and Forza Motorsport series by 2024 and beyond, I want them both to be even more improved by having the proper Sim Racing handling model option for racing wheel users plus still retaining Simcade handling model option to make them more consumer & accessible for controller pad users. I will really appreciate the Gran Turismo series coming to PC one day.

@cikame: I totally agree with you on what you've said.

@nodima: I think that GT7's menu system looks okay but is just bad to use. Which, again, matters more to me. But I also think that it's far from the worst aspect of Gran Turismo 7. The worst is probably the fact that in single player you ALWAYS start at the very back of the pack with a rolling start, which is just an extremely odd almost inexplicable choice. The second worst is the always online aspect, which will become the first worst when they take the servers offline (unless they patch it to still work, which they probably won't.) But the fact that you have to go to THREE different car dealers to buy cars and they're all arranged differently is pretty bad, and the customization menu isn't great either.

I think that it's very unfair to compare GT7s overall presentation to a tiny snippet of menu we saw with Forza. Forza Horizon has a whole story mode and as far as we know Forza might have a career mode or something similar with a lot more presentation stuff going on. You are looking at the good part of GT7's presentation (weird as the whole coffee shop is, and it is very frickin' weird) and then comparing that whole package to a tiny snippet of Forza's.

I don't really have a dog in this fight. I liked GT7 okay though I found it not very charming, and I'll play Forza on Game Pass, but I really don't think you can come away with a strong impression from a short trailer like this.

I think these games are trapped in a similar cycle to what hit Diablo IV this year. A dedicated fan base that pretty much wants the same game over and over. GT7 tried to mix it up by being...extremely pretentious for some reason (that game is probably the most pretentious mainstream game I can think of) and Forza may try to mix in some elements of the more popular Horizon series (in terms of presentation) which would at least liven things up. The Horizon games have their flaws but their "stories" missions where you have a passenger who talks to you about the cars and what makes them special are more compelling than any of GT7's car menus (okay, pretentious and weird.)

If Forza tries to do things like that then the presentation might not be as lifeless as you think.

@bigsocrates: All fair. At the end of the day I want all games to be their best selves. I just found the Forza showing to be quite generic compared to a lot of the other things Microsoft showed, but I s'pose that's also just casual sim racing games these days. I found GT7's nerd-chic vibe awkwardly charming, to the point I never really pondered why it has three separate car shops (and somehow the brand focused one is by far the most cumbersome and confounding) and I ultimately found its pretension (which I admit, is overwhelming) to be more cute than anything because the writing is so often esoterically dweeby. The game feels like it's square dancing around it's self-importance, and the fact that I can never tell how serious it is while knowing full well that it intends to be quite serious has never stopped being funny to me.

So I guess ultimately I'm saying that I hope XBox players get to giggle a bit too. Because whenever I go back to GT7, part of what keeps me there for a few weeks is that balance between feeling pretty tense on the track and very loose off of it.

And hopefully not derailing this thread too much: I totally get how boring it is that damn near every offline activity in the game starts you off in last place, but personally it feels like an old school, arcadey sort of touch. Maybe out of place, definitely not in line with the "racing simulator" identity the game's marketing emphasizes, but I kinda like that every race functions both as an obstacle course and a time attack. Especially during the menus, it really added to the tension of trying to figure out how to optimize my preferred car for certain courses...while hoping the AI wouldn't randomly fish tail me along the way.

@nodima: I think there is a chance that Forza will be bland but I think it's a little early to judge because it's possible that there will be elements of the presentation that are really cool even if the menus aren't. I think Forza Horizon has kind of annoying menus but I wouldn't say it has boring presentation, in fact I would say it does some presentation stuff very well.

I am not a GT7 hater or anything, as I said I like the game fine, I just found its menus cumbersome and annoying. I also played it while I had a temporary roommate and he mocked me mercilessly about it. "Oh, when we were kids video games were about saving the world and fighting aliens, good to see they've progressed to going to a coffee shop to listen to a retired guy brag about the cars he designed. Big improvement." Or "Why are you racing cars when you could be sipping a latte with your super chipper personal assistant? Seems like a waste."

I do think it has a touch of self awareness at times. But just a touch. I also think the 3 car shops and much of the rest of it are intended to portray the fantasy of starting out broke and becoming rich so you go to fancier stores and get exclusive invites, but it didn't work for me.

I don't mind the "rolling start from the back" thing and there is an old school arcade sense to it, I just have no idea why it's EVERY race except like Time Trials. Why aren't there at least some race variations where you start from a grid or can do a lap to improve your starting position? It just seems very strange in a game that's all about huge numbers of tracks and cars and variety to not have ANY variety there, especially when in real life that's not how things work.

Oh dear, here is something I've forgotten to show you guys in the two most recent articles for this game, it's going to have online DRM, just like Gran Turismo 7, so that means both always need an internet connection to play & progress through single-player career mode unfortunately, all I can do is treat them both like training modes for MMO games. Plus I have a feeling this game could be another iRacing of Simcade just like Gran Turismo 7 when it comes to PVP matches and ranking.

Links:

• Forza Motorsport's Career Mode Is Always-Online, DLC Plans Detailed | Pure Xbox
• Forza Motorsport copying Gran Turismo 7’s mandatory online | Metro News

Edit: Yeah, a lot of people dislike online DRM for single-player-focused games.