Forza Motorsport [XBSX|S, PC, XGP]

[Seanspeed]

Did anyone watch the latest deep dive into physics and AI? Genuinely impressive improvements, I'm actually pretty shocked (maybe I shouldn't be) at how poor previous FM AI was, they couldn't feather throttle or brake pedal, was completely binary inputs and. I knew about the rubberbanding though which IMO has never had any place in any game calling itself a simulator.

The comparison between AI lap times on the hardest difficulty FM7 vs FM is crazy too!

This and the multiplayer improvements they're making are the biggest selling points for me so far.

I'm sure none of this will be perfect, it never is, but it goes a really long way in making the racing feel better, and will hopefully make single player racing more worthwhile and challenging.

Also, if you think previous FM AI is poor, you should have seen Gran Turismo's. At least Forza's AI felt like there was some life and pace to things, while in GT it was genuinely completely braindead and painfully slow.

 

[Cyan]

new interesting info, screengrabs and videos.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1701267585315004586

 

[mr magoo]

This looks so good I can’t wait.

 

[cheapchips]

So XSX has 4k 60fps performance mode, RT 60fps variable res and RT 30fps quality. DF John has a video on the way, presumably talking about these modes from the press preview build.

Wonder how the XSS compares? The same at a 1440p starting point would be nice to see from a first party studio.

In the video I watched, load times seems really quick, but I couldn't tell if that was editing. Fast loading seems like an essential feature for next gen racing games I think.

 

[snc]

 

[Seanspeed]

So XSX has 4k 60fps performance mode, RT 60fps variable res and RT 30fps quality. DF John has a video on the way, presumably talking about these modes from the press preview build.

Wonder how the XSS compares? The same at a 1440p starting point would be nice to see from a first party studio.

In the video I watched, load times seems really quick, but I couldn't tell if that was editing. Fast loading seems like an essential feature for next gen racing games I think.

Loading times are definitely a lot better than in previous games, but they still seem to be hiding a fair bit of it through some cinematics and pre-race menu stuff and all. So it's still not quite as fast as I'd ultimately like, where I think ideally they'd streamline the menus and avoid all the extra transition scenes and everything if you could just set everything up from the main menus and then have everything load up in a few seconds with no extra faff. But I'm guessing the way they do things now, there's a very large change from main menus to actual in-game mode, so not just a matter of loading in some graphics.

 

[Seanspeed]

SuperGT hasn't really liked Forza in quite a while now, and I've disagreed with many of his takes on the franchise in recent years. Not saying he's not worth listening to, just maybe not the first person I'd be interested in hearing from personally.

Another video for somebody who I think is maybe not quiet so biased against it:

 

[Dictator]

Really want to see that PC version! So far only the xbox.

 

[cheapchips]

No racing RT reflections for Series S or RTAO. It's still using FH5's surfel GI though, which let face it, is a bigger visual impact.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1701428720450379971

 

[Karamazov]

imagine the obvious VR MOD incoming for PC, at full details and RTGI if you have a powerful enough machine, oh god, you'll never want to remove the headset.

 

[Johnny Awesome]

This game looks phenomenal.

 

[iroboto]

SuperGT reporting wheel is much better than before. Now is happy with the wheel experience now. So that is the great news here. Simulation steering is more responsive, overall major improvements to the driving feel and response over predecessors, but some settings require tweaking for it to feel that way

 

[RobertR1]

SuperGT reporting wheel is much better than before. Now is happy with the wheel experience now. So that is the great news here. Simulation steering is more responsive, overall major improvements to the driving feel and response over predecessors, but some settings require tweaking for it to feel that way

Hopefully on the PC, it supports proper simrigs and not just the mainstream setups. We'll see.

 

[Seanspeed]

imagine the obvious VR MOD incoming for PC, at full details and RTGI if you have a powerful enough machine, oh god, you'll never want to remove the headset.

We'll see how mod-able it actually is. Obviously UWP apps weren't mod-able at all, but even with Steam options, I've not seen much in the way of mods for like Forza Horizon or anything. Including VR is not actually something you can just easily hack into such games, either.

It's an absolute travesty that this game wont have VR support. Something so good looking, with presentation levels well beyond what exists for any other PC sim, and we're forced to play it on a flat screen. smh

I have more hope for GT7 coming to PC with VR support, honestly. Not saying I definitely think it'll happen, just I think there's a better chance since the game already has all the built-in VR integration.

 

[BitByte]

SuperGT hasn't really liked Forza in quite a while now, and I've disagreed with many of his takes on the franchise in recent years. Not saying he's not worth listening to, just maybe not the first person I'd be interested in hearing from personally.

It's not really surprising that he doesn't like it. Mainline Forza since 5 has been objectively bad at least when it comes to the driving model. Very unrealistic in a bad way. It's like it's trying to be a sim but doing it poorly. Even on dry roads, it feels like you're driving on ice. When i drive cars I've driven irl in Forza 5-7, it just feels wrong.

 

[Seanspeed]

Mainline Forza since 5 has been objectively bad at least when it comes to the driving model.

I mean, that's just a completely ridiculous claim. Forza Motorsport has largely, at least since FM2, driven very similarly. Nothing drastic happened from FM4 to FM5 that would make it so different, let alone anything you could call 'objectively bad', which is an even more absurd take. The driving model has always been very good. A good sort of sim-lite balance. Your claim about 'driving on ice' really bears no relation to any experience I've had, outside of certain cars, especially non-sports cars with stock setups, but that's not unusual or even unrealistic.

Now if you want to talk wheel support or something, sure, there's more there to argue, but the driving model itself has always been good. Genuinely one of the last things that there is to complain about with the series.

 

[BitByte]

I mean, that's just a completely ridiculous claim. Forza Motorsport has largely, at least since FM2, driven very similarly. Nothing drastic happened from FM4 to FM5 that would make it so different, let alone anything you could call 'objectively bad', which is an even more absurd take. The driving model has always been very good. A good sort of sim-lite balance. Your claim about 'driving on ice' really bears no relation to any experience I've had, outside of certain cars, especially non-sports cars with stock setups, but that's not unusual or even unrealistic.

Now if you want to talk wheel support or something, sure, there's more there to argue, but the driving model itself has always been good. Genuinely one of the last things that there is to complain about with the series.

I guess we can agree to disagree but, calling Forza's driving model good as it relates to fm5 - fm7? That is not something I consider to be congruent with reality. I haven't really used a wheel with Forza. I tried a few times and it wasn't great. The game was designed with controller as the main input.

 

[hughJ]

The one time I tried FM7 with a wheel I almost convinced myself it was time to throw it away and replace it because of how bad it felt. I then loaded up AC as a sanity check. Even the most basic test of sitting in an unmoving car and manipulating the tires side to side was a night and day showcase that AC is doing something that FM wasn't. And it's not like AC is an outlier. I'd gladly take older stuff like rFactor, GTR2, LiveForSpeed(?), etc over FM as well. It makes sense because those were sims that were made for wheels and people that play sims. Pretty much the only feature they have to nail is how the car handling feels with a wheel, because they obviously can't compete on graphics/art.

Maybe FM8's tire simulation and FFB will be worthy of calling it a "sim" unapologetically, but when has Turn10 (or really any mainstream console sim-adjacent racer) actually matched their marketing hype? They know who their audience is. Their audience are arcade racers that want to play with a controller on the TV, but want the cachet of the term "sim". That's how they can spin nonsense about AI drivatars powered by the cloud and actually get a lot of kids gobbling it up. Maybe FM8 will be different, but I don't see why it should be. They're in the business of making car games that millions of people play, not thousands like iRacing.

 

[Seanspeed]

I guess we can agree to disagree but, calling Forza's driving model good as it relates to fm5 - fm7? That is not something I consider to be congruent with reality. I haven't really used a wheel with Forza. I tried a few times and it wasn't great. The game was designed with controller as the main input.

It is more than congruent with reality. There was nothing special or strange that happened with FM5-7 that changed up the driving model so much like you're suggesting. I've been playing these games since the beginning and outside the first game, they all have a VERY similar driving model at the end of the day. And I'm pretty decent as well as a long-time sim racer, so I know how to read what's going on with the handling.

The one time I tried FM7 with a wheel I almost convinced myself it was time to throw it away and replace it because of how bad it felt. I then loaded up AC as a sanity check. Even the most basic test of sitting in an unmoving car and manipulating the tires side to side was a night and day showcase that AC is doing something that FM wasn't. And it's not like AC is an outlier. I'd gladly take older stuff like rFactor, GTR2, LiveForSpeed(?), etc over FM as well. It makes sense because those were sims that were made for wheels and people that play sims. Pretty much the only feature they have to nail is how the car handling feels with a wheel, because they obviously can't compete on graphics/art.

Maybe FM8's tire simulation and FFB will be worthy of calling it a "sim" unapologetically, but when has Turn10 (or really any mainstream console sim-adjacent racer) actually matched their marketing hype? They know who their audience is. Their audience are arcade racers that want to play with a controller on the TV, but want the cachet of the term "sim". That's how they can spin nonsense about AI drivatars powered by the cloud and actually get a lot of kids gobbling it up. Maybe FM8 will be different, but I don't see why it should be. They're in the business of making car games that millions of people play, not thousands like iRacing.

Wheel support has been notoriously bad in Forza Motorsport. FM7 did make a big improvement with a very late update, though. Still not as good as hardcore sims, but put it a lot more in line with something like GT Sport.

Also, calling Forza Motorsport an 'arcade' racer is just absolutely silly. I dont know why people do this. Forza Motorsport, much like GT, are still VERY much on the sim side of the spectrum. Sim-lite is what I think is most accurate. Saying they are arcade racers makes it sound like they're no different from Mario Kart or Need for Speed, which they so very clearly are. They still require actual proper driving technique for the most part; they're just a bit more forgiving than full on sims. Anybody who is competent at FM/GT will be able to translate their skills well enough to something like AC or iRacing, which you absolutely cannot say with Burnout Paradise.

As for the AI stuff, I think they've already demonstrated pretty good improvements. I think the 'Drivatar' thing was always garbage though, and could never actually replicate, to even any close degree, any specific person's behavior. We never really needed that, though. Just needed to make the AI race more competitively, and smarter. And it absolutely looks like they're much more competitive now. The AI has always been ahead of GT's, but the gap is looking like it's going to widen massively now.

 

[iroboto]

I played a lot of Forza on wheel, and I stopped. It was not fun and it felt like all my cars were constantly driving on wets or something. Controller was so much easier.

This goes for both FH and FM series. Hopefully this is the improvement I’m looking for or back to port begging for GT7 or I finally pony up to pay a sub for iracing.