There aren’t any surprises in the topics discussed, but it’s still good to see the Forza Motorsport developers respond to feedback so far at the start of 2024. In a message co-signed by Game Director Andy Beaudoin, Creative Director Chris Esaki and Executive Producer Trevor Laupmanis, they cover car progression, AI, race regulations and penalties.
A top prority this year is the car progression system, which has received a fairly poor reception. “It is clear from looking at feedback that while many of our players are enjoying the system as is, for many others it isn’t delivering the upgrade experience that they expect from Forza Motorsport. To address this, we are exploring changes to the system. Our goal with these changes is to retain what is working for those that enjoy it, while resolving the issues many of our most dedicated players have with the system.”
Personally, I think the best solution would be a version of the Manufacturer Affinity rewards first introduced back in Forza Motorsport 4. That would allow you to switch between cars, and own multiple versions of the same model for different classes, without forcing you to let the AI drive each car for hours to simply unlock tuning options. But still rewards you for sticking with a particular bonnet badge.
The other two issues discussed both concern the action on track. “We are aware that Forza Race Regulations are not working as intended in some situations. We have heard about inconsistent or unfair penalties in instances of intentional ramming, being pushed off the track, and spinning cars pushing drivers off the track. We have also heard that high speed collisions sometimes have no penalties while low speed collisions have mild penalties. It’s important that we capture all the data that we can about a race when FRR rulings happen in error, so over the next few months, we will be working with some long-time competitive Motorsport players to gather direct telemetry from them while they’re playing.”
And in single player, “We have seen feedback about our AI’s driving behavior: abruptly braking and slowing down; not accelerating out of exits, braking too hard on mild corners, and following racing lines too strictly. We understand how important it is to have fair and competitive AI in Motorsport and are our top priorities in early 2024 are addressing overly aggressive AI, while also getting a cleaner race start into turn 1 where many of the issues above most severely manifest and impact players.”
As a sim racer, it’s easier to understand the time and effort needed to evolve the penalty system based on data from actual players, rather than the issues with the car progression and AI which are pretty obvious from the first times you play Forza Motorsport. And fixing car levels would probably have the biggest impact on a lot of players, as part of the fun in previous titles has always been trying out ridiculous tunes on inappropriate cars. For example, one of my all-time favourite Forza creations was my four-wheel drive S class Toyota Aygo, which would smoke most supercars off the line but handled like a shopping trolley.
Hopefully once the improvements to all three systems start to be implemented, the Forza Motorsport experience will be more fun again, and feel less like a grind.
And the Forza team will also be able to find time to tackle some of the other issues impacting players, especially some of those which are still causing problems for livery designers, niggles with wheel support, and random occurences of invisible cars and tracks. The latter has even caused some longstanding league organisers to postpone or cancel their planned events, such as TORA, due to the fact they can’t guarantee fair racing.
Forza Motorsport is available for the PC via Steam or the Xbox Series X/S and via the Microsoft Store. And you can also play it via Game Pass for both Xbox and PC.
Keep up with all of the latest Forza Motorsport news, updates and DLC, here. Or check out the Forza Motorsport car list and circuit lists.
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