Forza Motorsport Trip Report (Patreon)

If asked, I’d tell you that I’m a Forza Motorsport fan. It wasn’t always that way, but as the franchise moved onto the Xbox 360 and as the various levels of player assists came into being and were continually refined, I think Turn 10 really hit upon a way to make a serious racing game accessible to a much wider swath of players. This is what kept me from ever really enjoying those first few Gran Turismo games.

Over time, Motorsport stalled a bit. They hit upon a great formula but had trouble finding a real “here’s what’s next” feature to make the game feel like it was truly moving forward. It probably didn’t help that it spawned a subseries in Forza Horizon, a game that takes Forza’s filthy lust for cars and a general level of seriousness about physics simulations and performance and all that and sets it all loose in an open-world full of vibrant vistas with a variety of event types that make it feel like there’s always something new to do.

Now, not everyone is going to feel this way, but as Horizon became more established, the flat, almost po-faced attitude of Motorsport became harder for me to come back to. So I’ve found myself really looking forward to this one, because the extra development time felt like it could be a great opportunity for Motorsport to re-find its identity in a world where there’ve been two Horizon releases between this and the previous Motorsport. The good news is that I feel like it’s finding that identity! The less-good news is that its identity is something I’m finding to be the opposite of “my bag.”

Forza Motorsport makes smart improvements and redesigns to its progression system. The career mode is broken up into tours, which as you might expect are built around specific types of cars, like “German” or “Hot Hatches.” Each one of these is broken up into five different races, so no one restriction lingers too long. They’ll also have performance restrictions, as before, and increasing car performance is probably where the biggest change for Motorsport lies: Each car levels up individually, and as your car gains levels you’ll earn a separate upgrade currency and you’ll also unlock the different types of upgrades available for each vehicle. At level 2, for example, you’ll unlock rim size customization, later on you’ll unlock clutch upgrades, and so on. Horizon had a similar system but instead of locking out actual performance improvements you’d unlock things like longer combo meters or bonus points for performing certain maneuvers. It works well here to keep you focused on one vehicle, at least for the duration of the tour, and as you graduate out of the tour system and into the multiplayer it’ll give you a good reason to find the handful of cars you really like and focus on making them as good as you can. You’ll also earn a manufacturer discount for hitting max level in a car. I think the Car XP and Car Points process helps give the game a feeling of progression, something the franchise has had a hard time balancing in the past.

The career mode has an annoying process of forcing you into practice before you can race. This, like the real thing, gives you a chance before the track is full of cars to do some laps and learn the course. This is again going to be one of those “what, exactly, do you want out of a racing game” sort of questions, because the idea of racing three laps on an empty track and then racing four real laps on the same track right afterwards is not really what I’m looking for. The game lets you skip practice, but not without forcing you to load all the way into the practice session first and then admonishing you when you quit early by trying to remind you of the Car XP you’ll be missing out on. Skipping practice should just be a menu option or something, loading in and out to get to the race is just a waste of time. If I wanted to practice a track I’d go to one of the other two offline modes.

You can take on a variety of time trials in the rivals mode, head to free race when you just want to pick a track and a car and go, and, of course, it has a multiplayer mode, “featured multiplayer.” This means that the game rotates tracks and events as time passes. Sometimes you’ll load it up and a race will be starting in a few minutes, sometimes it might be 15 minutes or so, depending on which sort of event you’re after. If you get into an event early, it lets you do a practice session and a qualifier to earn your starting position.

In order to open up more options, you first need to compete in an online qualifier series. From there you can get into a good variety of events and series, each with their own set of restrictions, much like the offline tours. In my experience, the multiplayer felt good and snappy, though if you’re the sort of person who just wants to get into a game already, you… can’t? As of this writing, Spec events start every 30 minutes, open events kick off every 20 minutes, and the introductory qualifiers also run every 20 minutes. Sometimes you just… want to get a race in, ya know? The way this is all set up both feels like a smart way to focus people are specific events and sessions while also being just inconvenient enough to be a hassle.

Like Gran Turismo Sport before it, Forza now has a safety rating that goes up and down depending on how willing you are to smash into other players. It isn’t something that factors into every mode, but it’s something that will lock you out of certain types of multiplayer events if you’re the type of goon who just slams into the first turn at full speed, smashing into every car in your way. This is not my bag, but it seems like a fine system in theory. Of course, getting banged around on the first turn and having the game think for a few seconds before assessing you a penalty in a collision that sure didn’t feel like it was your fault just feels bad, but most of the time… when it’s telling me that I’m being a dick… I know. Believe me, I know.

I think the thing I’d really like to see around this sort of system is something that actually teaches you how you’re supposed to drive. Decades of Ridge Racer, Need for Speed, and even Forza Horizon haven’t really been great teachers when it comes to actual sport of motorsports. How and when do I pass safely? Why is it my fault if the rear quarter-panel of my car hits an opponent that I couldn’t even see clearly? No, seriously, how are you supposed to safely pass people who don’t want to be passed? A mode that properly illustrated that—perhaps without also getting bogged down in joyless license tests the way Gran Turismo always did—would really go a long way towards opening up more of this game to me and, I suspect, other players. Instead, it just serves as another blinking sign that says “you should be playing Horizon.”

I suppose I’d say that it goes without saying that the game handles very well and offers you a variety of driving assists that let you control as much or as little of the experience as you’d like. At its heaviest, the assists will pretty much handle braking and acceleration around turns for you. Seriously, you can just keep the accelerator pegged and the game will take its foot off the gas and apply the brake for you, all you need to do is steer… and yeah, there’s also steering assistance. At its most unforgiving, well, ya know, that’s not really what I’m looking for. But everyone can find their own happy medium and, more importantly, you can start with full assists and slowly remove them as you become more comfortable behind the wheel and want to take on some additional challenge. You’ll earn more credits for finishing events as you strip those assists away.

Visually, Forza looks fantastic and runs great on an Xbox Series X. On the PC, I’ve found it to be a little more uneven, with the game’s automatic graphics settings getting me performance that can range from a stuttery rate in the high 30s all the way up to somewhere in the 120 range. The fluctuations don’t feel great! It has a wide variety of options, so perhaps this is a case of me just needing to spend more time dialing it all in, but starting at the automatic settings and doing some minor tweaking (disabling ray-tracing and such) hasn’t really impacted that performance. Obviously your experience with this is entirely dependent on what you’re running it on, so all I’ll really say here is that I haven’t found a satisfying middle ground for the settings yet.

If you needed to pick a big differentiator between Motorsport and Horizon’s tone, music is a big one. Meaning, like, Motorsport has no in-game soundtrack. I suppose this helps underscore the seriousness of it all, but in an era where we do have Horizon as a comparison point, Motorsport just continues to feel dry as a bone at every turn. The brief guide sent out to reviewers of the game notes that you could always run the Spotify app on your Xbox while the game runs if you really need music. I… suppose that’s one way of looking at it.

Forza Motorsport seems like a wonderful game, but I also can’t help but feel like I’m on the outside, looking in at it. Hitting me over the head to tell me that my safety rating dropped after I made accidental contact with a car in my blind spot after my very first online race sends a pretty clear message: Jeff, this game isn’t for you anymore. Forcing players into a practice session before pretty much every race draws a thick underline under that message. That’s sad, in a way, because I feel like my time with the Motorsport franchise was well-spent and was looking forward to getting back to it after a couple of Horizon games. While the improvements in structure and fidelity are easy to see, this game doesn’t feel as inclusive or fun as it did a couple of generations ago. I still have a lot left to see and do, but I’m not sure if I’m going to go see or do much more of it.