Forza Motorsport was one of 2023’s most disappointing games for a lot of racing game fans. Launched last October, the game was plagued with bugs and glitches. It lacked the polish you would expect from a triple-A game. While two post-launch patches have squashed some of these bugs, many fans still aren't happy about the game’s fundamental design.
In a community post, Turn 10 has responded to fan feedback, outlining three areas the team is focusing on improving in future updates for 2024: car progression, race regulations, and AI behaviour.
Fixing car progression is a "top priority"
The car progression is one of the biggest bugbears fans have with Forza Motorsport. Turn 10 introduced a new Car Mastery system that requires you to drive your car to level it up before you can unlock upgrades.
This system was divisive as it takes a long time to level up your car, forcing players to grind for points. Even though a post-launch patch reduced the time required to unlock upgrades, Turn 10 acknowledged that for many players, the upgrade system “isn’t delivering the upgrade experience that they expect from Forza Motorsport.”
“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,” Turn 10 said in a statement.
“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.”
Turn 10 added that resolving this issue is “a top priority for the team going into 2024.” Changing a core part of the game will take some time, however, as Turn 10 will need to “properly evaluate options, make the necessary code changes, and thoroughly test those code changes.”
Penalty system improvements
Turn 10 went on to address Forza Motorsport’s inconsistent penalty system. When racing online, some players are being unfairly penalised after being deliberately rammed off the track by an opponent.
In other cases, high-speed collisions sometimes don’t result in a penalty, while low-speed collisions have mild penalties. In response, Turn 10 will analyse telemetry data from online sessions to make the race regulations system “more accurate and reliable.”
“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,” Turn 10 said.
“They will be capturing these instances and feeding data to our team so that we can issue tweaks to make FRR more accurate and reliable. We appreciate your patience as we work on improving the system.”
Aggressive AI to be addressed
Finally, Turn 10 addressed Forza Motorsport’s overly aggressive AI. Players are experiencing erratic and bizarre behaviour from AI drivers with opponents braking abruptly or “too hard on mild corners” and sticking to the racing line too rigidly.
This has been an issue since Forza Motorsport 5 introduced cloud-powered AI Drivatars, yet Turn 10 touted Forza Motorsport's vastly improved AI in the run up to release.
“We understand how important it is to have fair and competitive AI in Motorsport and 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,” Turn 10 wrote.
Going forward, Turn 10 will publish quarterly updates responding to community feedback. Turn 10 didn’t offer a timeframe for when these changes will be implemented.
Turn 10 deserves credit for listening to fan feedback, but it’s clearly going to take a long time to fix Forza Motorsport’s myriad of issues. With player numbers plummeting, we'll have to wait and see if Forza Motorsport can still be saved. It begs the question of why Forza Motorsport was released in this state in the first place.
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