Forza Motorsport is kind of OK

I feel like I'm the only person on the Internet who is enjoying the new Forza Motorsport. Well, other than the glaring technical issues. And that point it loaded my Xbox profile, saw I have played nearly every mainline Forza and Horizon game since Forza Motorsport 2, and still made me sit through what felt like several minutes of unskippable voice narration about how car upgrading works.

But other than that, it's... fine, I guess?

Simulated Arcades

Forza and Gran Turismo are "simcade" games; a blending of arcade and simulation racers. In the arcade, simplicity and accessibility sit alongside a need to endlessly swallow coins: the classic setup is three tracks, simple handling where a drift is as good as the brake pedal, and punishing standards where anything but a top three finish will have an empty timer and "GAME OVER" on the screen quicker than you can say, "insert coin(s) to continue". Well, if it takes you 75 seconds to say that.

A traditional simulation takes a single race series and simulates it, offering all of its tracks and a championship where you'll need to set up your car in practice, qualify for a spot on the grid, run a quick warmup and then complete a race at anything up to full race distance over a double-digit number of rounds. Sometimes you'll never get the setup quite dialled in, and sometimes you'll be the victim of a mechanical failure or badly-timed yellow flag, and this will be fine because the only consequence of a 14th placed finish is... finishing 14th.

Most of the time, a simcade game takes an even blend between the two; on-edge handling is toned down and given subtle assists, championships are shortened and race weekends condensed, but the perils of midfield finishes are increased with the need to place highly to unlock content and one particular opponent who will always finish first unless you get ahead and stop them.

Forza 23 throws a bunch of that up in the air, and I love that it does.

Directed

The game is at its weakest during the introduction. It's the typical "throw you straight in" beloved of modern racing games so you spend most of your first few minutes awkwardly pausing, trying to get your controls set up, and then looking for where to turn driving aids off only to find they will not be revealed to you yet because this is the Mandatory Tutorial and therefore the car must feel weird throughout. At least it got the graphics settings mostly correct out of the box, although a later install on my laptop suggests this isn't guaranteed.

Then you get thrown into the second set piece, the last two laps of a half hour "endurance" race where you've stopped for tyres just short of the finish and all of the field is curiously still bunched within a few seconds of each other. And yet... I was fine with this. Yes, it's dumb and illogical in terms of how actual racing works but I saw this as the game going, "don't sweat the details, this isn't a proper sim" before serving another two lap introductory course, this time with my controls mostly set up.

I mean, they could also have played the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 song. That would have worked.

At this point the directed experience starts to blend into the game proper, as you're given a choice of cars, invited to choose a difficulty, and eased into the core game loop of the Builder's Cup and wanting the narrator to JUST SHUT UP, I KNOW THIS ALREADY. I pick some sort of Subaru and grit my teeth until the game finally stops explaining things I've already figured out within five seconds just from seeing the menu options.

Wrapping

If all this sounds like me not enjoying the game, it's because the opening is the weakest part. Maybe it's because I'm from an era where the first things I expect to see getting into a game are a page of video settings and a screen to calibrate my controls, but this tendency to put increasingly long directed experiences at the start of games just feels like half an hour of pointless busywork before you finally get, "congratulations, you have unlocked the main menu!"

However, once I'd haphazardly skidded my way round another championship in a Golf, bought myself a Porsche Cayman and finally started to figure out the handling, it all fell into place.

Forza 23 doesn't do "simcade" like any other game I've played, and I think I like it.

Rather than evenly blending elements across the spectrum, they've taken parts of the game and decided they're either going to be full sim or full arcade. Well, maybe not quite that far, but the splits are more 90/10 than 50/50. So what you get is this surprisingly hardcore sim driving model wrapped in completely arcade dressing, but with weird sim bits sprinkled throughout that too.

Careering

To start with I had the same problem with the handling that seems to make up half of all Steam Community threads; terminal understeer. But then I was driving an ordinary family hatchback around a racetrack, so this seemed plausible. Then a few races later, once I'd got my Cayman, I noticed a display on the bottom right. Cars were understeering because I was cooking my front tyres! I'm so unused to the idea of tyre heat making any difference in a Forza game that I was just piling into corners, loading everything up, and inevitably three turns later slithering off toward the outside kerb.

While I was getting to grips with how grip works, I noticed something else. While the career mode is overtly arcade in nature, with short championships, opponents that get faster in later races, and the option to gamble your starting position for greater winnings, it was doing something which felt far more like a sim: it didn't care if I spent every one of those four or five races scrapping for 7th place. I still unlocked the next championship.

This is something Forza has toyed with before, but here they've gone all-in. The game is positively encouraging you to whack the difficulty all the way up, turn off all the assists, start from the back of the grid and have fun. Do so and you add in sim-style penalties for going off track or crashing into other cars, although these are pleasingly generous about track limits and won't punish you for genuine mistakes you didn't gain any advantage from. Extra payouts from high difficulty offset whatever credits you lose from those down-grid finishes, so it doesn't even discourage you with slow unlocking progress for that 12th place.

Suddenly the practice sessions start to make sense. With no racing line overlay, tough opponents, short races and cars which you upgrade as a season progresses, I find I need those two or three laps to figure out where I'm braking and what I can get away with. I might be an outlier with this, but I prefer it to the game dumping you on a starting grid and going, "here, you barely remember this track, go race." I liked it even more when I realised I could tune the car during these sessions, essential when I've just added some new upgrades.

Unlocking

Speaking of upgrades, this brings me to one of the most controversial changes. You don't buy turbos and suspension bits with credits. You unlock them by driving the car you want to upgrade. It's pure arcade, and I love it.

See, for me the greatest progression in any racing game career has been Gran Turismo 2. You spend the early game repeating the first few cups, finishing 3rd or 4th so you can buy enough tuning parts to finish 1st, which lets you upgrade enough to finish 3rd or 4th in a new cup which gives more money, which you save up and buy a new car. The prizes and car costs increase throughout the game, so you start out winning 3,000 credits in a 9,000 credit car, and end winning 50k+ in a 400k+ car.

What made this work is you tended to stick with a few cars over the course of the game; you won a lot and drove a lot but only a few felt worth investing into fully upgrading.

Later Gran Turismos broke this by giving away too much money too early, then over-corrected by making the prizes too small and the cars too expensive. Forza in its early incarnations had the problem that the early game was scaled perfectly but the payouts didn't increase, so later cars were a painful grind to purchase. Then it moved to the model where the game constantly throws cars and upgrades at you, so you have 300 fully-upgraded cars you've driven somewhere between 0 and 1 times.

In this context, Forza 23's system is great.

Muscle

I started to appreciate it when I entered some sort of muscle car cup, and picked a Dodge Challenger. It was awful. It'd wallow into corners, struggle with any braking zone requiring shedding more than about 20mph, cook its tyres almost immediately and had no hope of putting any useful power down unless it was facing in a perfectly straight line.

If this had been Forza Motorsport 7, the game's homologation system would have given me an already-upgraded car with these problems fixed; stiffer suspension, stickier tyres, better brakes. And if I didn't like any of these, I'd be free to reconfigure them at will. It's very evenly simcade; the arcade philosophy of accessibility meets the simulation mindset that of course a car entering a race series would be race-prepped. It was also one of my least favourite parts of that game because it had 700 cars and all of them felt mostly the same because they all had race setups by default.

But this let me enter a race in a hopelessly under-prepared car and then gave me the full simulated consequences of doing so. It felt great, exactly like I'd expect to feel swapping a Porsche Cayman for a large front-engined muscle car. I responded by finishing my first race in 20th place. However, because I still did my practice and kept to my racing lines as much as the wayward Challenger allowed me to, I unlocked some tyre upgrades which tamed some problems while making the wobbly suspension even more noticeable. A few races later I had an upgrade for that. By the end of the series I was able to scrape a 7th place finish, with the promise I could take my Challenger back, do it again, and this time it might actually be good. Or at least vaguely driveable.

I love this. The game let me choose a bad car and forced me to turn it into something decent. This is now my Challenger, much like some time back in the early 2000s I'd fire up Gran Turismo 2 and there in the garage would be my Nissan Primera. Maybe if I raced more online with the kind of people who have perfectly tuned everything for every eventuality this slow unlocking would become annoying, but for me and my world of single-player career mode it's ideal.

While big upgrades take a long time to unlock I find the system reasonably generous on giving you enough to make a workable car setup; a few laps in Rivals mode will usually unlock the first few tiers while giving you an idea what the stock car handles like. I also find myself experimenting with upgrades I wouldn't have touched in previous Forza games, because they're what I have available.

Buggy Whip

Other than the directed experience at the start Forza 23 doesn't suffer too many of the problems which have turned me off modern AAA gaming, apart from one: launch bugs.

There was a time when putting a buggy v1.0 out on shelves would tank a game's sales even long past the point it was on a budget label and everything that could be corrected had been, but those days are long gone. I thought I'd escaped the worst with Forza 23 as most of the things I saw people complaining about online didn't happen to me, but then I did a race on my desktop while transferring the install to my laptop and this happened:

There's someone at Turn 10 who's fixed this bug in pretty much every Forza game ever (seriously, Forza Motorsport 4 would do this if your Xbox 360's DVD drive was having a bit of a strop) and they need to be given some sort of sign-off authority over releases.

The worst thing about this is it's not a single-frame glitch; once so much as one texture fails to load the game will stop loading textures full stop, while continuing to gleefully cycle existing ones out of memory until the entire track becomes invisible. It's race over at this point, and you'd better hope it hasn't also unloaded all the graphics it uses to build the menus as then it's Alt-F4 at that point.

So yes, this would be my biggest complaint: the launch version is a technical mess. Graphics options randomly appear and disappear from menus, close races may be ended at any moment by that texture glitch, and this is replicated across both my desktop and laptop. (My laptop wouldn't even launch in fullscreen correctly until I played around in NVidia control panel).

Which is a shame, because Turn 10 have made a lot of bold and interesting moves with gameplay, some of which I think are great if you take time to get used to them, and then for the sake of a few more weeks testing and polishing have given the terminal complainers of the online world a gigantic and avoidable stick to beat them with.

Although maybe I'm just weird in liking this particular odd balance of sim and arcade. Which, if they made a game just for me, surely they should have known to test on my particular hardware configuration?