The Stupid Reason I'm Now Fed Up With Forza

This evening I had some free time and the desire to play a bit of computerised racing, so I fired up... Automobilista 2.

It's a game I've neglected because while it has a lot of race series there's not one which ever makes me think, "oh yes, I want to race one of those" and despite a lot of work still has some inherited Project Cars 2 physics issues, with cars exhibiting an odd combination of being overly twitchy and yet also having too much inertia once they start sliding.

But still, once I accepted putting in some humblingly low AI strength settings and recalibrating back to the good old "it can't be realistic unless it's knife-edge difficult" mindset, I had some good fun racing. Races where I finished one event and immediately wanted to get back in the game for some more.

This is something I've been missing in Forza. I can't be the only one; at the time of writing, janky old Automobilista 2, a niche indie simulator that's nearly 4 years old at this point, has double the number of active players on Steam as Microsoft's AAA baby.

But why don't I get this same feeling from Forza? The reason, paradoxically, is that Forza is trying to get me to rack up the hours and keep coming back to it in a way which is outright obnoxious.

Picture

What's wrong with this picture?

This is a game with a career mode so shallow you could complete it inside of a week, and yet on this "Featured" tab, a tab with a mere two tours, each comprising of 17 fairly short races, one of them is about to be deleted from the game.

What lunacy inspired someone to think, "yes, there are only two options here, one of which isn't fully available yet, but that's no reason to not delete one of them"?

Let's make this picture even worse, though. Not only are we removing events from this page, leaving it more "blank space" than "things to do", each of those events has a prize car which you can only get by winning that event.

Automobilista 2 is, as I said, nearly four years old by this point and I haven't played it much over that time. Imagine opening up the game, deciding to play a GT4 race, and having it go, "oh, you wanted to race the BMW M4? Should have played during August 2022, then." The model and textures would still be on your hard disk, taking up space. You'd see opponents driving it round. Maybe, if it had an unusually good setup available, you'd see other players setting lap records on tracks that you have no reasonable hope of being able to compete with. You wouldn't, however, be able to drive it. Ever.

Time-Limited

The theory behind this time-limited content is to juice player numbers by making people who were going to spend their evening playing Minecraft or Fallout or complaining about racing games on their blog go, "oh no! If I don't play Forza this week I'll miss out on the 1974 Austin Allegro 1100. Better do that now."

This first came to the Forza series with a 2019 update to Forza Horizon 4, which locked desirable cars behind a "Festival Playlist" event which would have to be completed within the time window.

The problem here is that these things take a fun game and turn it into a joyless, mechanical experience. Log in, play, get the thing which you will only be able to get at this particular moment in time, log off feeling slightly sullied by the experience. It took me a while, but I realised Update 7 was the point at which I stopped truly enjoying Forza Horizon 4, and it's left me with no interest whatsoever in purchasing Forza Horizon 5. (Indeed, even if I saw it on a 90%-off sale I'd shrug and go, "eh, I'd probably get annoyed by all the stuff I can't unlock, may as well not bother")

This isn't the only way Forza Motorsport (2023) attempts to keep you playing, though.

One of the things I've found myself regularly doing in the game is completing the practice session, then driving around for another 5-10 minutes even though I'm confident I already know the track and all of its braking points. This is because if I don't, I won't gain enough "car points" to be able to upgrade my car to keep it competitive, as the performance requirements keep going up with each race, and completing just the races themselves doesn't give you enough.

This "you aren't playing the game to have fun, you're playing it to unlock things it's withholding from you in the hope that you can have fun later" is classic grind. The theory behind which is to keep you playing longer, in the service of some bizarro-world belief that spending 80 fairly miserable hours in a game to have 20 fun ones is somehow better than just having 20 hours of fun and wanting to purchase future games from the same developer.

I would in fairness say the grind is not outright horrible. It's not at the level of Gran Turismo 6 and its habit of handing out 4,000 credits for a race while cars cost 20,000,000. Yes, I suffered through that game and the consequence is I've never bought another Gran Turismo game again or, indeed, PlayStation console.

Dumb

This is the dumb thing. You're trying to micro-optimise increasing the amount of time someone spends in a game and how often they play it, at the cost of them going, "I'm never going to buy another one of those again".

Worse, in Forza's case, even that isn't working. There are more people currently playing Train Simulator. Tiny indie games have more players. These semi-sim buffet racers are supposed to be the flagship system sellers, and despite all these tricks Microsoft are struggling to get more people in their game at a time than would go to see a moderately successful tribute band at a local village hall.

This has knock-on effects, because Forza games take their AI behaviour from people playing the game, and when the only people playing it are ramming their way through a championship to get the thing which will be taken away next week, that now becomes how the AI work.

Not only am I grinding my way through a game which makes me feel bad about playing it, I'm doing it against AI which cannot race properly because its only point of reference is pointless blocking, brake testing, and smashing in to anything which moves. The Drivatar system simply doesn't work if it doesn't have a broad spectrum of players of all skills and safety ratings to draw from.

The worst thing for me here is that I want to like this game. Diving into Automobilista 2 reminded me of the things Forza does well. The physics are wonderful, constantly doing things I'm used to actual cars doing on the limit. The lighting and material design on the tracks are great. It's full of cars I want to drive. It's just that I have to do all of these things in a game which is constantly reminding me how thin and insubstantial it is by all the tricks it plays to pretend it's not.

You Have Messed Up

I think a part of the low player numbers is not that Forza Motorsport (2023) does this, but that Forza Motorsport games have kept trying to do this while Microsoft and Turn 10 refuse to learn from the backlash. Car Tokens in Forza 4, the rushed nature of Forza 5, the loot crates and aborted attempts at pay-to-win in Forza 7; they've created an expectation of this being a series where you really want to wait, see what happens, and then maybe pick it up in a sale once the biggest complaints are addressed.

(I'll admit, that was my plan. I got lured in by seeing how good those physics looked.)

The thing is, having done that, you really need to convince potential buyers things have changed. That's not happening. Anybody looking at the game is not going to see a "live service" game which is constantly being expanded and upgraded, they're going to see "FOMO championships", "technical issues", "limited career" and a Steam page listing reviews as "mostly negative". This isn't a "juice player numbers back up with some time-locked content" moment, it's a, "we have messed up and need to fix it" one.

That's not insurmountable. Look at No Man's Sky, which was universally panned for its paucity of content at launch and yet now is a beloved game which almost has too many things to do. The tone of some of the recent community posts suggest Turn 10 have realised something is wrong, they just need to also realise this is a problem which needs to be fixed with a passion for games and fun, not a passion for dark patterns and metric manipulation.

Either that, or I'm going to have to learn to love obscure Brazilian race series and cars which handle like go-karts on ice.