Forza Motorsport is OK with being the boring Forza
04.10.2023 - 07:36
/ polygon.com
Forza Motorsport’s developer, Turn 10 Studios, finds itself in an odd position. This is the eighth game in a series that used to be a flagship for Xbox. And yet, after an uncharacteristic six years away, it returns to find that its fun-loving younger sibling series, Forza Horizon, has stolen the limelight. This process was already underway when Forza Motorsport 7 came out in 2017 — it’s probably the reason Microsoft felt an extended break for Motorsport was both comfortable and necessary — but in the intervening time, the two strongest Horizon titles yet found an enormous new audience on Game Pass and beyond. This means Forza Motorsport has to explain itself all over again to a new generation of Forza fans brought up on Playground Games’ freewheeling automotive vacations.
The good news is that it does so with confidence and authority. There’s no hint of an identity crisis to Motorsport’s rebooted return, nor of the desperate trend-chasing that marred its Xbox One era with microtransactions, loot boxes, and fussily randomized service-gaming systems. There’s barely any evidence in Forza Motorsport that the Horizon games exist, unless you count the studied way in which it doesn’t do any of the things that Horizon does. This is a resolutely focused circuit-racing game with real-world motorsport leanings.
If anything, Forza Motorsport is single-minded to a fault. Coming to it from the ebullient fiesta of Horizon 5 — or even from the eccentric nerdery of Gran Turismo 7 — you might be surprised by the lack of variety in the event design and the absence of a distinctive voice, of a personality to guide you through this world of asphalt and piston. But this is the Forza Motorsport way. The series has always worked best as a framework, a toolkit, that gives back what you put into it.
This framework is where Turn 10 has put the lion’s share of its effort over the last six years. Some aspects, like the livery and car tuning editors it shares with the Horizon games, needed little work. Elsewhere, Forza Motorsport required a more serious overhaul. Long-missing features like dynamic time of day and weather systems — which may sound like box-ticking, but are of crucial importance to the sim racing community — have finally been implemented, and beautifully, too. There’s an impressive spectrum of rain in this game, all the way from a hazy drizzle that can make for a treacherously slick surface to a view-obliterating downpour. The lighting across sunset and into night is rich and dramatic, and even at high noon the positioning of the sun can have gameplay implications; turn into the sun at the Laguna Seca circuit, for example, and the glare from the track surface can make its edges, blurred by dust, hard to read.
Forza’