Forza Motorsport Impressions - caRPG Finally

[CriticalGaming]

So the last major racing sim game Gran Turismo 7 started out strong but ended up being and overly grindy frustration. The gameplay is good, the cars are good, the grind expected of you to get new cars and upgrades is absolutely fucking dogshit.

Forza 7 on the other hand...was worst in that in was missing features like cars, tracks, career mode, customization options, it was a shell of the game expected of it. And it had more monetization than a mobile game. People hated the FUCK out of it.

And to be fair the Forza devs kinda went MIA on the sim racing genre in favor of pumping out 3 Horizon games. For a while I wondered if they just rather make open world arcade racers because it was easier and more fun to make. For what they were the Horizon games were also pretty well received and fun.

But new generation and now finally a new Forza Motorsport called....well that. I guess technically 8 but also maybe not? I dunno, that's a complaint for Yahtzee. Anyway Forza Motorsport seems like a genuine attempt to get back into the fans good graces by bring back the old school style of progression in these sim games, or as some people call them caRPG's. The reasoning for the nickname is that the progression system is very much like an RPG, where you start by battling mundane street cars like Honda Civics and Subaru Impreza's, until you level up into Porche and Lambo's, then ultimately super cars.

Forza takes this RPG thing even further by giving each individual car a level up system. You have to level up your car now to control how many upgrade points it has. These points act as almost like a weight system in another RPG, so at level two you car has 500 points, and if you want to put a Turbo on the car it's 300 points, but new tires are 400 points, so you can't put both on at the same time. However when the car levels up again that car now will have a pool of 700 points so now both things would be within the point allotment. And spending these points doesn't lose them, if you remove that Turbo you'd get those 300 points back. It's a system that is meant to control how much a car can be upgraded at one time. But also let's you min/max as well because there is another factor in how you tune the car and that's the Power score.

As you upgrade cars their Power level increases which is very DBZ of the game. However each race limits your power to a cap to prevent you from blowing away the competition. So the trick is to best use the car's points availability to maximize performance without also going over the Power limit of the event you're about to run.

Which brings me to another feature I like and that's Practice. So not only does practice do exactly what you think it does (allowing you to practice the track before the race) but it also gives you goal times. There are goals for total lap time, but also goals for segments of track. This allows you to sort of figure out the best way to race the track itself but it also if very sneakily telling you whether you can win the race or not. You see there are like 10 levels of AI difficulty for the game, these will make the AI more and more perfect on the track (but never truly perfect) and increasing the difficulty will increase the cash % bonus you get for winning. The beautiful thing about practice is that the Lap time it sets for you to hit, will be the track time you'll need to consistantly run in order to beat the AI on whatever difficulty you've got them set to. This allows you to know whether the AI will be too hard for you on this track, and/or let you know if you need to reconfigure your car's upgrades.

Knowing you can win is different than actually winning of course. Especially when you are punished for starting shit on the track. In practice it's easy to know your racing line, but what happens when your opponents are also on that line and blocking you for passing. Forza also introduces penalties to the game, meaning if you ram another driver, run off track, cut a corner, etc, the game will add punishment time to your race. So if you get first place by 2 seconds but have 3 seconds of built up penalties for the race, the game will knock you down to second or third accordingly. This encourages people to drive properly in multiplayer because online these games are just vindictive shit shows, and also means you can't bully the AI in single player because coming in first alone isn't going to win if you drive like a jackass.

So far so good. I haven't seen microtransactions yet, but that doesn't mean they aren't here somewhere and I've just been blanking them out of my mind. But the progression feels good, and credits feel fare, and it's off to a good start.

 

[Elvis Starburst]

Is the Forza Motorsport you played the same one I saw in this video? Cause this is definitely a very wildly different set of experiences that I'm quite surprised to see compared to what is essentially my first impression, courtesy of my subscription box.



Granted, Shiny's thing is racing games, he plays a ton of them and plays them often, so a lot of these might be nitpicks or changes that are more noticeable for people that play the genre/these games a lot

 

[CriticalGaming]

So there are some visual bugs and loading issues here and there. But nothing crazy like some of these youtube videos. I think the negative reviews are coming from a different place than what i want out of Forza or other semi sim games. The complaints are certainly valid but nothingni notice from my standpoint.

 

[meiam]

Forza takes this RPG thing even further by giving each individual car a level up system. You have to level up your car now to control how many upgrade points it has. These points act as almost like a weight system in another RPG, so at level two you car has 500 points, and if you want to put a Turbo on the car it's 300 points, but new tires are 400 points, so you can't put both on at the same time. However when the car levels up again that car now will have a pool of 700 points so now both things would be within the point allotment. And spending these points doesn't lose them, if you remove that Turbo you'd get those 300 points back. It's a system that is meant to control how much a car can be upgraded at one time. But also let's you min/max as well because there is another factor in how you tune the car and that's the Power score.

As you upgrade cars their Power level increases which is very DBZ of the game. However each race limits your power to a cap to prevent you from blowing away the competition. So the trick is to best use the car's points availability to maximize performance without also going over the Power limit of the event you're about to run.

That's a good idea, but doesn't that just torpedo the whole realism aspect? Why not simply make it a money limit (which actually exist in some form for some car race) and drop the whole "levelling" car?

 

[Hawki]

Even if this is a CARPG, it's odd to see Critical reviewing it. I didn't think you had truck with these sorts of games.

 

[The Rogue Wolf]

Even if this is a CARPG, it's odd to see Critical reviewing it. I didn't think you had truck with these sorts of games.

Maybe he just felt driven to do it.

 

[CriticalGaming]

That's a good idea, but doesn't that just torpedo the whole realism aspect? Why not simply make it a money limit (which actually exist in some form for some car race) and drop the whole "levelling" car?

Imo it ends up the same either way. This system works because upgrades to cars dont require cash, which means all your esrns can go to buying new cars. It feels like it provides more freedom this way. There is no division between upgrading a car you like and saving for a car you might not. Now there is no downside to buying car because upgrades arent tied to your cash, and vise versa.

 

[CriticalGaming]

Even if this is a CARPG, it's odd to see Critical reviewing it. I didn't think you had truck with these sorts of games.

Wydm? I reviewed Gran Turismo 7, i like these games sometimes.

 

[Specter Von Baren]

I'm not here to talk about the game. I'm just here to say my peace about the title of this thread.

Critical... How dare you.

 

[CriticalGaming]

I'm not here to talk about the game. I'm just here to say my peace about the title of this thread.

Critical... How dare you.

What did i do?

 

[Specter Von Baren]

What did i do?

"CaRPG"

 

[BrawlMan]

"CaRPG"

That's nothing new. That term's been around since the late '90s and early 2000s.

 

[CriticalGaming]

"CaRPG"

That's nothing new. That term's been around since the late '90s and early 2000s.

Don't listen to BrawlMan, I am super smart and super creative and I came up with that all by myself!

 

[hanselthecaretaker2]

Imo it ends up the same either way. This system works because upgrades to cars dont require cash, which means all your esrns can go to buying new cars. It feels like it provides more freedom this way. There is no division between upgrading a car you like and saving for a car you might not. Now there is no downside to buying car because upgrades arent tied to your cash, and vise versa.

From a progression standpoint it would seem something like “winning” cars by beating them in a race could work, and then using cash to upgrade them or trick them out. I’ve never really played Forza but think it would be cool to pick races based on what cars are featured, then win them simply through racing. Kinda like acquiring a boss’s gear or weapon after defeating them.

 

[CriticalGaming]

From a progression standpoint it would seem something like “winning” cars by beating them in a race could work, and then using cash to upgrade them or trick them out. I’ve never really played Forza but think it would be cool to pick races based on what cars are featured, then win them simply through racing. Kinda like acquiring a boss’s gear or weapon after defeating them.

In my experience that is more limited than you think. Because Gran Turismo does that, winning an event nets you a prize car but the car is never really something you want, and what you do want is really expensive meaning you're grinding wins using cars you don't enjoy racing in so that you can buy the cars you actually want, but then you grind up more to get enough parts to make them viable.

I like the Forza system in place here better. The most expensive cars are only about 500k and you get about 100k from winning a series. So you can have your dream car in about 1-2 hours depending on race length.

The grinding comes from leveling up the car by driving it which happens pretty fast. One series of races will get your car from 1 - 19 depending on how good you drive.

Perhaps I should explain that a little better.

So each track is broken up into segments that the game judges you on. How well did you follow the racing line, how fast you completed the segment and did you do it without hitting anyone or anything. The game then gives you a rating between 1.0 and 10. This score then gives you exp for the car. THEN you get a bonus EXP reward for doing the segment better than your previous best score on that race, so long as your previous best was at least a 5. This means you can't shit the bed and get 1's for a lap, then come back and do it properly for a bonus each time.

Not to mention that while you are doing all of that you still are trying to win the race anyway. So what's awesome about it, it that it becomes completely passive, you aren't thinking about the exp system but instead you just try to race the best you can and in so doing you earn the best rewards naturally. Which is why I really like it because each race feel like you are rewarded with better parts for your car because you will have leveled that car up several times during the race affording you more points to invest in making the car stronger for the next race.

The downside is that it makes the start of a series of races harder than the final race because in an event with 5 races, you'll have a bunch more levels and a bunch of extra power potential in your car by the time you are on the 5th race. Which is why each race as a power limit. Meaning your car rating is capped during the event so while you might start race one with a power rating of 650 out of 700 allowed, in race 5 you'll been damn near or on 700 rating. This is probably why they let you adjust the AI difficulty of the other racers on the fly, so that you can maintain a challenge throughout, which is kinda bad. But honestly the challenge of the single player mode has never been racing against the AI in these games, it's been about perfecting the track so that you can race against real people online later.

 

[hanselthecaretaker2]

In my experience that is more limited than you think. Because Gran Turismo does that, winning an event nets you a prize car but the car is never really something you want, and what you do want is really expensive meaning you're grinding wins using cars you don't enjoy racing in so that you can buy the cars you actually want, but then you grind up more to get enough parts to make them viable.

I like the Forza system in place here better. The most expensive cars are only about 500k and you get about 100k from winning a series. So you can have your dream car in about 1-2 hours depending on race length.

The grinding comes from leveling up the car by driving it which happens pretty fast. One series of races will get your car from 1 - 19 depending on how good you drive.

Perhaps I should explain that a little better.

So each track is broken up into segments that the game judges you on. How well did you follow the racing line, how fast you completed the segment and did you do it without hitting anyone or anything. The game then gives you a rating between 1.0 and 10. This score then gives you exp for the car. THEN you get a bonus EXP reward for doing the segment better than your previous best score on that race, so long as your previous best was at least a 5. This means you can't shit the bed and get 1's for a lap, then come back and do it properly for a bonus each time.

Not to mention that while you are doing all of that you still are trying to win the race anyway. So what's awesome about it, it that it becomes completely passive, you aren't thinking about the exp system but instead you just try to race the best you can and in so doing you earn the best rewards naturally. Which is why I really like it because each race feel like you are rewarded with better parts for your car because you will have leveled that car up several times during the race affording you more points to invest in making the car stronger for the next race.

The downside is that it makes the start of a series of races harder than the final race because in an event with 5 races, you'll have a bunch more levels and a bunch of extra power potential in your car by the time you are on the 5th race. Which is why each race as a power limit. Meaning your car rating is capped during the event so while you might start race one with a power rating of 650 out of 700 allowed, in race 5 you'll been damn near or on 700 rating. This is probably why they let you adjust the AI difficulty of the other racers on the fly, so that you can maintain a challenge throughout, which is kinda bad. But honestly the challenge of the single player mode has never been racing against the AI in these games, it's been about perfecting the track so that you can race against real people online later.

I’ll take your word for it. Just sounds weird to “level up” a car by driving it well, vs just upgrading components to make it better. Maybe if it were the driver is leveling up in skill with a specific car. In terms of getting better cars, it seems there’s a grind either way in a worse car while eyeing the prize, so my thinking was avoiding that by simply beating the car you want in a similar class. Unless they allow you to bypass lower classes altogether by just saving up enough currency to buy an exotic or something, but that sounds counterintuitive in terms of progression.

 

[CriticalGaming]

so my thinking was avoiding that by simply beating the car you want in a similar class.

Except you wouldn't be able to beat a super car in your Ford Focus, so you would already need a super car to compete. This wouldn't work.

Unless they allow you to bypass lower classes altogether by just saving up enough currency to buy an exotic or something, but that sounds counterintuitive in terms of progression.

You can't because you unlock the events in sequencial order. So you can certainly buy a super car, but you can't race it until you beat the events leading up to those Super events. And because of the power limit you can't bring your Super GT in a race against rally cars or whatever.

 

[hanselthecaretaker2]

Except you wouldn't be able to beat a super car in your Ford Focus, so you would already need a super car to compete. This wouldn't work.

IIRC with GT for instance you attain licenses for each class and that allows you to advance to better cars or race circuits. At leas the older games’ career modes seemed to revolve around improving as a driver. Granted cars are still purchased there, but I think the concept would work for winning cars in races too since progression could be bound to licenses in each class.

You can't because you unlock the events in sequencial order. So you can certainly buy a super car, but you can't race it until you beat the events leading up to those Super events. And because of the power limit you can't bring your Super GT in a race against rally cars or whatever.

That’s why I added it would be counterintuitive to progression.

 

[CriticalGaming]

IIRC with GT for instance you attain licenses for each class and that allows you to advance to better cars or race circuits.

The licenses are required for entry into certain events, but they dont keep you from buying cars.

 

[Elvis Starburst]

Snip

I gotta say, all of the mechanics you've mentioned in this thread for how the game works both sound smartly thought out and over-complicated at the same time. It's not a system I've had experience with though, so maybe it's smoother in-game than it's made to sound.
How is the racing and how the game handles overall?