‘Endless Driving Awaits You in Forza Motorsport’
Essentially, we have no intention of creating a separate follow-up.
Dan Greenawalt, the GM of the Forza franchise, has been working on motorsport games for two decades, but his remarks at the post-Xbox Showcase press conference on Sunday hinted that this next release could be the series’ last. Forza Motorsport is the eighth game in Turn 10 Studios’ driving sim series and the first newcomer in nearly half a decade.
Forza has been one of Microsoft’s most reliable first-party properties. Ignoring Playground Games’ spinoff Horizon series, the original Xbox had one Forza title, the Xbox 360 had three, and the Xbox One had three. Aside from a few release hiccups, each title has been well-reviewed and the franchise as a whole has sold millions. We’re now in the third year of this console generation and there haven’t been any Motorsport games for the fans.
A lot has changed since Forza Motorsport 7 arrived in September 2017. The “Day one with Game Pass” paradigm shift started with Sea Of Thieves in 2018 and has since become Microsoft’s entire business model. Now Microsoft measures success more like a social network (or a tech news publication) that focuses on monthly active users and play time instead of sales.
So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Forza Motorsport is set up more as a service game than a traditional AAA game.
While many of the modes that Forza players have come to expect, especially the online multiplayer component, will be tweaked and improved, Turn 10 is betting that its new career mode will keep players coming back week after week. At Summer Game Fest, the game’s creative director Chris Esaki spoke to a group of reporters about this new career mode loop and the change in philosophy of the series.
Esaki described Forza Horizon as “a completely new take on falling in love with cars”. We saw a career mode event called the Builders Cup, which started with a narrated introduction to the car trio. Once you’ve chosen the bike, you’ll then move on to ‘open practice’ where you’ll get to know the car. These sessions are full of stats and challenges; you earn Car Experience Points (CXP) for each corner you take, and the closer you are to perfection, the more CXP you get. CXP is car specific and is used to upgrade parts and customize vehicle performance.
After open practice, you’ll head to the race, which features a new “challenge grid” system that lets you bet against your racing abilities. You can choose which grid you start on and how fast your AI opponents are, with bigger rewards as the difficulty increases. Once you’ve competed in the race itself, you’ll earn money for new vehicles as well as more car-specific CXPs. Then it’s time for the next open practices, more tuning and tailoring and more competitions.
Esaki calls this loop “level, build, master.” He sees it as a way to get players interested in a wide range of cars, rather than going straight to Ferrari or Bugatti. It might sound like the ethos of another popular racing sim, but while there are certainly elements of Gran Turismo 7’s cups and cafe challenges here, Builders Cup feels both more restrained and more replayable. It’s All Planned: Similar to recent Forza Horizon games, players can expect major content updates on a monthly basis, which will then be released on a weekly basis.
We’ll likely hear a lot more about Forza Motorsport before its release on October 10th, and I’m interested in trying out new simulation features like the massively revamped physics system and improved opponent AI. For now, though, the field looks solid. I’m a big fan of Gran Turismo 7, but if you don’t like online sim racing and the toxicity that comes with it, its single player experience is pretty painless. In contrast, Turn 10 seems to have developed Forza Motorsport into a forever-lasting game with new experiences every week, designed to satisfy players’ desire for new races and Microsoft’s desire for monthly active users.
Check out all the Summer Game Fest news here!
