dodge coronet - forza motorsport 2023
i love racing games. all of my followers know this because i'm frequently posting screencaps from my adventures in racing video games, and a lot of them are capped out of Forza games.
In all honesty, I wish I wasn't so desperate for racing games that playing Forza was a necessity to get my fill.
Being physically disabled means I don't always have the energy to take my racing addiction into a hardcore racing simulation with a full wheel, pedal and shifter rig. This means I often have to make compromises and play games that are more accessible to controller users to scratch the vroom and nyoom itch.
Playing Motorsport 2023 isn't a compromise I'm willing to make.
From day one the game has been entirely dysfunctional. Let's go through all the ways it's fucked.
- Drafting is backwards.
Cars going at a high rate of speed have to move the air in front of them as they travel. The faster the car goes, the harder that car "punches" a hole through the air. That hole in the air takes a long time to fill back up if the car is going especially fast, so any car following the 'air puncher' ahead will have the advantage of not punching nearly as much air as the car ahead of it. The act of following a car ahead of you to try and fit into that less-dense pocket of air is called "drafting."
Forza's drafting used to be non-existent. they said it was "realistic" but in reality, the feature might as well not have been there. If you've ever watched a Formula 1 race, you know just how much faster a car can go when it's in the draft. In Motorsport 2023, the drafting feature is fucking backwards. The lead car actually receives the speed benefits from drafting now, not the car following in the pocket of air being punched by the lead car. High downforce cars like LMPs and GTPs show especially fucked up characteristics where the lead car in the draft will suddenly lose all rear downforce when a car enters their draft, making the lead car exceedingly twitchy and uncontrollable.
- Frequent crashes even six months from launch.
In fact, this game crashes more frequently after the recent update than it ever has since launch for me. Every three races the game will crash in practice with no discernible pattern to figure out why. This persistent instability tells me that the jenga tower of baseline code Turn 10 is working from has completely failed, and they're now gluing the jenga tower back together rather than figuring out how to make the pieces stack neatly together again.
- The controls are worse than they've ever been.
I find myself frequently looking at my steering wheel and pedals to play Forza because the cars in this game feel impressively muted and numb. I've said this to @Kaceydotme and @traumagotchi among others, but steering inputs feel more like suggestions than commands. I'm often placing an input to turn the car into a corner 50 yards before I would expect to do so considering the cars I drive, and countersteering feels like a total diceroll between under or overcorrection. In fact, I had to unlearn the bad habit of driving with the throttle and brake inputs in order to complete my team endurance race with iRacing staff at the Road America 500. Because, as it turns out in Forza, FOR SOME FUCKIN REASON, your throttle and brake inputs are more precise inputs for steering than your fucking steering wheel is.
Even beyond that, crash avoidance is almost impossible in Forza. The steering is so clumsy and slow that it's no fucking surprise the Forza community has a reputation for just crashing into parked cars. I don't have enough fingers and toes to count how many times a car has become involved in an accident that should have reasonably been avoided in any other game, but in Forza it was a complete inevitability.
- Tires are like on/off grip switches.
I've driven a couple real cars beyond its limits in icy, snowy, rainy and dry conditions on tarmac and gravel. The most exciting experience having done so is feeling the tires sharply climb up to their limit of grip as you exert longitudinal forces on the car until they gradually slip away when you get into a slide. Getting sideways is almost always going to be slower than staying gripped up throughout a corner, but there is a perfect balance between on and over the limit of grip called "slip angle" that you have to achieve to be as fast as possible.
Forza couldn't give less of a shit. Tires slide at all? Bye bye, grip. Off to the tire wall with you.
I'm not even advocating for realism here. All I'm saying is that the most rewarding part of racing - achieving the perfect balance on the limit of grip through an entire lap - isn't even present. I always feel like i'm either underdriving or overdriving the car, there is no happy medium to achieve. It's not fun. It's like having a strict driving instructor sitting next to you while you're racing, constantly yelling "YOU'RE GOING TOO FAST" and demanding you slow down to 30 mph.
- "The Sim Twitch" still exists.
Forza racing games have had the ability to change between "arcade" and "simulation" steering input settings for a while now. Generally, "arcade" steering will be a bit more muted and easy to control, while "simulation" steering is generally faster but also a bit more difficult to control. "Sim twitch" is a phenomenon in the simulation steering setting where a driver will try to minimally correct a slide, but the game will overestimate the input and "twitch" the car around the opposite direction.
Forza Horizon 5 is developed by Playground Games using Turn 10's base Forza code and adjusted to function in a more casual, open-world setting. Horizon 5's development team fixed the Sim Twitch issues and have a simulation steering input system that feels natural, fluid and direct. Motorsport 2023's simulation steering inputs still feel vague, muddy and muted while the "sim twitch" phenomenon still persists.
What I'm saying is that the "casual" Forza drives better than the "serious" Forza.
- Broken features
Let's see, where do I start?
- Car regulations in private lobbies sometimes don't apply correctly
- loading one track layout in free play and private lobbies may actually load a completely different layout for the same track
- weather options in free play and private lobbies will sometimes not be what was selected
- some players in private lobbies will complete the track loading screen and immediately be dumped onto the track in their car without the ability to move their car or pause the game
- some players in private lobbies will be stuck in an infinite loading screen until the lobby host selects a different track
- accelerated tire wear as seen in the campaign and public multiplayer lobbies are not accessible in free play or in private multiplayer lobbies
- safety rating and skill rating in featured multiplayer lobbies literally do not matter because the matchmaking system immediately dumps you into a multiplayer lobby rather than holding you in the matchmaking system until the deadline for entry is reached.
- their 'car points' system sucked so bad they patched in a way to bypass it entirely
- certain shiny paint jobs like Polished Aluminum and Chrome gives decals applied to that surface a matte finish rather than a shiny gloss finish to match the glossy, shiny paint
- getting banned for infractions in multiplayer will also revoke access to the singleplayer campaign, only allowing you to use Free Play mode
i can list a lot more but i think i had a stroke realizing just how much of this game just doesn't work right.
- Rain is fucked
This is the last thing I wanna talk about because it really shows just how badly designed this game is. In real racing conditions under dry weather, tires will scrub off like erasers when under stress. This is most often seen as black marks on the asphalt in braking zones through the corner, and end at the exit of the corner where the tires are now accelerating in a straight line and no longer under extreme load. That rubber has to go somewhere, and on a rough surface like asphalt, the rubber will get pressed into the asphalt. As rubber builds up in the track, the "rubbered groove" gives more grip to the car because more of the tire's surface area is making contact with the ground.
When it starts raining, however, the water starts pooling up into puddles on the rubbered groove much faster because the rough asphalt has been filled in with rubber. This makes the rubbered groove as slippery as ice. The clean areas of the track haven't been filled in with rubber, so it takes longer for the rain to build puddles on clean track surfaces. This means the actual fastest racing line under wet racing conditions is anywhere rubber isn't present.
In Forza, the wet rubbered racing line is still always going to be faster than the clean, unrubbered line no matter what. This completely and entirely removes any interesting features of variable weather racing that a weather system in a racing game can provide. Essentially, the rain is just a fucking grip modifier and that's it. It's boring.
Why do I care so much?
Because I'm sick of the only good multiplayer racing game being inaccessible to me and my disabilities 90% of the week. I love iRacing a lot, especially after their recent "Tempest" weather system update that creates extremely dynamic and realistic wet weather racing and introduces creative racing strategies in long-form racing. but nobody else is doing it properly like they are, and it fucking sucks. If iRacing released a controller-friendly version of their hardcore simulator tomorrow I'd be a lifetime subscriber. If GT7 and its features came to PC flawlessly tomorrow, I'd never play another racing game.
But since I have a PC, my only choices are to fuck my body up or to go fuck myself.
EDIT: I also care because racing games should be fun, and games that don't work right aren't fun. I can point to the latest Panenkoek video about invisible walls to prove that games become exceedingly frustrating when freak errors occur.
I also also care because Microsoft sold me a game that was "built from the ground up" and I got a game that feels like Forza Motorsport 7 with a fresh chunk of cow shit splattered on it.
