On the recent Forza Monthly stream, more details have emerged for the upcoming Forza Motorsport, releasing later this October.
In particular, the stream dedicated time to talk about how the Career Mode, called the Builders Cup, works.
Structurally, it should be familiar with previous Forza Motorsport games (there are seven of them). It’s divided into Tours, and each Tour has multiple themed championships which allow specific cars to be entered.
The Builders Cup championships are designed to accommodate post-launch cars, tracks and also events. So if there’s a new car or track added to Forza Motorsport in the future, they can be added into the Builders Cup.
The gameplay loop is totally different. Instead of collecting credits and cars, Forza Motorsport is about “built not bought”, where you are expected to upgrade cars to improve their performance. And so now every car has a Car Mastery level that you can level up. And levelling up will unlock a new category of upgrades to install. Instead of credits, you allocate Car Points to install specific upgrades.
Essentially, Forza Motorsport has gone CaR-PG, car RPG. Each car is a character you level up (to the level cap of 50), and Car Points are skill points you have to unlock upgrades.
Duplicate cars do not share levels, you must level them up individually.
This should allow newcomers, or players who are not familiar with how car upgrades work, to be able to grasp this intricate system that may seem like common knowledge to car enthusiasts, but not common knowledge to every player. Alongside that, there’s a new spider graph that better demonstrates how each performance upgrade affects a car’s performance.
There will also be an auto-upgrade feature.
Each race begins with Open Practice where you can increase your car progression (your Car Mastery level). Every car begins stock, at level 1, so you get a feel of its base characteristics, and as you keep driving it you earn XP and unlock new upgrades.
XP is earned on how much you push the car through corners– a system called Track Mastery. Forza Motorsport will compare the time you took to go in and out of corner against the theoretical fastest time with that setup to see how far you pushed it and reward XP according to how close you got to it. Corners are the enemies in this CaR-PG.
Forza Motorsport has a new way of dialing up the difficulty, called Challenge The Grid. You can set your starting position (so no qualifying), and change AI difficulty and other race rules. These settings will scale up or down the rewards for winning which includes Driver XP, credits and Car XP.
Credits are still in the game, used exclusively to buy new cars.
The maximum grid size in all modes are 24 cars in a grid.
However, how many assists you turn off does not negatively impact rewards anymore, to not punish players who prefer having assists on and not assume that everyone should work their way into turning those off over time.
The Drivatar AI system, powered by machine learning like before, has been revamped. They drive with “no cheats or hacks” and no rubberbanding. Drivatars will still make use of your friends list to have them, alongside their cars and liveries, appear.
Each track now has dynamic time and weather, which impacts handling. Grip levels on track change over time- tracks can get rubbered in, and be slippier when rain hits compared to a green track.
Car progression can also be made in other modes like in online multiplayer.
Unfortunately, all progression are server-based, so progress in Builders Cup requires an online connection. This is done “to help us ensure the security and fairness of the game for everyone” but game preservation advocates will surely be disappointed by this decision. All seven Forza Motorsport games prior to this upcoming title are all delisted, and as much as the game evolves with new free content updates, it will one day suffer the same fate. There are options to play the game offline, but progression requires an online connection.
At least the good news is there are no loot boxes in Forza Motorsport. It should be no surprise but surprisingly there were loot boxes in past Forza Motorsport titles. All progression is earned, with no plans to sell Car Points or Credits. There will be a Car Pass- DLC that contains new-to-Forza cars- and Car Packs, regular DLC items for the series.
Forza Motorsport, the latest release by developer Turn 10 Studios, will be released on October 10 for Xbox Series X|S and PC (Steam, Microsoft Store). Like all other Xbox Game Studios titles, the game will be available on Xbox Game Pass and PC Game Pass.
Source: Forza