With less than one month away from release, Turn 10 has now showed some more gameplay of the new Forza Motorsport at the recent Forza Monthly stream.
Though the more interesting tidbit from the show is how developers Turn 10 is positioning Forza Motorsport not as a car collecting game, despite the game’s massive 500+ car roster at launch.
“It’s not about collecting cars,” said Dan Greenwalt, GM of Turn 10 Studios. “It’s not about collecting cars over time, it’s about collecting cars that matters to you.
“So for you that might be these 10 cars, and for me those might be a different [set of] 10 cars. What’s gonna build community is our ability to talk about that, argue about that, have opinions, build skill and compete”.
The comment is likely a response to the way this Forza Motorsport is designed around.
For context, each car you own has a car mastery level that you need to increase by simply driving it. You get XP by how fast you go through corners, measured against a theoretical best the game has pre-calculated based on the current car setup. Unlock performance upgrades require you to increase this car mastery level. So it’s a Car-PG in a way, but way more restrictive. You must do this for all cars, you can’t just buy a new car and expect to start tuning and upgrading it from the get-go.
Further on in the show, game director Chris Esaki said that this change in game design, where it’s not about amassing a garage of all the cars, but to get to intimately know each car you drive by having to put the time behind the wheel, is part of the reason Forza Motorsport isn’t called Forza Motorsport 8.
“We’ve completely rethought everything about what it means to play Forza Motorsport,” he said. “And that means reimagining the core gameplay, all of our design philosophies that really allow or help [players] fall in love with cars, through the power of play, community building, skill and competition.
“We’ve fundamentally moved from, I would like to think this, Forza Motorsport 1 to 7 was really an experience about car collection. And we’ve moved into this new era of Forza Motorsport where it’s about car progression.
“With all of the new physics, it is a completely new game. Everything feels new. With all of the new modes, all the new features, and this new meta moving from car collection to car progression, I truly believe we’re at a completely new era of Forza Motorsport. Which is why we dropped the number.”
Forza Motorsport really wants to break away from its past to even dropping the number (to the chagrin of historians and people searching up the original Forza Motorsport game on the Internet). And Turn 10 is doubling down on their design decisions. Now hopefully the fans and players get it and can judge the game based around this new philosophy, because judging it as a car collecting game like the likes of Gran Turismo, but with a built-in grind to stop you from modifying every car you buy, sounds like a bad time.
Forza Motorsport (2023) will launch with 500+ cars and 20 tracks, with more coming as free updates, which includes the Nürburgring Nordschleife.
Forza Motorsport (2023) releases on October 10 for Xbox Series X|S and PC (Steam, Microsoft Store). It will be available on Xbox Game Pass and PC Game Pass day-1 of launch.