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Ryuu96 on 11 September 2023
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Forza Motorsport Preview

Forza Motorsport 5, 6 and 7 weren’t bad games at all, but progress definitely began to to feel stale. For the next-gen reboot of Forza Motorsport, Turn 10 Studios took their time to boost things forward, and fortunately that really shows in a preview version I played for the past week. I also want to highlight very early on that Forza Motorsport ships with some of the most impressive and varied accessibility as well as game options I’ve seen in many years. Your entire Forza Motorsport experience is highly customizable.

Gameplay

When you’ll put your hands on the new wheel (or controller) in Forza Motorsport, one of the first things you’ll notice are the overhauled car/driving physics. It’s difficult to describe the feel for physics in words, but cars bring a lot more weight on the track, the “floaty“ feeling of past Forza Motorsport games is gone. I’d say it still feels like Forza while also feeling more complex. I’ve played every Forza Motorsport title in the franchise, and this is without any doubt the biggest evolution to the feel of the game so far. Forza Motorsport feels great to play. It’s the foundation of everything here.

The new gameplay core experience is defined by several pillars:

• New and more complex physics simulation allowing for more varied racing
• Overhauled AI, which finally makes racing in singleplayer actually fun and competitive
• Racing strategy, including pit stops, tire compound, fuel management & more. Pit stops are semi-animated, which is fine but can be improved on, and I think a flag/safety car system or something would make the racing experience even more believable.
• Forza Race Regulations, a new system based on machine learning, which I tested in multiple situations. I came away impressed with the accuracy of regulation results, although the real challenge for the system will be in multiplayer.
• Progression. As you race, you’ll constantly earn experience and level up your car. The system feels incredibly rewarding during gameplay, giving you a sense of progression throughout the race. You use that earned experience to upgrade your car, which is a nice change from previous Forza games, where you did this with credits.

Visuals

I played Forza Motorsport on Xbox Series X. As expected, Turn 10’s latest is a beautiful experience. The environments are the clear highlight. The tracks and all the details around them just look fantastic, the new lighting system in connection with photogrammetry does an impressive job here. All tracks in the game support full day-and-night cycle lighting, all tracks support weather, all tracks have 3D props, vegetation, details, spectators, all tracks are built from the ground up and have the same high quality. Fantasy tracks naturally look even better due to artists having more freedom. The cost for this are less tracks than in Forza Motorsport 7; Turn 10 took a “quality over quantity“ approach here. More tracks will come post-launch, as Forza Motorsport is basically a platform for months and years to come.

To confirm the “elephant in the room“: yes, Forza Motorsport does indeed support raytracing at 60 FPS during gameplay. Forza Motorsport will launch with three visual modes to choose from:

• PERFORMANCE | Prioritize 60 frames per second on-track performance at 4K resolution.
• PERFORMANCE RAY TRACING | Enable on-track ray tracing at 60 frames per second with variable resolution. I’m not Digital Foundry, so I can not pixel count the average rendering resolution. To my eyes, the resolution still looks still quite high, dynamically changing likely somewhere in the above 1440P range.
• VISUALS | Maximize 4K visual quality on-track with ray tracing at 30 frames per second.

Comparing these directly, I felt like the differences weren’t that extreme, although car reflections definitely do look more realistic, more natural with ray tracing enabled, and cars as a result blend better with the environment. I didn’t experience any framer drops in either of these modes, performance felt rock solid, just like with previous Forza games.

One more little detail: to my surprise, night races now feature dynamic shadows. Your car lights, other car lights, even track lights cast dynamic shadows, and it makes for a cool racing experience at night time.

Sound

For Forza Motorsport, you better put some quality headphones on, because the game totally deserves it. Turn 10 finally invested a lot in a better sound experience, and you can hear it the moment you start the game with a new, punchy Turn 10 Studios animation. Engines do sound more punchy, details like hitting the curbs or tyre wear feel much more refined and believable. I could only test a few cars in the preview here, so I do hope the quality of these preview cars can be translated to the rest of the game.
Settings & Accessibility

Forza Motorsport launches with one of the most impressive settings & accessibility options catalogue I’ve seen in recent years. I’m just a small guy on X, I do hope the larger outlets will give the studio credit here. Just a phenomenal job by the team where you can really adapt the whole experience to fit to your needs, from gameplay to multiple difficulty settings, from HUD & camera to detailed sound segmentation. from completely customisable controls to solutions for blind people and so, so much more. Controls not included, Forza Motorsport features about 150 different menu items to change the game how you want to play it. Forza Motorsport adapts to you, not the other way around. Bravo, Turn 10!

Verdict

After 6 years, Turn 10 Studios is back. And I loved what I played of Forza Motorsport so far. A few questions remain though. The quality of the netcode and Forza Race Regulations will make or break the competitive multiplayer side of things; other games in the genre have failed in these areas as well. Will the available singleplayer cups at launch offer enough variety? And given Forza Motorsport is now a live platform for quite some time to come, how large will future content updates be and how frequent will these be delivered to the game? After this preview, I do know one thing for sure though: Turn 10 Studios is striving for quality with Forza Motorsport; you can feel it when racing, you can see it when taking a moment to enjoy the visuals, you can hear it when the car engines roar through the night.

*Thank you to Xbox & Turn 10 for allowing me to preview Forza Motorsport at home!
**Screenshots taken on Xbox Series X | Performance Mode.