source: classygamer.blogspot
When it was released a few months ago, Forza Motorsport 3 gathered a bounty of enthusiastic reviews and over-90 high scores that seemed to seal the success of the third installment of the Microsoft-powered franchise. The recent announcement of two millions copies sold seems to confirm such success, but reality is a little less shiny.
The online community of the game is rapidly dwindling and more and more tuning and painting garages (the true heart of such community) are closing down shop, admitting defeat.
Last Friday evening at 9 PM EST (one of the busiest times in the week for online gaming), public lobbies for Forza 3 had a total of 1463 players. Sunday afternoon, at the time of this article's writing, the number is only slightly higher, with 1752 players online. Even considering a sizable amount of gamers "hidden" in private lobbies, with two millions copies in the gamers' homes, one would expect such numbers to be much, much higher.
Less than the 0.1% of the game's player base online during the most busy parts of the week is indeed a pretty discouraging percentage. The numbers are pretty much comparable to the players of Forza Motorsport 2 during the last, quite dead, days of it's lifespan, more than two years after the release of the game. And Forza Motorsport 3 has been released less than four months ago.
How to explain such saddening data when the game sold a solid two millions copies and got so many high scores (Metacritic average 92, with a long list of 100's)?
Gaming "journalists" normally only scratch the surface of a game, playing for a few hours before writing their articles. It happens quite often that such few hours aren't nearly sufficient to truly understand the solidity of a title, and that, partly, what happened with Forza Mortorsport 3.
One has to wonder how much Dale North of Destructoid or Tom Orry of Videogamer.com actually played Forza 3 before writing their review, or how much they know about cars, driving and racing in order to judge a racing simulation with extremely enthusiastic terms like "best", "flawless" or "masterpiece".
Those "journalist" very probably opened their nice review copy, loaded it on their Xbox 360, played it for a short while, saw a lot of extremely shiny car porn and happily awarded a full score.
Hard not to understand them, to be honest. As a "car porn" game Forza 3 is actually great, if not exceptional, and welcomes the gamer (and especially the gaming journalist in a rush) with a lot of shiny pimped rides and chrome wheels, factor further enhanced by the endless possibility of the honestly masterful car painter (that should really be a feature in ANY racing game, hands down).
It's when you start to analyze the game as a racing simulator, and especially an online one, that the shiny surface starts to fall apart.
Let's start with two of the aspects Turn 10 boasted the most about. The ultra-realistic physics and handling and the damage system.
Dan Greenwalt and company really puffed their collective chest in praising their physics engine and the realistic handling of their cars. The problem is that such realism often falls short. A clear example is the behavior of rear-wheel drive cars.
In reality and in most racing simulators, driving high-end RWD cars at top speed is very difficult to master, especially because of sudden over steer when giving throttle harshly during a corner as well as in the opposite case, when releasing the throttle too suddenly (lift-off over steer).
Even in un-tuned (and as such unbalanced) cars the latter is totally non-existent, while the first basically happens in racing rated cars, and even then it's easily controllable. Even without driving assists.
Either the physics engine completely forgets about the traction of the car and the position of the engine, and as such it sucks, or Turn 10 took the arbitrary decision to make RWD cars much easier to drive than in reality, hence throwing realism to the bushes in order to make the game more "accessible".
The worst part is that RWD cars are normally hard to master rides, but once mastered, they pay dividends (tighter turning, better braking and so forth, making them solid choices or even mandatory in real racing conditions). In Forza Motorsport 3 not only RWD's disadvantages (that can be overcome with driving skill) are flattened, but their advantages are removed from the picture as well. The effect, paired with the evident advantages of AWD (all wheel drive) cars simply results in AWD dominating the racing scene completely and without question. The gap in performance is simply enormous and absolutely against any notion of realism. It's so evident that that Turn 10 has been forced (instead of correcting the problem) to create separate online lobbies for RWD fans to let them compete between themselves without being completely humiliated.
Of course that's not the only evident flaw of the physics engine: another evident examples are collisions. The behavior of cars when hitting other cars of any obstacle gets more weird as the impact speed grows. It's very easy to notice when you drive against a barrier at full force head on, hit it straight like a bullet without any side deviation and your car suddenly decides to flip over to the side, without any slightest force applied in that direction.
The damage engine itself is just as flawed. Turn 10's very generic pre-release promises of absolute realism built incredible expectations. In the end we have exactly the same pre-calculated damage system we got with Forza 2, with the aforementioned flawed flip-overs added on top of it. There's no deformation of the car's chassis like in even the slightest real-life crash. The engine simply applies a "generic" damage to a very generic area (or multiple generic areas) of the car, that might or might have not been involved in the crash. Someone hits you slightly on your right door? The whole right side of your car will be covered in bumps and scratches like someone had too much fun with an hammer. You are involved in a gruesome multi-car crash that had you flip over several time and end against a barrier with a force that would have turned a real ride in a pile of junk metal? You'll lose your bumpers and spoiler, and the rest of the car will be covered in bumps and scratches very similar to those of the case described above.
This, of course, when the engine even manage to register hits in the right area of the car. I can't count the times in which I've been hit head on in the rear of my car, and the engine actually damaged only the sides. So realistic...
While quite serious, especially given how much Greenwalt and company boasted before the release, those flaws are just the tip of the iceberg. The worst problems are found in the online gameplay, which is arguably one of the most important areas of the game to ensure brand loyalty and longevity, especially in an online-oriented community like the Xbox 360 one.
In order to make the online community more accessible to the casual gamer, Turn 10 scratched the system they had in place with Forza 2 and implemented an automatic hoppers system similar to that of FPS games. The problem is that racing games are an entirely different beast from FPSs, and their community has much different needs to be satisfied.
One of the most important needs is customization of racing conditions. Dedicated online racers feel the need to decide things like the number of laps, the class of the cars, possible restrictions to keep the playing field even, the amount of damage... all things that make racing online easier on the nerves and more balanced.
The automatic hoppers prevent any kind of control of the sort. Everything is predetermined, and even if there are a few different hoppers to provide variety, they don't cover even a tenth of the actual possibilities. Not even of the most popular ones.
An example are the street races like Fujimi Kaido (one of my personal favourites, and one of the things that I really like in Forza 3). They are available only as restriction-less (an absolutely useless mode given the abysmal balance) or for A class. Too bad that such windy and bumpy roads are the most fun and challenging when tackled with low-class cars like E to B.
This cuts the fun and the flexibility of racing online basically in half, and even private races (that offer a better degree of customization) don't cut it, because most people don't have enough friends online playing the same game at the same time to fill a race completely.
On top of it, moreover, the "easy in, easy out" aspect of the hoppers doesn't really encourage proper behavior and respect between racers (the player kick function is very hit & miss, and will more often result in a good racer kicked to remove competition than in a griefer expelled from the room). The result is that insults and profanity are not an exception anymore, and the level has lowered to one similar to the simplest FPS, but even worse, people don't care about crashes anymore. From my personal experience of public races, maybe the 5% of races manages to start cleanly without someone just forgetting to brake at the first corner, and ass-jamming multiple people in front of him, basically ruining the game for everyone. Of that 5%, maybe the 1% gets to the end without crashes.
As a side-result, the general lack of respect and politeness that were required in Forza 2 brought people to simply drop the social aspect of racing online. This is grimly symbolized by the number of games actually using a microphone, that has taken a steep dive.
The worst flaw, though, has yet to come, and is truly game breaking. The PI system (the system that ranks the cars in different classes according to their potential, in order to put racers in different cars on a semi-even playing field) works well on paper, but to work well in reality it requires a nearly flawless implementation. The cars with exactly the same PI values need to be equally competitive to guarantee a level playing field, especially given that the hoppers don't allow the player to restrict the make/model of the cars on the circuit.
Unfortunately the PI system is radically flawed. Some cars are so radically more powerful and simply better than the others in their own class that they have become the perfect choice for the cheesy gamer in order to dominate. They are the infamous "leaderboard cars", because no other car with the same PI (which means theoretically the same abilities in a race) can compete with them.
The problem is quite evident when you go and look at the actual leaderboards. Let's take the Maple Valley track as an example:
At the moment of the writing of this article, in class F I scrolled down to 2500th place in the list before I got bored and until then the cars used were all VolksWagen Golf GTi Mk2. Depressing to say the least. Mind you, I don't know how much longer the ling of VWs went, I couldn't be bothered searching further.
Moving to class E, the VW Golf is still dominating solidly with a few sparse Celica and Eclipse. But still, it's a complete domination of 3 cars between a lot.
Class D is completely dominated by '03 Celica, with a few sparse Civic and WRX. Again, three cars dominating, with one being the almost absolute dominant.
Class C is just a no more mixed. Celica and Subaru WRX dominate pretty evenly, with some sparse Audi S5. Three cars.
Class B is back to disastrous (not that E, D and C were much better) with the WRX dominating squarely, with a few very lonely S5 mixed in. Two cars.
Class A is the best so far, with WRX, Ferrari F50, Murcielago LP640, S5 and Porsche 997 RS splitting the cake pretty evenly. It's still 5 cars between a couple hundred eligible ones though.
Class S is complete disaster again, the list is completely and exclusively filled by Dodge Viper '08, with a dominance comparable to the Golf in class F
Class R3 is just as depressing, with the Mazda B09/86 destroying everything else like they didn't exist. the same happens in Class R2, where the Mazda is the sole survivor... two whole classes dominated by the same car...
Class R1 completes the picture with the RS Spyder dominating basically uncontested, with very few Audi R15 TDI that can be spotted crying for help in the middle.
If we count that the game has 400 cars, and that with tuning and parts all of them can be brought to the same PI, means that less than the 4% of the whole car porn catalog of the game has any actual utility in a race if one wants to win.
Given that speed is speed whether you're hot lapping or in a race, those cars face absolutely no competition during online racing with the result that, unless their pilot is a complete newbie and you're a genius of the wheel, if one or (or more) such cars appears in your lobby before the race, you might as well give up any hope of victory.
The worst problem is that their dominance is so radical that we're talking about a difference in lap times of 20-30 or more seconds if put in the hands of equally skilled drivers. Given the average race length of 3-5 laps, the challenge for the ones that happen to like other, less advantageous rides is not trying to win, but actually trying to reach the goal at most 30 seconds after the winner, deadline beyond which you get disqualified from the race, and your standing doesn't count, whether you're second or eight, you lose, and your score gets maimed (this penalty is made more serious by the hoppers, that default to 30 seconds, while it was customizable to higher deadlines in Forza 2).
Seeing your whole race in which you struggled to earn a good position (and avoid to the 1st corner idiots), totally voided by some dude in a leaderboard car that smoked everyone else by 1 minute regardless of skill, is not fun nor fair, and completely jeopardizes the very core of racing online.
Of course there always are fair racers around that will completely disregard the leaderboard cars to race whatever they want (you'll never see me in a Leaderboard car, whatever happens, I'd never use one even if I had to constantly end in last position), but all it takes is someone that doesn't care about fairness to join a lobby to completely ruin it for everyone else. And it happens 90% of the times.
Add to what already listed a quite sizable number of semi-game-breaking bugs and glitches, and you have a desolating scenario in which only the most dedicated and hardcore can survive, fully explaining the abysmal numbers of people left in the community, and the many, many people that are simply giving up hope and leaving to games that they can finally enjoy.
The shameful boasting by Dan Greenwalt and some of his subordinates got us to grow incredible expectations for the game, and not even half of those expectations have been fulfilled.
Of course many people went to the official forums to complain, show their disappointment, and encourage Turn 10 to take steps to solve the problems, but instead of humbly doing so, Microsoft instructed the moderators to lock or delete every complaint, trying to clumsily hide them in two quite hidden "official problems and suggestions" thread, dropping an almost insulting post that recites "Over the last few months, general discussion has become an unfriendly place for new users, this is not something we want, nor should you. We know you are as passionate about the Forza franchise as we are and you wish to tell us how to improve your experience. Creating thread after thread discussing issues that have been covered or responded to has created a negative vibe on these forums".
Let me paraphrase that: "Since so many of you guys dare to criticize the obvious flaws of the game, instead of bending over and thanking us for magnanimously delivering our obviously flawed game, we're shutting you up. We don't want people to read what you write, because if they did they'd notice that the high-scoring reviews are completely skewed and would think twice before buying the game. Thank you for your patronage and money, now shut the hell up. Maybe we'll fix some of the problems at our best convenience. Maybe."
This, of course, created further malcontent between even the most dedicated fans, that felt that their legitimate complaints not only went unanswered, but were silenced as well in the name of tricking more people into thinking that the game actually reflected the high scores it got from the press.
The final blow comes from Turn 10's DLC policy. They already released multiple DLCs to increase their revenue, while very little of the game's initial flaws have even been looked into. The latest DLC pack, the Nurburgring F1 circuit has been especially criticized due to a poor quality, not to mention the fact that it hasn't been inserted in the hoppers and doesn't have any offline events. It's basically a quite costly (400 MS points) dead track in the hard disk of most people that can be used mostly for hot lapping.
The situation is made worse by the announcement that Turn 10 will release a DLC pack every month. With such a close release schedule, people definitely wonder how and when they'll even find the time to work on some extremely needed fixes.
Unfortunately the whole scenario is very very dire. Most of the reviews proved to be at least partly rushed, as the "journalists" were blinded by the shiny car porn, ignoring the problems that were laying in hiding under the thin surface.
Don't get me wrong, Forza 3 is a good game, and hopefully will keep me and others at least partly busy until something better hits the market, but despite the pre-release boastful declarations of superiority, it's by no means "definitive". Quite a few lessons are there to be learned, by the developer, by the press and by the gamers.
KIYAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA NOOB!
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