I can see their reasoning but all I can say is DAMMIT!

^

What a joke.

A shame. There's only a few tracks that support dynamic lighting and weather in GT5 but it adds so much to the experience. Sunrise with the fog on Nurburgring, doing the final laps on Sarthe while the sun is disappearing will be missed.

It's not just nigh time, having the sun in different positions, overcast or sunny keeps the game fresh a lot longer.
Hopefully all racing sims next gen will have dynamic lighting.

GPL had excellent physics and tracks and car modeling, but no weather effects and no night racing and the damage model was limited to suspensions and engine (enough anyway to slow you or even kick you out of the race if you did anything that would have slowed or ended your race in real life, and the suspension damage modeling was very realistic, with damages ranging from just steering not centred anymore to visibly deformed rods to totally broken suspensions). More than 10 years ago, on PCs less powerful than a GameCube.

Honestly I hate night/wet races (at least I did in GT5). I'm fine with all of them being daytime and dry.

As long as there's a good variety of tracks it won't get stale having the same weather/sun. And I'd take 60FPS and awesome graphics over night/wet racing.

Racing guys with Obutto racing seats with 3 monitor surround vision setups will be dissapointed for sure.

Wait! Thats me! And I don't care...Buying this game for sure. :p

Funny how the OP never bothered highlighting this bit.

For Forza 4, the majority of our graphical investment went into our new image-based lighting (IBL) model, as well as new material shaders, which give our cars and tracks such a realistic, detailed look. With IBL, supporting the general look of night is not particularly hard. However, we take frame rate pretty seriously—we believe that having a solid 60 frames per second (FPS) experience with no tearing is very important for a simulation racing game.

Welcome to early august...

well imo the weather effects was crap in gt5, they should have gone the hot pursuit route of faking it all ie, shiney wet roads and rain splashes added on, to do that all in real time was just to much to handle. car handles brilliantly real in the rain but it looks crap.

re: night racing its a shame it isnt in, racing on nurburgring in night then slowly cascading into day looks and plays amazing, but its not the end of the world for forza 4

the devs have given good reason why its ommited so we have to leave it at that