Forza Motorsport 7 Catch-All

Well, if no one else is going to:

Official announcement details from forzamotorsport.net

EDIT: Launch trailer.

It's light on the details for now (presumably we'll get more throughout the week), but the basic highlights:

- 700+ cars -- including Porche from launch for the first time in a very long time
- 30 track environments with 200+ ribbons -- including the return (at the very least) of Maple Valley and Suzuka
- Some level of dynamic weather and lighting -- to what extent remains unclear though
- New character customization system
- As was the case with Forza Horizon 3, it's a "Play Anywhere" title
- 4k 60fps on the Xbox One X, 1080p 60fps on a standard Xbox One

I'm there with you zeroKFE.

They better let me rock that leather helmet and goggles look from the very start.

Yeah, I'm in.

I hope they do more tutorial and campaign stuff this time around. The weather changes in 6 were nice, but I'd like a bit more structure in the game.

After playing FH3 with HDR enabled and watching the Forza 7 trailer in HD, I'm so freaking in.

Amazon has the digital version of the Ultimate Edition for $80 for preorder.

I really like the open world of Forza Horizon 3. I've dropped hundreds of hours into it. I don't know if I can go to a closed, track based version. You can't cage this bird.

BlackSabre wrote:

I really like the open world of Forza Horizon 3. I've dropped hundreds of hours into it. I don't know if I can go to a closed, track based version. You can't cage this bird.

I like both. They each provide a unique experience. I even drive differently in them. I'm usually third person view in Forizon, but almost exclusively cockpit view in Forza.

honestly, other than a great, arcadey Rally game, I don't need anything else. Dirt 4 looks like a good option. Microsoft needs to resurrect Rallisport.

The demo is now available both on Xbox and PC.

Also, launch trailer:

EDIT:

Also, very much hope that this promo art indicates that there will be a garage mode that shows more than one car.

IMAGE(http://compass.xboxlive.com/assets/0f/9e/0f9e35e7-9487-44e5-8240-92cc954733df.jpg?n=FM7_Demo_story_01.jpg)

Do I really need to install something to tempt me to buy another game? I haven't sucked the marrow out of Forza Horizon 3 yet, and I'm playing Destiny 2 pretty much non stop.

Nah, I'll wait. FM7 seems like a whole lotta retread from what I've read (unless you want 4K and HDR).

BadKen wrote:

Nah, I'll wait. FM7 seems like a whole lotta retread from what I've read (unless you want 4K and HDR).

Yeah, maybe so. I think it really depends on how you slice the new content, what you personally are looking for from the game, and what the last Forza Motorsport game you played was.

In terms of tracks, it's everything from Forza 6 (including the tracks added via DLC), one new fantasy track (Dubai), one returning fantasy track (Maple Valley), and two returning real world tracks (Suzuka and Mugello) — the returning tracks being ones that have been missing since Forza 4, and thus had to be completely recaptured and remodeled for the HD era. There's still no return for other fantasy track favorites such as Fujimi Kaido, Camino Viejo, or Amalfi Coast, and we're still missing the other two Japanese tracks (Motegi and Tsukuba) that reportedly have been too costly to relicense and remodel when it came time to go HD with Forza 5. And there are no entirely new real world tracks either.

So from one perspective, that's only one new track environment that's never been included in a Forza game previously, which is mildly disappointing no matter how you look at it. But at the same time, they are finally adding dynamic time of day and weather conditions to the Motorsport series, which for me is a huge, huge deal. It is still a bit unclear just how complete the support for that feature set will be across all environments, but even if it's less than complete, that accounts for a huge amount of production work, and stands as a rather impressive technical marvel if they really have made it run as well as Forza 6 while also looking a good sight better as well.

Then on the cars front, it's basically everything they've ever had before in any Forza game, except Toyota (who apparently is now taking their turn as the car company du jour who are going to be jerks about licensing). But VW and Porche are back in up front, and there's been some nice growth in the roster in many areas, such as professional race cars, vintage, rare, and other oddball cars, and low end "affordable" favorites. So, the Toyota thing sucks a lot, but other than that it's all pretty impressive in terms of car list.

The open question for me personally is what they've done with the structured campaign modes this time. Forza 5 and 6 both had takes on that which were a bit hit and miss for my tastes, but I don't know that even the demo is going to answer most of my questions there. So definitely no harm in waiting and seeing if that's something that weighs heavily for you, because even though a lot of hay is made about multiplayer, there are a good many folks like myself who only ever play these games single player, and what they offer to pull you through and keep you engaged in that area matters a lot.

As for retread? I dunno — it kind of feels like any other Forza sequel to me, other than 5 which had a sharp drop in content due to requiring a full rebuild for HD for most of the cars and tracks. Each new game has a few more tracks, a good chunk of new cars, prettier graphics, and few evolutionary but not necessarily revolutionary new features. Probably most casual driving game fans would be quite fine just playing every other one — for example, if you had last played Forza 5, this would be a hugely impressive improvement. But, on their exceptionally regular two year production pace for these games, each new entry is rarely going to be more than an incremental jump over the last, you know?

EDIT: It is also the first Motorsport game to run on the PC -- I know I'm very much looking forward to playing on my beautiful 21:9 monitor, and maybe even finding a way to cheat in some manner of head look with my TrackIR -- so that's something too.

Another thing that worries me is that I don't know if I can go back to track racing after the incredibly well-crafted open world of Forza Horizon 3. Weather is a nice feature, but I *hate* racing in the rain. Which is why I am super happy that there's a customization option that lets you set the weather conditions and set whether they are static or not.

I only ever played Forza 6 Apex, and it's a limited version. I think it at least has all the cars & tracks, but not all the customization options. And speaking of customization options, I really, really couldn't care less about customizing my driver. I mean really, how often are you looking at your driver? Seems like a really dumb feature jammed in there just to claim something new. And if you are spending more time looking at your driver in FM7, that makes me even less interested, because I want to look at sexy cars.

The main plus the Motorsport game has for me over the Horizon series is that it doesn't have the goofy racing culture festival party atmosphere that saturates Horizon. However, Horizon has a lot of offroad, stock, luxury, and novelty cars that I don't think really fit in Motorsport. Unless they're going to add some Rally events in DLC...

I'm waiting on this one until I get my shiny Scorpio. Gotta have something that makes it feel like I dropped all that cash for a "new" console and 4K TV for a reason!

BadKen wrote:

Another thing that worries me is that I don't know if I can go back to track racing after the incredibly well-crafted open world of Forza Horizon 3. Weather is a nice feature, but I *hate* racing in the rain. Which is why I am super happy that there's a customization option that lets you set the weather conditions and set whether they are static or not.

I only ever played Forza 6 Apex, and it's a limited version. I think it at least has all the cars & tracks, but not all the customization options. And speaking of customization options, I really, really couldn't care less about customizing my driver. I mean really, how often are you looking at your driver? Seems like a really dumb feature jammed in there just to claim something new. And if you are spending more time looking at your driver in FM7, that makes me even less interested, because I want to look at sexy cars.

The main plus the Motorsport game has for me over the Horizon series is that it doesn't have the goofy racing culture festival party atmosphere that saturates Horizon. However, Horizon has a lot of offroad, stock, luxury, and novelty cars that I don't think really fit in Motorsport. Unless they're going to add some Rally events in DLC...

Yeah, while I personally am happy to be able to customize my driver, I'm right there with you about wanting the focus in the Motorsport games to be on the cars and the driving — no Horizon style "culture" needed.

I'm also there with you about wishing for a more serious Forza rally experience. I enjoyed Dirt Rally, and I also LOVE the Horizon games, but I'd be very excited to get a Forza approach to rally (and/or other offload) racing that was more on the Motorsport side of the sim/arcade and serious/goofy fun spectrums than the Horizon games are. Sadly, I think that division is getting close to set in stone at this point — but, you know, can't have everything, right?

The demo is a bit limited in its offerings (just the same three limited racing options from the E3 demo), but it does serve as a good proof of functionality for the PC version.

+ Support for USB devices is much improved. I can finally use my TH8A shifter alongside my TX racing wheel — really hope they port that support back to Horizon 3, so I can stop playing that on the Xbox. Tonight I might see if it will let me map one of my other devices (maybe either my flight stick or throttle) to the handbrake, to see if it might be worth finally investing in a real handbrake.
- UI keybinding options are limited for wheels — there's no ability to remap which button functions as enter and escape in the menus, so you just have to use whichever button the devs feel is best for your device. Didn't really mess with controller or keyboard options, so maybe it's better there.
+ Keybinding for actual driving inputs was just fine, but…
- There doesn't seem to be a free look option in the wheel settings, which means it's unlikely I'll be able to kludge in TrackIR for that. Bummer. I forgot to try picking up my Xbox controller to see if it would take inputs from that at the same time, though, so there may still be hope if I can fake TrackIR into a set of xinput joystick axes.
+ Force feedback felt well tuned with the default settings, although I've always found that to be the case for me in Forza, so no big surprise there.

+ Performance is excellent, which is no surprise given how well Horizon 3 ran. All options turned up to max, and my computer (Intel 4790k/GTX 1080/16GB RAM/game loaded on SSD) ran a locked 60 FPS at 3440x1440 on all three demo scenarios (and in the benchmark tool), and load times were reasonable (lightyears better than playing Forza 6 on my Xbox, but that should be a given anyway).
- A few options, including the very important car models option, didn't have ultra options, only high. Maybe that's to save space on the demo download? We'll see what's what on the final release I suppose.

Anyway, all told it managed to satisfy most of my concerns about the performance and usability of the PC version, and the remaining question marks are all in the category of "making the game even better" rather than "making it work as well as the console version," which is good since ultimately I mostly played Horizon 3 on my Xbox due to the missing support for my shifter. Assuming there isn't some huge issue with the final release that isn't indicated by this demo, looks like I can probably drop my preorder for an Xbox One X upgrade. Thanks, Play Anywhere initiative!

Oh, a few other thoughts about the actual game:

+ The dynamic conditions are really only on display in the GTR/Nurburgring GP scenario, but they are really, really awesome and beautiful and I can't wait to see them in play across the board in every race.
+ Speaking of which, wet surface conditions seem to have much more effect than they did previously — or, maybe it's that you can actually feel the change since the conditions change as you drive. In fact, they've actually added a new assist that allows you to dampen those effects (presumably make it feel more like the Horizon games), but that assist seems to auto-dirty your lap times for leaderboards.
+ A lot of folks on the internet seem to be complaining about the new camera shake features — and the good news for them is that they can be disabled — but at least so far, I love them. Combined with the now much more animated cockpits (such as all the netting and fabric in the cab of the racing semi) and the even more impressive material rendering (holy hell, check out the alcantera leather in the Porche at max settings, it's spectacular), the experience of sitting in your cockpit feels much more alive than it ever has before, which makes me very happy.
+ Speaking of the racing semi, I thought it would be dumb. It's not. Well, maybe it is, but it's dumb and awesome at the same time, and I love it.
- That Porche is squirrelly as hell, but I suppose the high end ones usually are without upgrades and tuning. Probably best to leave TCS on if you try it out in the demo.

Looks like the pre-load is live

Yup. Now, the question is whether or not the Windows App Store chokes and dies over and over again the way it has every other time I've done a Play Anywhere install.

I got Forza 5 free as part of the Xbox Live sub this month. As a general note on my experience with the series:

I arrive from a background in Arcade style racing (early need-for-speed) and this is totally different. The braking, handling, and throttle control are far more sensitive. I had to turn on baby mode where the game handles a lot of the features as I spun out constantly. I figure I can increase difficulty once I get a feel for it.

Although I don't think I am going to get that far. Sadly the game has induced my photo-sensitivity with the fast rushing detail blur and focus required. After 2 hours I had a migraine.

Kudos to you all that can handle the throttle, braking, and drift recovery in this title.

The Forza games probably do the best job of any sim (well, sim-ish) racer of bridging that gap by offering the wide variety of extremely helpful driving assists and a broad spectrum of difficulty modes, but yeah, ultimately it's still attempting to simulate the behavior of a car in a way that arcade racers do not, and the learning curve can be quite steep at times.

That said, one of the reasons I'm such a fan of the Forza series is because the process of making your way along that learning curve can be quite enjoyable and rewarding. I came to Forza 1 and the older Gran Turismo games back when they were new from a similar place (enjoying arcade racers, being interested in something serious, but not being sure how to begin with that) and bounced off for similar reasons. But, I gave Forza 2 a bit more serious an effort, first with a controller, then with a wheel, slowly working my way through the process of dialing back the assists each time I felt like I had mastered controlling the car with their help, and by the time Forza 4 came out I was driving with all assists off shifting gears manually with a clutch. It was a slow process, but thanks to the friendly granularity of how the Forza series manages assists and difficulty I was able to teach myself to drive in exactly the ways that made sense to me.

Anyway, if you do decide to give it another try, a few suggestions that might help you find a good place to start:

- Don't think of it as baby mode — it's just letting you find the set of constraints on the simulation that let you enjoy the game.
- I know Forza 7 will be allowing players to disable some of the motion blur and camera shake effects, but I can't remember if Forza 5 and 6 did that as well. Worth taking a peak in the settings, though.
- Even if not, you might play around with different camera positions if you haven't already. I know that many folks prefer a third person camera (particularly when they are more comfortable with arcade racers), but the cockpit and/or bumper camera views might help you feel more seated in your car and reduce negative effects of the motion blur, etc.
- And, if you haven't been using the cockpit mode, you might also find that it's helpful for the process of learning how to control things in a sim racer — I certainly did (and still do).

- Even with all the assists on, the car you are driving really, really matters. It is still a simulation, and some cars are just way, way harder to control than others.
- If you've been playing around with faster cars (A tier or higher) try out slower cars; even when they are hard to handle, the cost of mistakes will still often be a lot less severe.
- Regardless of what car you are driving, it can always be made to drive a LOT better through proper tuning and upgrading. At first glance that might seem like an invitation to get in way over your head when starting out with the game, but Forza does an amazing thing in that it lets you crowdsource your car setups so you can just take advantage of the hard work other players have put in figuring out how to make the car you want to drive more drivable.
- I can't recall the exact series of clicks to get into the interface where you browse other players' setups in Forza 5, but generally speaking if you go into the upgrade/tuning tools and look for an option to load a setup, you'll find it. It might not have been emphasized in that game, so check the tool tips as well as the larger menu options (it might have been on the view/back button?).
- When you are selecting a tuning, obviously try to choose highly rated ones, but also be conservative about how much you let it upgrade the car. Only let it bump you up a letter grade or two at most, because in most cases a more severe upgrade might make the car fast, but it probably also makes it undriveable for the average player as well.
- Also, if you are looking for the most easy drivability, often a good rule of thumb is to choose tuning setups that advertise being tuned for grip — and to avoid ones that are tuned for drifting and drag racing.

zeroKFE wrote:

Yup. Now, the question is whether or not the Windows App Store chokes and dies over and over again the way it has every other time I've done a Play Anywhere install. :P

Update:

The Windows App Store is still busted and sh*tty for large files. I'm now on my third attempt downloading, the previous two managing to pull down 60+ GB of data before erroring out.

Two things I'm trying this time that other users seem to think help, in case anyone else here is attempting to download it as well:

- Having more than twice the required space available on my hard drive (glad I've got a big SSD, I guess?)
- Fully deleting/uninstalling the preorder stub before attempting a new download.

Hopefully those cut it, because some of the bullsh*t I had to do to get Forza Horizon 3 and Gear of War 4 installed last year were very, very unpleasant.

Seriously, though, Microsoft: why can't you figure this sh*t out? You figured it out on your console. Dozens of other digital distributors have figured it out on your operating system. Granted, downloading and installing software of this size is a relatively recent development, but it's still been a solved problem for years amongst your competitors.

Even on the console there is confusion. MS said the game would be about 95GB, but it seems to be more like 67, but people have seen the size go up and down; download 67, then it seems to unpack or something and shows as 95, then back to 67 for no clear reason.

Yeah.

Technically it should be 67 on current models, and 95 on the X due to the extra assets to run in 4k, but the copy I have installed on my Xbox showed 95 the last time I looked.

zeroKFE wrote:

Yeah.

Technically it should be 67 on current models, and 95 on the X due to the extra assets to run in 4k, but the copy I have installed on my Xbox showed 95 the last time I looked.

About 95 Gb on my PC

zeroKFE wrote:

Yeah.

Technically it should be 67 on current models, and 95 on the X due to the extra assets to run in 4k, but the copy I have installed on my Xbox showed 95 the last time I looked.

Except that they had a press release that clearly said the 95 was before the HD patch. To be clear I'm not saying you are wrong, just that the messaging is muddled. Neither 67 nor 95 at launch would surprise me much.

Downloading this involved a two hour argument with Windows Store where it wouldn't see my F: at all and complained I didn't have enough space on the G: for the 22gb download... I had 485GB free. The game was apparently desperate to install to my C: for some reason.

After a reboot the Store still wouldn't see the F: but it did at last concede that 22<485 and installed to the G: drive.

Then it turned out the download experience might be better than the game itself.

Stutters were frequent, Force Feedback would randomly vanish, sometimes mid-corner, and then dump back all at once in the middle of the subsequent straight and the AI, while set to non-aggressive drove into me as if I wasn't there, including one time where a driver turned away from a corner to hit me.

I don't have a console so I don't have past experience with Forza outside of the Apex beta, but wow I did not expect it to be this bad.

Credit to the demo for saving me money at least.

Wow, that's crazy about the force feedback -- what wheel do you use?

Support was quite excellent out of the box for my Thrustmaster TX, but I suppose one would expect that to be pretty dialed in since they've been supporting that wheel in one form or another since Forza 5.

I wonder if it's all performance related, though -- like, the strange AI behavior and the force feedback issues are being caused by the stuttering, whatever is at the root of that. Massive bummer either way.

Oh, and either way the Windows app store can f*ck right off to hell and back as far as I'm concerned; I've probably burned through 300 GB of bandwidth now across five or six failed attempts to preload. Their Twitter account seems to be indicating that the issues might be related to whatever system they use for managing prerelease downloading, and that the download should be fine once the game is unlocked, so I've finally given up on trying until 9 PM tonight.

We shall see, I suppose, and thankfully I can play on my Xbox in the meantime. Still, very disappointing because for me the demo ran beautifully and seemed to promise that I'd be able to enjoy this game in all the glory that my PC setup can provide from the very start. Maybe for Horizon 4, I guess?

Really, truly, I despise that sh*tty ass app store right now.

I'm using a Fanatec wheel and pedals. It was... ok in the Apex Beta, but here it feels like the game is distracted and forgets ffb for a second, then gives it back along with all the ffb you missed in the deadzone.

Played for a few minutes this morning. I don't know if this had previous been revealed, but I think it is pretty cool that it is now cannon that the "M" in M. Rossi is Maria.

Nice.

But, didn't the old names get retired with the advent of drivatars?

After reading this article, there is no way I'm buying Forza 7.

Now, instead of paying money for a chance at random loot, you can pay money for a chance at a random race mutator (which they are curiously calling "mods") that will reward more credits that you can spend on more random chances! They have also removed the option to earn a bigger payout by increasing race difficulty (turning off assists, and so on). You can still increase the difficulty, there is just no reward for it unless you are using one of those random "mods."

All hail our new loot box overlords.

Yeah, it is a bit crass, although not terribly unexpected given trends in the industry.

Personally, I'm going to withhold judgement until I've played the game -- Turn 10 has a decent record of showing restraint and generally not abusing players, and at least for me has earned a little bit of benefit of the doubt. That said, I certainly wouldn't fault others for deciding that their following these trends is a step too far. While some of the changes mentioned definitely can be explained as design choices in response to real and perceived balance problems in the economy and sense of progression in previous games, it does generate some unfortunately justifiable suspicion with the addition of blind loot boxes.

--

Incidentally, the app store finally did work and let me install after the unlock time, and the game runs and plays as wonderfully as the demo indicated on my PC with my wheel setup, so at least so far I'm pretty happy with Turn 10's part of the whole thing, despite my significant ire at Microsoft's sh*tty digital distribution system. Only found an hour or two to play so far, though, so we shall see how things progress and hold up once I put some real time into it.