Sitting on the grid in my 2017 Holden V8 Supercar, surrounded by Lamborghinis, Ferraris, and Audi R8s, I have to concede I’m feeling a little underqualified. Forza Motorsport’s online multiplayer spec racing should technically place all these cars on a level field, but I can’t help but feel like I’ve brought a cricket bat to a swordfight here. Several mediocre laps later and neither myself or my Vegemite-eating VF Commodore have troubled the timesheets much, finishing mid-pack one spot below where I started – but I’m sweating, and I’m smiling. The 2023 version of Forza Motorsport is brimming with new features across the board, from its muscular new multiplayer to its much-improved handling. All except for its upgrades, that is. They’ve been downgraded. Confused? Me too.
Forza Motorsport is, by a significant margin, the best feeling game in the Motorsport franchise to date. It isn’t necessarily a total reinvention of the Forza formula, and it still has that familiar level of forgiveness baked into it when you’re at and just beyond the limits of control. This is a series that has always been about letting us have the confidence to grab a car by the scruff of its neck and step the rear end out with a boot-full of throttle without constantly over-rotating, and that’s absolutely still the case here. The improvements before we break traction, however, are marked.
If the previous game, Forza Motorsport 7, has any noticeable handling blemishes, it’d be that there’s often a lack of bite to the feeling of grip. Six years later, that’s totally gone here in this follow-up. The feeling of grip in Forza Motorsport is far more pronounced and authentic, and cars feel more realistically rooted to the road than they ever have previously. Push beyond the capacity of your tyres and grip will now taper away instead of falling off a cliff, meaning cars squirm more and skate less – which is a great improvement.
The pleasing side-effect of these terrific tyre modelling improvements goes beyond making racing feel more accurate; it also actually makes it feel easier to drive fast. ‘Easy’ is too often used as a pejorative in a gaming context but, with respect to those who can’t feel feelings until they’re being flayed alive by a FromSoft game, in racing terms I can assure you it’s not a contemptuous concept. Lapping as fast as the pros, millimetre perfect and at maximum attack? No, that’s not simple – if it was, we’d all have yachts in Monaco by now. But hustling around a track quick and hard, confident the car beneath you is going to behave as it should? That’s well within the means of a competent driver. The old sim racing mentality that “if it’s not difficult, it’s not realistic” is something that most good driving simulators have been moving away from for some time, and Forza Motorsport is no exception. It’s easier because it’s more authentic.
Gamepad handling is extremely well-refined. While it’s hardly a surprise considering good gamepad handling has always been a staple of this long-running series, I’m happy to report it remains top-notch and has survived the physics updates beneath the surface. As usual, the team at Turn 10 has struck a terrific balance between softening things like rapid weight transfer and certain steering inputs to keep the handling tameable on a tiny analogue stick, but still demanding an indisputable deftness to drive consistently fast.
On a wheel, my experience is limited to the Thrustmaster TS-XW Racer – but it definitely errs extremely heavy out of the box. Surprisingly so, in fact. The last time my actual car felt this heavy to pilot it was because my alternator failed and killed my power steering. It is, however, extremely tuneable – so I was able to eventually dial that aggressive heaviness out and enjoy what I otherwise consider the best Forza Motorsport wheel feel I’ve ever experienced. There might be a slight numbness to severe kerbs, but the responsiveness and stability is excellent.
The feeling of car weight is also great – especially on undulating and technical track sections like cresting over the rise at Laguna Seca before slamming down through the corkscrew. There are some small, welcome touches for wheel users, too. Those who play in cabin-view with the wheel visible may be happy to see the steering animation is no longer locked to just 90 degrees in either direction. The on-screen wheel now rotates up to 360 degrees, which is far more realistic. There are also car-specific force feedback and steering lock settings in the tuning menus, making it easier to keep cars feeling right without constantly re-adjusting the global settings.
Level: May Cry
There’s more good news on tuning, including a new layer of suspension settings as well as the ability to add ballast. Adding ballast obviously increases car weight and lowers its performance index overall, but it is automatically distributed throughout the car to bring it closer to a perfect 50/50 weight distribution. It’s impossible to instantly gauge the impact the addition of ballast will have on competitive car builds, but it will be interesting to watch and experiment to see whether pushing a car over the limit before handicapping it with extra weight is a viable strategy on certain tracks.
Unfortunately, that’s currently where the positive news on tuning – or perhaps more specifically, customisation – largely stops. That’s because upgrades are no longer all immediately available for any car by default, like they are in Forza Motorsport 7 or Forza Horizon 5. Instead, they’re frugally rationed out for each car as you spend seat time in them and earn experience for that specific vehicle. They’re also no longer purchased with credits, either; rather, each car will have a set amount of ‘Car Points’ that applying upgrades eats away at. The amount of Car Points you have per car will be determined by each car’s individual level, which tops out at 50. Upgrades are always made available in the same order, but it takes several hours of driving to unlock things like engine swaps (40), body kits (45), and drivetrain swaps (50).
By design, this overtly RPG-style approach is meant to encourage us to form more profound connections with a narrower assortment of cars that mean something to us personally instead of bouncing around. In practice, however, it’s just a bit bothersome. Sure, it never feels as trivial as, say, the luck-based upgrade systems under the hood of arcade racers like The Crew series or Need for Speed Payback; we’re still in control of the parts we choose to “purchase” and fit. And sure, at car level 50 with the full range of parts available, the upgrade system in Forza Motorsport is essentially the same as it’s been for generations. The problem is getting there is now an unexpected treadmill, for every individual car (including duplicates of the same car).
I do appreciate Forza Motorsport’s “built, not bought” philosophy, but the new layer of gamification here isn’t really for me. It’s not so much the Car Point system itself – I actually think there’s a decent amount of merit in some kind of system that’s perhaps roughly analogous to time sunk. Anyone who’s ever spent time wrenching on a car will know that you can’t do everything at once, and Car Points do mean you have to slowly add and swap parts over time – just like in real-life. What I don’t really get is the concept of gating away upgrades in a strict order – especially the super straightforward ones. Why do we really need a certain car level before we can yank out the spare wheel to shave some kilos? It definitely dilutes the previous freedom we had to focus on the upgrades we predict would make the most meaningful difference to a car’s performance from the outset, and it’s all bit silly that I’m measuring fuel loads by the millilitre to slice bonus thousandths of a second off my lap times when I’m still lugging around a spare tyre in the boot.