Forza Motorsport - on Gamepass from 10th Oct

[Snowy]

I don't know how many racing game fans there are on the forum outside of Raid and I, but I have always loved the Forza series. Horizons for arcade fun and open world hooning, and the Motorsport series for a more focused driving experience. The Motorsport editions are not serious racing sims in the vein of Assetto Corsa or iRacing, but are a lot closer to them than the Horizons titles.

As I say, I do like racing games and have sunk a crazy amount of hours into the Forza series. As such when a new one comes along, I buy the uber edition to vote with my wallet for their games, which I did again for Motorsport. As well as expansions and some other cars, this gave me a head start jump into the game before general release on the 10th - I thought I would pop in here to tell you how it is.

I can tell you, initially things did not look good. The game fired up but took an age to transition from load screens to career options to tracks loading to actual races. 2-3 minutes between them quite frequently. On top of that, while doing the initial opening 'scene setter' races, the track and much of the surrounding graphics vanished. My racing line was overlaid over a void basically. I struggled through to the end, rebooted, all to no avail. Eventually I decided that it has simply been released before it was ready and uninstalled it.

The following morning I tried a reinstallation, which to my amazement completely fixed the issues. Suddenly the game was transformed, running perfectly and feeling fantastic to boot. Where I had played my first abortive games using the joypad, I had set my wheel up for planned weekend racing with Raid (on F1 23) and I have to say, the car handling using a FFB wheel Is absolutely sublime. I was streaming for Raid via Discord - he suggested I chose a 'standard' Ferrari road car and suggested a circuit that he had enjoyed racing on. I always use a cockpit view for proper racing games, and the wheel was absolutely singing in my hands, telling me everything the car was doing. I was driving the 458 Challenge Stradale, the last of the naturally aspirated mid-engine V8s, on a track I had never driven, but the feeling from the wheel was so sublime that I was (mostly) able to keep it on the track. The 458 is a powerful car and I was constantly having to input small corrections as I drove the track - honestly it was some of the best feeling driving I have ever done on a PC. Rather than most racing titles where the car grips until you hit the limits of adhesion and then just slide sideways, in Forza Motorsport you can feel those limits, feel when the traction starts to give and the adjustment you make are just so natural.

I am running it on my new rig which is close to bleeding edge, on a Samsung G9 49" ultrawide, and am getting between 85-100FPS with everything turned up to maximum. I have since been doing some other races, in much more humble cars, and really enjoyed those too.

There are definitely still some teething troubles though. The last race I ran was in heavy rain, and once again the track simply disappeared. I will keep on with my early access before the general release tomorrow, where we may well see a Day 1 patch that I hope fixes this. I have read of other performance issues impacting other players, so your experience may be issue free or a little problematic, but once ironed out if you like a racing game close to a Sim racer but that you can pick up and play, you should be on happy ground here.

[Rusty]

My wheel and pedals are gathering dust in my spare room (since lockdown really) so maybe it's time to keep Gamepass and try it out.

[Drarok]

The default settings (which you seemingly can't change until you're quite far into the UNSKIPPABLE INTRO ) made all the "videos" in the intro run around 0.5-2 FPS for me, but as soon as it dumped me into the first race everything was smooth and playable – weird!

The audio played at standard speed though so I got to hear the intro as it's meant to be heard, but then had to wait for the visuals to show up. Very weird.

Once I finally had control, I went and fiddled with the graphics settings which didn't seem too nuts given the woeful performance of in-game cut scenes, but I dialled it back anyway. Yeah, no – there's just some bug with them. The actual races are mostly smooth, dipping to 50 FPS once or twice, but the cut scenes have some weird performance jank going on for me.

As for the actual racing, I didn't dig my wheel out yet so just using the Xbox controller for now. The sound and feedback are great, and I've made some really fun overtakes!

Another plus: the menu system (so far) doesn't seem like the absolute hellspawn of FH5, though the true test will be when I try to team up with friends to race.

[Snowy]

Well Raid and I will be playing online in private races, initially at least - feel free to dive into the TGA Discord (the-ga-ghosts sub-channel) where we can be found loitering most evenings, happy to have anyone wanting some racing (or shooting or any other co-op goodness) along