It has been a few months since Forza Motorsport launched, and first update arriving now made some people say “Why bother?”
The newest addition to one of the longest racing game series, Forza Motorsport, finally had its first update, addressing feedback and adding quality-of-life updates to make it play at least a bit better. When Forza Motorsport was released all the way back in October, it received middle to bad reviews due to its countless bugs in both gameplay and UI, along with extremely slow progression pace. The whole new take on the “caRPG” did not help Turn 10 either.
Turn 10 had shown Forza Motorsport from time to time in Xbox showcases and it had a promising lead with fantastic graphics, immersive AI, and in-depth progress, but in the end, players got none of it. It currently sits at “Mostly Negative” reviews on the Steam platform and is most likely to stay that way despite the developer’s efforts to make it a better game.
The first update for Forza Motorsport also brought an additional blog post on the website, addressing the topics Turn 10 specialized while working on the update. Although this sounds rather helpful, most players are complaining about how late the update arrived. Compared to their rival, Gran Turismo, Polyphony Digital has been delivering at least one update in some sort of capacity every month. Let it be fixing bugs, bringing new cars or events and even enabling a harder, more aggressive AI to beat in races.
Although late, Turn 10 basically states three mechanics of the game are currently being improved: AI, progression system, and racing regulations. To begin with, getting the AI dead-right in a racing game can be tricky. However, in Forza Motorsport, every car after 3rd position tended to be slow traffic rather than actual competitors. For racing regulations, Forza is already notorious for its unfair penalties and shameful rammers in online play, being crashed into and getting the penalty for yourself is quite a regular occurrence.
As for the progression system, Turn 10 does not talk about how they would improve it, but they are aware that people have been finding it rather slow and unreasonably limiting. It is actually great that they are aware of what the racing community wants, but it’s unfortunate that these were addressed quite a long time after its release, which might have made people try out other games and completely drop Forza Motorsport.
