Forza Motorsport preview: Xbox’s sim racer goes full CaRPG
Xbox Series X’s reinvention of Forza improves the way you connect with your car – and looks better than ever.
Full disclosure: I’m not a racing game guy. No, instead that honour deservedly goes to resident petrol head and Mirror Gaming editor Nathan Bliss, who is sure to be jealous of the fact that I (apparently) am part of the first round of press to see behind-the-scenes gameplay of the new Forza Motorsport. That’s according to the team at Turn 10 anyway, which I can tell have been aching to show off everything they have in store for the first entry in the respected sim racing series to be built for the ground up for Xbox Series X.
Xbox players have already been blown away by the main franchise’s breezier brother, Forza Horizon 5, but what you get here is a true current-gen racing experience primed to blow you away with visuals that achieve 4K 60fps simultaneously. Such a visual feast is more along the lines of what we’ve come to expect from the 'world’s most powerful console' – and it certainly blew me away. Racing on the track appeared smooth, the dynamic weather cycle truly benefitting from the OLED display the short demo was played on, and raytraced lighting sees the natural light bounce from the hood to the tarmac and back again in a way that could make you feel like the images you’re seeing is real life.
Equally as impressive as the current-gen graphics, though, is what’s going on under the hood. I was super curious to find out why this was the entry Turn 10 chose to brand as simply ‘Forza Motorsport’, and it quickly becomes clear once you discover how the revamped career mode is being handled. Of course, not being a Forza fanatic, I don’t have a lot to compare it to. That said, plenty of effort has gone in to make the Xbox Series X’s sim racing debut the most accessible entry yet for newcomers.
Highway to heaven
The career mode this time around is called Builders Cup, built around three different modes designed to let you build a better relationship with your car over time. The first mode is Open Practice, and it’s just as freeform as it sounds. The idea here is to take your car and take it out on the track to learn all the turns, all of which can be used as a way to prepare for race day. So far, so simple. From there you have Challenge the Grid, where you can select anywhere in the pack to start, duking it out against rivals to further test your ability and potential. Following this it’s race day.
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The kicker comes in how almost everything you do – be it braking, turning, and finishing – continuously earn you Car Points. These can then be used in between races to upgrade your vehicle and build a better car. Car Points are unique to the vehicle you earn them in, so there’s no chance that you’ll unlock the best build for the vehicles featured in your garage quickly or easily. After all, that wouldn’t be too much fun. All these various manoeuvres also gifts you a score that you can use to get better the next time you return to that track.
The extra oomph Xbox Series X brings has also allowed Turn 10 to improved upon its already great patented Drivatar technology. Because not only is it powered by the machine learning benefits of AI, but has been designed to match the ability of real drivers. This means your AI opponents never have to cheat their way to give you a good challenge on the track – if it can be done in real-time by a professional driver, then it can be done in Forza Motorsport too. Builders Cup is broken up into different types of racing series too, so there’s plenty of ways and methods to test your skill.
The entirety of Forza Motorsport has been designed around the idea that 'cars are built not bought', if only to reward players for doing better and improving naturally, not just in Builders Cup but really all the game modes. This then feeds into the wider ethos Turn 10 is implementing in which they will try and encourage players to 'level, build, dominate' in a manner that’s not been possible before. As a core gameplay loop it should work well to inspire racing enthusiasts to form a relationship much closer to their car, if only because they’ll see the effects of their success actually on the track. In this way, the game appears primed to live up to its true CaRPG potential.
I came away from the hands-off preview enthused about the prospect of not being overwhelmed by a sim racing game for once. Equally as exciting is the idea that Forza Motorsport looks to be the first game to fully take advantage of the Xbox Series X’s hardware potential through the use of simultaneous 4K 60 fps with real-time raytracing and HDR – a four-way combination that even PlayStation’s Gran Turismo 7 couldn’t even pull off. By reworking the campaign and the way you connect with the cars themselves, Forza Motorsport so far looks set to very much be the clean slate its numberless title implies.
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