What's good on Xbox? (Gaming)

by stabbim , Des Moines, IA, USA, Sunday, February 11, 2018, 22:19 (2481 days ago) @ cheapLEY
edited by stabbim, Sunday, February 11, 2018, 22:30

I had heard some bad stuff about Forza 7, but I'm sure I'll get it soon.

Speaking of which, I'm not in as much of a rush now as when I wrote that first post, so here goes...

Good:

It drives better than any previous Forza game. The cars' handling just feels right. And that is the point, after all.

The weather effects are finally where they should be, I think. As you probably know, Forza didn't have weather effects at all for a long time. It only got rain in version 6. And they did do a great job, in some ways - Forza 6 actually simulated hydroplaning on standing water, as well as the drag force from going through the puddles. It didn't just say the wet version of the track was X% less grippy, and that's the only difference. So that was great, and the things they were doing with water were things I had not seen before. But the flipside was that Forza 6 treated the wet environment as a static thing. There was a version of the track with rain, and one without, and that was it. The rain version was always in the same state - the rate of rainfall was constant, the puddles stayed the same size the whole time, etc. There was no concept of the track conditions gradually changing. Now, in 7, there are a BUNCH of different states ranging from cloudy to full-on thunderstorm, to foggy. And it believably transitions between them. The track surface gradually gets more slippery and puddles start to build up after it's been raining for a bit. Very good stuff.

The Pagani Zonda R is back, as is the Ferrari F40 Competizione. Those two cars have both been in previous games, but were absent for a while. I'm not even sure when the last time I was able to drive them was, and I have strong emotional attachment to both, so for me it's almost worth the other issues just to have them back.

You can now buy parts, tune cars, and test drive from within the pre-race menu. This is great because it means you can adjust your car setup for the actual race you're doing, if you're someone who likes to do that, without quitting the race and going into the car setup area separately. And you can test drive right at that track, since it's loaded up for the race.

There's a huge amount of content. It feels massively bigger than 5 and even a bit bigger than 6 to me. You might be aware, but Forza had an unfortunate lack of content in 5, which was obviously due to them being forced to rush production to launch with the XBone. There were a couple hundred fewer cars than FM4, and several fewer tracks. Pretty dismal for a game that had been steadily expanding up until that point. 6 improved, and on numbers it might have been close to 4 (I never checked TBH), but somehow it didn't feel as expansive as 4. I think 7 is finally back where it should be, and I'm fairly sure it launched with more content than 4 had.

Bad:

Buying cars is weird. For some reason, the first method you're introduced to is this baffling "car collection" screen, which only sorts the cars by their "collection tier" (more on this later), not by anything else. And since there are only a handful of tiers, each group is HUGE. Plus the tiers have more to do with rarity than speed, so there's very little logic to where anything is. You could never develop any understanding of which cars are where. And to top it all off, NOTHING about the cars' stats are shown here. Not class, weight, power, or anything of the sort. Now, luckily the standard car store does still exist, but it's not what's pushed at you in the intros/tutorials, so I probably had the game a day or two before I noticed it. And as it turns out, you're probably not meant to use the car collection as your primary shopping center - it's just to keep track of what you've collected, as the name suggests. But that's not how it's presented early on.

Collection tiers. Each car is in a tier based on rarity, although this is a bit questionable since most cars in Forza are rare. Even the ones that are based on a common model are usually a special version (Dodge Omni GLHS, for example). Anyway, the deal is that every car you own nets you some points, and getting to a given point total unlocks each tier. You're not able to buy cars above your current tier (though you can still win them as rewards from various things). In practice, I found that this mattered very little. Partly because, as is typical in Forza, while going through the initial career mode stuff I was getting so many cars from races and leveling up that I didn't even have time to try them all, never mind buying others on top of that. And also because the cars above my current tier were generally more expensive than I could afford. It didn't take very long for me to reach top tier, and once you do that it's all meaningless.

Classes vs. Divisions. In addition to the typical A, B, C, etc., each car is now also in a division. These divisions try to group similar types of cars together, so it might be things like American street muscle, luxury coupes, or classic rally. Now, Forza has had these types of groupings before. Horizon 3 does the same thing. What's different is that in Forza 7 each division has its OWN performance index, which is separate from the class. So B class might range from 501-600 PI for example, but Classic Rally cars need to be 575 to compete in their division (I'm just making up numbers here, but you get the idea). And nearly ALL the career races are by division, so if you're going to use a car in those career mode races, it needs to be at that PI level. But when my friends and I race, we prefer to just go by broad class, because that creates a more interesting mix of different vehicles. So I have to have a separate tune for each scenario, at least for the cars I actually used in the career mode. Giant pain in the ass, and it accomplishes NOTHING because the previous Forza games were still ABLE to have career races with similar cars all running together, because they still HAD vehicle types. I can think of no logical reason why these groupings needed to have their own separate PI requirement. Oh, and by they way, it's not JUST a PI requirement. Any given division will also have maximum tire width and power levels. These limits, for most cars, are far enough above stock to not be too big of a deal, but there are a few which are actually above the requirements in stock form. This leads to some street vehicles having RESTRICTOR PLATES among their possible mods, in order to de-tune them for their division. Restrictor plates on a street car FFS.

The normal tune and test-drive area is gone. For me personally, this is Forza 7's worst sin. In previous Forza games, as odd as it may sound, the thing I actually spent the most time on was building and tuning cars. The thing I have the most fun with is driving a car bone-stock in the test drive area, identifying its strengths and weaknesses and the handling tendencies that I don't like, and then very gradually installing upgrades and tweaking settings. This involves NUMEROUS test drives in between each change so I can test my changes. For some reason I can't quite fathom, Turn 10 apparently thought that since they now have test driving in the pre-race menu, that is where ALL tuning and setup would be done. It's apparently incomprehensible to them that someone would set up a car first thing, just to do it, and not necessarily because they have a particular race pending. This means that I have to load up a race (which I often have no intention of actually running) just to build my car. Oh, and here's the great part. Because I intend to do my own setup, I often buy my cars stock (in this game, they normally come automatically upgraded to their division specs). So, when I go into "free play" and choose the race, the game automatically selects that car's division in the race settings. Then, when I try to load the session, it yells at me because my car doesn't meet the specs for the division that IT CHOSE WITHOUT ASKING ME (because, of course, it's stock). I then have to manually go into race settings and set the division to "all" just so it'll let me load things up. And as I say, I was never actually planning on running the race, so this is supremely irritating.

No AI cars in multiplayer games. This isn't the worst thing in the world, since Forza's AI drivers are notoriously bad (and they have not improved at all in 7). But it is something that's lacking. My friends and I used to fill up the rest of the lobby with AI bots when we raced online, just for a bit of extra traffic. It was always a fun challenge to run the Nordschleife with roll-off delay starts, and see if we could catch up to the lead cars by the lap's end. Things feel lonelier now.

All that being said, I still love Forza 7, even with all its faults. Last Saturday night I spent 6 straight hours racing around with 3 other people (off and on, 2 of them were trying and failing to share a PC setup, LOL).

I bought Horizon because it was only $30. I sort of already regret it. It's really fun, but damn it just isn't the same. Everyone talks about about how it still has that Forza feel, and . . . no, it actually doesn't. I have everything off just like I do in Motorsport, and it still seems impossible to actually screw up--the cars still drive like they're on rails.

Well, it is like the main Forza games, and yet it isn't. The edge is definitely taken off the handling, as you obviously noticed. And TBH, I think it has to be. Trying to do Horizon's ridiculous cross-country races with Forza Motorsport's handling model would be an exercise in frustration and failure. There's already too much colliding with other cars and random jostling IMO. On the other hand, it still does a great job communicating weight transfer, balance, and per-wheel grip, in a way that I think most other console games get wrong or omit entirely. I mean, try The Crew. Yeesh. My thinking is that people who say Horizon and Motorsport games drive the same are probably using a lot of assists. I imagine they might feel similar with the stability control and traction control turned on. Not that I'd know, scrubs! ;)

That being said, I think Horizon 3 is a great game, for the type of game that it is, and I'd be happy to play that one with you as well. There's a lot of potential fun in its multiplayer stuff that I've never really given a try. Pro tip: you can put Top Gear style training wheels on a Reliant Robin, and it actually works realistically. It's hilarious. That alone makes the game worthwhile IMO. :)