This piece was going to be my first impressions of Forza Motorsport – the latest big racing simulation game developed by Turn 10 Studios for Xbox. But the longer I’ve sat with Forza Motorsport, the more the game feels overshadowed by one single problem, and this is getting in the way of what should be an exciting racing experience.
Forza Motorsport is a good game with a single glaring flaw. It has a great selection of cars, it’s visually stunning, it runs well on my PC, and it landed on Game Pass on launch day. Even though I’m not any kind of motoring enthusiast and I don’t know the first thing about how or what to tune to get two extra brake horsepower or more torque (what even is torque, by the way?) Forza’s cars feel like a ton of fun to drive. I’ll leave most of the tinkering to folks who know what they’re doing – but the fact that there’s such a huge array of tuning options is fantastic.
But Forza Motorsport is lacking in one key department – and it’s one that feels like it should be an incredibly obvious thing for any racing game to get right. Forza Motorsport just doesn’t have enough racetracks.
At time of writing in October 2023, shortly after the game’s launch, there are a mere twenty racetracks. That’s compared with 32 racetracks in its (confusingly-named) predecessor, Forza Motorsport 7 from 2017. I can’t think of another recent racing game that launched with so few racetracks – not a serious racer, at any rate. Gran Turismo 7, which is Xbox and Forza’s big PlayStation 5 competitor, launched with almost twice as many tracks for players to race on.
When I owned a SNES console in the early 1990s, I had a game called Nigel Mansell’s World Championship. That game, which is now more than thirty years old, had sixteen racetracks – only four fewer than Forza Motorsport. Is that okay? Are players in 2023 willing to accept that the latest edition of one of the racing genre’s big beasts has only four more racetracks than a thirty-one-year-old SNES/Amiga game that hardly anyone remembers?
Let’s get the obvious out of the way: Turn 10 and Xbox Game Studios clearly plan to add more racetracks as paid-for DLC. The fact that the game launched on day one with purchasable car packs as add-ons says a lot about the state of monetisation in Forza Motorsport. But at least the base game came with a solid lineup of cars to choose from. The amount of racetracks, in comparison, feels incredibly lacklustre and downright stingy.
For me, this lack of diversity in racing environments has crippled Forza Motorsport, cutting the game off at the knees and utterly annihilating any potential longevity it might’ve had. And I’m sure I won’t be the only one in that position. The game, in its current form, feels almost akin to a demo or beta version; an incomplete experience with promises of additional development to come at some nebulous future date. In a game that’s priced at £65/$70 – for the base version – I don’t consider that to be acceptable.
If Turn 10 wanted to add more racetracks but didn’t have time, why not delay the launch of Forza Motorsport? From Xbox’s point of view, the game isn’t essential at the present moment – sure, it’s great to get it out in time for Christmas, but with titles like Starfield doing big numbers and a relatively successful 2023 already under its belt, it’s not like the success or failure of Game Pass or the Series X was somehow riding on an early launch of Forza Motorsport. There was time to push things back if some racetracks weren’t ready.
But I really don’t believe that’s the issue. It seems obvious to me that Turn 10 and Xbox are planning to release racetracks either as standalone pieces or in bundles – and charge players extra for them. That’s a pretty big disappointment considering how few tracks there are in the “standard edition” of the game. There are promises of free updates… but watch this space. I’d bet on at least some of these racetracks only being available to people willing to fork over some extra cash.
More and more games are going down this “live-service” route, and it’s disappointing. While Forza Motorsport runs well and seems to be free of major bugs and performance issues, it still feels like a game that doesn’t have enough content to justify its price tag… or, frankly, its early release. There’s a lot here that could be great… but when there aren’t many racetracks to sink your teeth into, the game feels like it gets old pretty fast.
I’d rather have seen 300 cars and 30 tracks instead of 500 cars and 20 tracks. Maybe that’s just me, but that would’ve been my preference if there were limited development resources. Or, alternatively, I’d have delayed Forza Motorsport until more racetracks were fully-developed and ready to be included as part of the base game.
I will caveat all of this by saying that I’m not a “car guy” or really any kind of racing sim expert. And if the general consensus from players is that they’d rather have more cars to toy with and that the number of racetracks and the diversity of racing environments don’t matter so much… then fair enough! This is all just one player’s subjective take, after all.
But I confess that I feel disappointed in Forza Motorsport as things stand. The game just doesn’t have as much to offer as I feel it should – and that seriously cuts into the enjoyment for me. I’ve put down the control pad for now… and I’m honestly not sure if I’ll bother to pick it back up.
Forza Motorsport is out now for PC and Xbox Series S/X. The game is also available as part of a Game Pass subscription. Forza Motorsport is the copyright of Turn 10 Studios, Xbox Game Studios, and Microsoft. Some promotional images courtesy of IGDB. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Trekking with Dennis 