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"[GAME] Forza Motorsport 5 (Xbox One)"

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Mon 30/03/15 at 23:44
Regular
"The Prodigal Son..."
Posts: 23
In light of the fact that Forza Motorsport 6 has now been announced, I thought I’d take a little time to give the Freeola Chat Forum my rather elongated opinion on Forza 5, after recently acquiring it along with an Xbox One.

So, I’ll start by frontally addressing the fact that yes, Forza 5, in comparison with almost all of its predecessors was pretty terribly received by the community way back when the Xbox One launched. Having fairly recently got myself an Xbox One, complete with both Forza 5 and Forza Horizon 2, I’m having a fair amount of trouble figuring out why.

I’ve been an avid Forza follower for most of my gaming life – since Forza Motorsport 2 was released in conjuction with the launch of the 360 in fact – and I can’t really fathom what everyone’s been so up in arms about. The more I think about it the more it occurs to me it’s most likely that it just got a little harder. The Forza series has come on leaps and bounds in terms of the realism when it comes to the next gen consoles - yes the Horizon series could be a little like a prettier version of the nitro-boost-around-a-90-degree-corner-at-170mph Need For Speed games, but they’re designed to be casual. The idea of the Horizon games is that you jump in to an online lobby with 12 of your mates and hoon about in a car park with a Mk. 1 Golf you’ve somehow managed to plow 1100bhp into.

Anyway, I digress. The 5th Installment of the Forza Motorsport series has had a serious overhaul in terms of physics as well as graphically and I think the former might be what’s caused all the hoo-haa. Reason being, this game noticeably does one thing exceptionally well, and that’s punish you for driving like a plonker. Tires react to you flinging them into a bend at 120mph like they should - they lose grip – and you go with them, all the way into the barrier 200 feet past the sand pit. In previous Forzas, you could set up your car so it was glued to the road in a manner which was frankly, wholly unrealistic. On top of that, hitting a curb at speed seemed to affect your trajectory by somewhere close to nill. In Forza 5, if you put a sliver of the back wheel on a curb in your Mustang while you’re full throttle out of the bend, you’ll lose traction and you’ll be staring at the headlights of whoever was behind you a second ago before you’ve had the time to process what’s even happened.

Here seems as good a place as any to mention one of the small, but significant, changes from 4 to 5. The physics engine for 4, even if you had it set at the more ‘realistic’ simulation setting, always put you ‘on a rail’ as such, if you lost grip, even with TCS and STM off, you’d get some help from the engine in the way of a gentle point back in the right direction. In 5, as far as I can tell so far, this has been scrapped. Now, if you get it wrong, you can fishtail all the way down a main straight with no aid from the physics engine.

Personally I love this, I found the Forza 4 Career mode, even set to maximum difficulty with no assists turned on, too easy. The new engine and the increased level of difficulty it brings to keeping cars in check that would be unruly in the real world makes it a much more immersing and challenging experience. It gives you a sense of achievement when in actual fact all you’ve managed is to get the car around the track on a clean lap, sometimes to the point where even if you manage to get it around one of the numerous extremely tricky bends, you give yourself a little mental pat on the back, the “That one felt right.” Moment in amongst the hundreds of times you swear at the screen as you career into an opponent because you locked up on entry.

That brings me quite neatly to the AI. We’ve also had an incredible jump in the way the AI in these games work, from 4 to 5 we’ve moved from hard programmed AI that lap the track in a laughably inhuman fashion and can’t even seem to react to where you are on the track, to the point where it feels more like navigating traffic on a country road than it does racing around a track. With 5, we have the Drivatar. Every race you enter in career mode is populated by your friends, and other racers at your skill level, as you race, Forza develops a profile on how you race, dropping your Drivatar into your friends races and earning you in-game credits while you’re not even racing, so even when your friends aren’t online, you’re always technically racing against them – how cool is that? This is one of the features that makes this game so much more competitive and turns what you intended to be a fairly relaxed poodle about in a classic car around Le Mans into leaning forward in your chair, biting your tongue in an effort to scrape the 0.035 seconds difference between your lap time and your friends fastest lap around whichever track you’ve decided on.

The in game contributions from Top Gears Jeremy, James and Richard aren’t too shabby either, every time you start a new league in career, you’ll be greeted by these three, reminiscing on their teenage years for the retro hot hatches or drooling in unison over the supercars, as well as the occasional argument about which of the cars they think you should pick for the next 8-10 races. It serves well as a natural break with a little humor and human interaction for the completionists out there in what can sometimes be the dull trawl from league to league ticking off races for the sake of it.

Whether you’re a fan or not, there’s one thing that nobody can disagree on, and that’s how astoundingly pretty the cars in this game are. The Forzavista mode on every single one of the hundreds of super-high poly count in-game cars is absolutely mesmerising. I’ve found myself on more than one occasion firing my console up ready to race and spending half an hour walking around cars, getting in, starting up engines, removing engine covers, opening bonnets and listening to the expertly narrated stories behind each of the cars. Zoom in far enough and you can see the orange peel in the paint, it’s just utterly gorgeous. Aside from the visuals, the sound effects on this game are also on point. Using actual cars and a trunk full of microphones, Turn 10 have also captured engine sounds in just about as high fidelity as you could wish for, you’ll definitely want to turn this game up a few clicks.

On top of that, now we’ve got laser-mapped tracks to race them around. So you can take your pixel perfect car, your realistic set of tires and drop it all onto a track that’s as near as you’ll get to what it feels like in real life. Every bump and dip in the road punishes the car, get to the crest of a hill and you can feel the front end go light, hit a dip and you get the opposite effect.

The only complaint I have about this game is to do with downloadable content. Having been around since Forza 2, anyone else who’s been here this long will understand what I mean when I say it’s hard not to get a little frustrated with Turn 10 Studios regurgitating content. We get around 8 packs of DLC cars for each game, ranging from 5-10 cars. Of all the packs for Forza 5 (for which you pay the handsome price of £31.99) nearly half are cars we’ve seen before that have been dressed up for next gen. I’m not sure I’m alone when I say I’d definitely like to see some more cars come to Forza that we’ve not seen before.

All in all, if I’m anywhere close with my theory on why this game wasn’t so well accepted, to those who aren’t impressed, buy Horizon if you want to win the race AND throw your car around with reckless abandon. If you’d prefer an out and out driving simulator in which every mistake will almost certainly cost you a place or two, pick your car, load up a track, turn your assists off, crank the difficulty up and inevitably spin, crash, skid and slide around until you get the hang of it. Trust me, winning a race by a tenth of a second against all odds after hours of practice and a few restarts is one of the most rewarding experiences in gaming. Well worth the teething pains.

9.5/10
Wed 01/04/15 at 14:59
Moderator
"possibly impossible"
Posts: 24,985
Rainbird wrote:
Nothing too exciting:

2.1m Cr on Horizon 2 and 5,

400k on Horizon and 4.


Will have to take a look at the new rewards. Haven't had my XBO on for a while, so about time I switched it on again!
Wed 01/04/15 at 10:17
Regular
"The Prodigal Son..."
Posts: 23
Nothing too exciting:

2.1m Cr on Horizon 2 and 5,

400k on Horizon and 4.
Wed 01/04/15 at 09:11
Regular
"The Prodigal Son..."
Posts: 23
Yeah, the hub is great. I just reached the top rewards tier on it last night :P

New rewards out today too!
Wed 01/04/15 at 00:16
Moderator
"possibly impossible"
Posts: 24,985
I was happy with Forza 5 too. It didn't feel as big as 3 and 4 but it was just as grand and I love the avatar based system.

I love the way they rewarded players of the previous games and continue to do so if you download the Forza Hub app.
Mon 30/03/15 at 23:44
Regular
"The Prodigal Son..."
Posts: 23
In light of the fact that Forza Motorsport 6 has now been announced, I thought I’d take a little time to give the Freeola Chat Forum my rather elongated opinion on Forza 5, after recently acquiring it along with an Xbox One.

So, I’ll start by frontally addressing the fact that yes, Forza 5, in comparison with almost all of its predecessors was pretty terribly received by the community way back when the Xbox One launched. Having fairly recently got myself an Xbox One, complete with both Forza 5 and Forza Horizon 2, I’m having a fair amount of trouble figuring out why.

I’ve been an avid Forza follower for most of my gaming life – since Forza Motorsport 2 was released in conjuction with the launch of the 360 in fact – and I can’t really fathom what everyone’s been so up in arms about. The more I think about it the more it occurs to me it’s most likely that it just got a little harder. The Forza series has come on leaps and bounds in terms of the realism when it comes to the next gen consoles - yes the Horizon series could be a little like a prettier version of the nitro-boost-around-a-90-degree-corner-at-170mph Need For Speed games, but they’re designed to be casual. The idea of the Horizon games is that you jump in to an online lobby with 12 of your mates and hoon about in a car park with a Mk. 1 Golf you’ve somehow managed to plow 1100bhp into.

Anyway, I digress. The 5th Installment of the Forza Motorsport series has had a serious overhaul in terms of physics as well as graphically and I think the former might be what’s caused all the hoo-haa. Reason being, this game noticeably does one thing exceptionally well, and that’s punish you for driving like a plonker. Tires react to you flinging them into a bend at 120mph like they should - they lose grip – and you go with them, all the way into the barrier 200 feet past the sand pit. In previous Forzas, you could set up your car so it was glued to the road in a manner which was frankly, wholly unrealistic. On top of that, hitting a curb at speed seemed to affect your trajectory by somewhere close to nill. In Forza 5, if you put a sliver of the back wheel on a curb in your Mustang while you’re full throttle out of the bend, you’ll lose traction and you’ll be staring at the headlights of whoever was behind you a second ago before you’ve had the time to process what’s even happened.

Here seems as good a place as any to mention one of the small, but significant, changes from 4 to 5. The physics engine for 4, even if you had it set at the more ‘realistic’ simulation setting, always put you ‘on a rail’ as such, if you lost grip, even with TCS and STM off, you’d get some help from the engine in the way of a gentle point back in the right direction. In 5, as far as I can tell so far, this has been scrapped. Now, if you get it wrong, you can fishtail all the way down a main straight with no aid from the physics engine.

Personally I love this, I found the Forza 4 Career mode, even set to maximum difficulty with no assists turned on, too easy. The new engine and the increased level of difficulty it brings to keeping cars in check that would be unruly in the real world makes it a much more immersing and challenging experience. It gives you a sense of achievement when in actual fact all you’ve managed is to get the car around the track on a clean lap, sometimes to the point where even if you manage to get it around one of the numerous extremely tricky bends, you give yourself a little mental pat on the back, the “That one felt right.” Moment in amongst the hundreds of times you swear at the screen as you career into an opponent because you locked up on entry.

That brings me quite neatly to the AI. We’ve also had an incredible jump in the way the AI in these games work, from 4 to 5 we’ve moved from hard programmed AI that lap the track in a laughably inhuman fashion and can’t even seem to react to where you are on the track, to the point where it feels more like navigating traffic on a country road than it does racing around a track. With 5, we have the Drivatar. Every race you enter in career mode is populated by your friends, and other racers at your skill level, as you race, Forza develops a profile on how you race, dropping your Drivatar into your friends races and earning you in-game credits while you’re not even racing, so even when your friends aren’t online, you’re always technically racing against them – how cool is that? This is one of the features that makes this game so much more competitive and turns what you intended to be a fairly relaxed poodle about in a classic car around Le Mans into leaning forward in your chair, biting your tongue in an effort to scrape the 0.035 seconds difference between your lap time and your friends fastest lap around whichever track you’ve decided on.

The in game contributions from Top Gears Jeremy, James and Richard aren’t too shabby either, every time you start a new league in career, you’ll be greeted by these three, reminiscing on their teenage years for the retro hot hatches or drooling in unison over the supercars, as well as the occasional argument about which of the cars they think you should pick for the next 8-10 races. It serves well as a natural break with a little humor and human interaction for the completionists out there in what can sometimes be the dull trawl from league to league ticking off races for the sake of it.

Whether you’re a fan or not, there’s one thing that nobody can disagree on, and that’s how astoundingly pretty the cars in this game are. The Forzavista mode on every single one of the hundreds of super-high poly count in-game cars is absolutely mesmerising. I’ve found myself on more than one occasion firing my console up ready to race and spending half an hour walking around cars, getting in, starting up engines, removing engine covers, opening bonnets and listening to the expertly narrated stories behind each of the cars. Zoom in far enough and you can see the orange peel in the paint, it’s just utterly gorgeous. Aside from the visuals, the sound effects on this game are also on point. Using actual cars and a trunk full of microphones, Turn 10 have also captured engine sounds in just about as high fidelity as you could wish for, you’ll definitely want to turn this game up a few clicks.

On top of that, now we’ve got laser-mapped tracks to race them around. So you can take your pixel perfect car, your realistic set of tires and drop it all onto a track that’s as near as you’ll get to what it feels like in real life. Every bump and dip in the road punishes the car, get to the crest of a hill and you can feel the front end go light, hit a dip and you get the opposite effect.

The only complaint I have about this game is to do with downloadable content. Having been around since Forza 2, anyone else who’s been here this long will understand what I mean when I say it’s hard not to get a little frustrated with Turn 10 Studios regurgitating content. We get around 8 packs of DLC cars for each game, ranging from 5-10 cars. Of all the packs for Forza 5 (for which you pay the handsome price of £31.99) nearly half are cars we’ve seen before that have been dressed up for next gen. I’m not sure I’m alone when I say I’d definitely like to see some more cars come to Forza that we’ve not seen before.

All in all, if I’m anywhere close with my theory on why this game wasn’t so well accepted, to those who aren’t impressed, buy Horizon if you want to win the race AND throw your car around with reckless abandon. If you’d prefer an out and out driving simulator in which every mistake will almost certainly cost you a place or two, pick your car, load up a track, turn your assists off, crank the difficulty up and inevitably spin, crash, skid and slide around until you get the hang of it. Trust me, winning a race by a tenth of a second against all odds after hours of practice and a few restarts is one of the most rewarding experiences in gaming. Well worth the teething pains.

9.5/10

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