Forza 4 VS GT5 (read the first post before you contribute)

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Well, after a few weeks of playing neither, I've had a go at both in the last couple of days.

Played GT5, went on to have a go at some of the new seasonals. Got annoyed that I'd forgotten that SRF was locked on and that it took away all feel from the car. Jumped into arcade mode to do some laps to compare to the GTA demo. Got annoyed that I'd forgotten that you can't choose any car in your garage in Arcade, it has to be a favourite. Thought about going through all the menus to select the 370Z as a favourite and get back to arcade, got depressed, chose an M3 instead 'cos it's sort of close.

Had kind of fun playing, the AI was both better and just as bad as I remembered. Not as slow, but still ~6 seconds a lap slower, and I lost purely because I started ~30 seconds back in the silly rolling start.

Thought about having another game, but the lack of easy options made me turn it off.

The next night, turned on Forza 4. Had a look at the new Rivals events, found a nice one for B500 French cars around the Bernese Alps. Had a go in a stock Megane, did pretty badly. Went and bought a V6 Clio and tuned it up to B500. Had another couple of goes and made respectable improvements to my time. Fiddled with the tyre pressures a bit, knocked off half a second. Had a good long run working on my braking points and corner entry angles, got another second.

Found that I'd been playing for a couple of hours and it was 1 in the morning. And I'd made something like 400k credits while I was at it.

I routinely get suckered into playing FM4 for longer than I'd really wanted to. I routinely get annoyed with stuff in GT5 that I'd forgotten was an issue since the last time I turned it on. Drivingwise, it's close enough that I could forget about it if they were both fun. But GT just makes it so difficult to enjoy. It's like the world's most high maintenance girlfriend.
 
I enjoyed the GT Academy Demo for GT6 but I don't know, I might get bored of Gran Turismo. I used to have cravings to play car games, I got Forza 2 and 3, got bored of them both within 2-3 weeks and never played them again. I then got Forza 4 and figured I would get bored again but it has been about 3 months and I am still not bored of it and have logged a little over 100 hours on it now.

GT5 might not seem as fun as Forza, the cars don't crash well like Forza 4, the damage modeling is crap and when you smash into someone, its like hitting a brick wall, nothing happens.

The Hypocrite developers who made GT5 it is "The Ultimate Driving Simulator" yet crashing and real car damage does not exist in the game. Crashing and damage is part of real racing, it is stupid for them not to have it. I can see why GT5 might get boring, there are more restrictions on what you can do, some license tests can be very boring and the online might get boring to.

What I like about Forza 4 is the adreneline rush you get playing online. You always have to watch behind you because the guy behind you might try to wipe you out. Every vehicle feels different and reacts differently when hit. I remember driving the Hummer and someone was trying to crash into me, my hummer did not even budge, sometimes peopel would wipe out trying to hit me.

I know some may not like it, but the wiping people aspect of Forza 4 is really fun. There are many people who like a clean race but there is usually always someone in the game who wants to wipe people out. The first corner pile up in a 16 player online race is epic, someone always wipes another person out. I notice the players who win are almost always people who never try to crash into anyone. Trying to wipe someone out in Forza 4 does have a risk since when you try it your car might wipe out just as bad as the person you hit or worse.

It takes a lot of practice to master smashing into someone and ruining there race without you damaging yourself. I have done it many times but about almost 50% of the time, I wipe out to if I hit someone.
 
I enjoyed the GT Academy Demo for GT6 but I don't know, I might get bored of Gran Turismo. I used to have cravings to play car games, I got Forza 2 and 3, got bored of them both within 2-3 weeks and never played them again. I then got Forza 4 and figured I would get bored again but it has been about 3 months and I am still not bored of it and have logged a little over 100 hours on it now.

GT5 might not seem as fun as Forza, the cars don't crash well like Forza 4, the damage modeling is crap and when you smash into someone, its like hitting a brick wall, nothing happens.

The Hypocrite developers who made GT5 it is "The Ultimate Driving Simulator" yet crashing and real car damage does not exist in the game. Crashing and damage is part of real racing, it is stupid for them not to have it. I can see why GT5 might get boring, there are more restrictions on what you can do, some license tests can be very boring and the online might get boring to.

What I like about Forza 4 is the adreneline rush you get playing online. You always have to watch behind you because the guy behind you might try to wipe you out. Every vehicle feels different and reacts differently when hit. I remember driving the Hummer and someone was trying to crash into me, my hummer did not even budge, sometimes peopel would wipe out trying to hit me.

I know some may not like it, but the wiping people aspect of Forza 4 is really fun. There are many people who like a clean race but there is usually always someone in the game who wants to wipe people out. The first corner pile up in a 16 player online race is epic, someone always wipes another person out. I notice the players who win are almost always people who never try to crash into anyone. Trying to wipe someone out in Forza 4 does have a risk since when you try it your car might wipe out just as bad as the person you hit or worse.

It takes a lot of practice to master smashing into someone and ruining there race without you damaging yourself. I have done it many times but about almost 50% of the time, I wipe out to if I hit someone.

Ruining someone's race on purpose is such a douche move, please go and play something else as that kind of attitude is not welcome in forza or GT 👎
 
After 50 hours of driving I've finally made it to 25% of the career completed. Holy Moses there's a lot of single player content in FM4.
 
After 50 hours of driving I've finally made it to 25% of the career completed. Holy Moses there's a lot of single player content in FM4.

I can't stand the career mode in FM4. Don't think I've even hit 10% and I'm level 208 or something. Constant 3 lap races feels like you spend more time loading than actually playing.
 
I'm doing it exact to get a true list, so yes the 'diversity' of GT5 will include all of those dupes. It's the only fair way to do it.

Although I've got to D and lost motivation. Surely someone has already done this before me?
 
Not that I can recall, manteomax on the forzamotorsport.net forums would be the most likely person to have done it. (he really enjoys number crunching.)

If you have accurate links to both car lists that I can drop into excel I can run some comparisons this afternoon
 
I did the numbers for the straight up dupes, but not sure if that's what you want (and I gave some pretty extreme benefit of the doubt for some of the cars I left off).
 
I would have to agree that balance may be the better word than diversity when comparing the games. Yet I would challenge the white knuckle fanatics on the which game has more of a diverse influence in the GT series..
 
I think I might have an Excel file floating around with every car in all of both series. I'll take a look, and then isolate the newest iterations of both...

Yeah, balance might be a better term, since GT is the one that more often explores the fringes; the Tank Car, the Nike (a made-up car, of course), the WWII VW's, the Rocket, the Caterham, the Samba. But it's an attitude that extends to other aspects of the game; a small taster, a dip in the pool of different categories, instead of implementing them fully. The quite frankly pathetic utilization of the WRC and NASCAR licenses are great examples of this.

Also, it's astounding people still think this is true:

So, believe me, I know that hotrods and supercars rule and stuff. But some of us aren't keen on the top heavy list off thrilling rides in Forza at the expense of hundreds of lesser cars.

A quick browse of the FM4 database:

F Class: 49
E Class: 40
D Class: 89
C Class: 100
B Class: 94
A Class: 92
S Class: 58
R3 Class: 75
R2 Class: 39
R1 Class: 35
 
Well what do you take fault in with the Nascar license, tracks? I'm just curious I knew you and many of us had issue with the WRC one. My biggest issue was that they never put a dodge cup car in the game during a time frame that actually saw them win many races and ultimately a championship two years after the game came out.
 
Well what do you take fault in with the Nascar license, tracks?

The only thing that is notably NASCAR-like to make use of the licence in a way that made sense and was logical (the Special Events, creepy Gordon narration and all, nonetheless covered stuff that is well within the typical focus of "mission modes" in actual NASCAR games) was almost immediately ruined with forced driving aids; and when a way was found to circumvent them, purposely ruined again by disabling the workaround. The other events in A-Spec were just a standard GT race but with stock cars instead.


Then they drew attention to how they modeled all those 2011 cars, but did nothing whatsoever with any of them.



As long as the fictional cars account for less 0.2% of the total car count, I'm totally fine with them adding more fictional cars.

It's a hell of a lot more than that. 2% of the car list are fictional versions of the Mazda Miata alone; on top of which they added dozens of fictional race cars that maybe kinda sorta could be analogous to real race cars (nevermind your X1 silliness).
 
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The only thing that is notably NASCAR-like to make use of the licence in a way that made sense and was logical (the Special Events, creepy Gordon narration and all, nonetheless covered stuff that is well within the typical focus of "mission modes" in actual NASCAR games) was almost immediately ruined with forced driving aids; and when a way was found to circumvent them, purposely ruined again by disabling the workaround. The other events in A-Spec were just a standard GT race but with stock cars instead.


Then they drew attention to how they modeled all those 2011 cars, but did nothing whatsoever with any of them.





It's a hell of a lot more than that. 2% of the car list are fictional versions of the Mazda Miata alone; on top of which they added dozens of fictional race cars that maybe kinda sorta could be analogous to real race cars (nevermind your X1 silliness).

By fictional, I meant purely fictional like the X1 or the Nike One (or the Warthog from FM4), not fictional variants of real cars.

I wouldn't mind seeing more silly crap added for the sake of novelty, just so long as it doesn't get too out of hand... there should be a few hundred real cars (or fictitious variants of them) for each completely fictional or completely silly vehicle they decide to include.
 
By fictional, I meant purely fictional like the X1 or the Nike One (or the Warthog from FM4), not fictional variants of real cars.

I wouldn't mind seeing more silly crap added for the sake of novelty, just so long as it doesn't get too out of hand... there should be a few hundred real cars (or fictitious variants of them) for each completely fictional or completely silly vehicle they decide to include.

..Warthog? Is it some kind of Unicorn?
 
I find Forza to have the more balanced car list by far. The fact that there was no livery editor in GT5 did little to spice up the cars that I found dull due to a) playing them to death in the ~10 years since they've appeared in GT3 and GT4 or b) their lack of relevance for a racing game released in 2010.

I see lots of talk about MX5's and Skylines here, but one car model with excessive variants on GT5 that never gets mentioned is MINI. Including DLC, there's seven variants of new MINI, including three standards from the year 2002 alone and four premium models. Utterly ridiculous considering that bar the Countryman, the models are practically identical.

One might think that PD are on MINI's payroll because these cars have no motoring significance or motorsport pedigree (besides the Countryman, the WRC variant of which is not included) and yet cars such as supercars or cars considered staples of motor racing are absent from the car list. Even the 1959-2000 Mini Models (which have both great motoring significance AND motorsport pedigree) lack a premium model in the game.

One of many perplexing car choices by PD made even stranger by the fact that it cannot be attributed to Japanese Manufacturer bias.
 
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Because I was bored, a frequency graph of the PP of cars in GT5. I couldn't figure out how to get a dump of them so I typed them out from MyGranTurismo.net.

Somehow I managed to end up with 1107 entries instead of 1109, but I'll be damned if I'm going through to find two cars. Just pretend any raw car counts you see are +/-2. :)

Anyway, that graph isn't really that helpful to look at. What I want to do is compare to the Forza PI classes. For that, we need some sort of scaling factor between PI and PP.

BIG ASSUMPTION: That both PI and PP are roughly linear. You would hope that they are, because otherwise it starts to become pretty unintuitive for players to use. But they're probably not perfectly linear, local linearity would be enough. Regardless, I'm assuming they're both linear because it's more work than I want to get into digging through both car lists for matches and correlating them.

So, assuming linearity I took two points. PI bottoms out at 100. PP bottoms out at 204. I called it 200, and used that as my lower correlation. Highest PI car in FM4 is the Pug 908 at 998. Happily, this car also exists in GT5 at 704 PP.

Draw a graph, draw a line, take the equation to get: PP=0.561247216PI + 143.8752783964.

So using those to scale the FM4 classes to GT5 we get:

F = 256PP
E = 298PP
D = 340PP
C = 382PP
B = 424PP
A = 481PP
S = 537PP
R3 = 593PP
R2 = 635PP
R1 = 704PP
X = Everything above that.

Then it's relatively simple to run a count on the PP numbers I already typed out.

GT5 has the following numbers of cars in each class:

F = 14
E = 29
D = 78
C = 146
B = 192
A = 281
S = 139
R3 = 113
R2 = 43
R1 = 50
X = 22

Since we're talking about the distribution of the cars, it would make sense to compare these numbers in GT5 and FM4 using percentages of total cars.

FM4 = Class = GT5

7.30% = F = 1.26%
5.96% = E = 2.62%
13.26% = D = 7.05%
14.90% = C = 13.19%
14.01% = B = 17.34%
13.71% = A = 25.38%
8.64% = S = 12.56%
11.18% = R3 = 10.21%
5.81% = R2 = 3.88%
5.22% = R1 = 4.52%
0.00% = X = 1.99%

GT5 has far less cars at the lower PP/PI levels than FM does. It has far more at the A and S class levels, which is generally the high-class performance car/super car level.

Can we put to bed this idea that FM is somehow top heavy? It's not. If anything, GT5 is.


Someone could go into far more detail with this and produce a proper correlation for PP and PI, and that would be more robust. But I think the general principle stands.
 
The exact way PP and PI are calculated is unknown, and they could be very different.

I'd like to see you try your "PP=0.561247216PI + 143.8752783964" formula on all the cars that are in both Forza and GT and see if it works out every time. I bet it won't. 👍
 
The exact way PP and PI are calculated is unknown, and they could be very different.

I'd like to see you try your "PP=0.561247216PI + 143.8752783964" formula on all the cars that are in both Forza and GT and see if it works out every time. I bet it won't. 👍

I bet it won't too. That's why I was very clear about the big assumption. If they were both linear, then there's a simple scaling factor. If they're not, then it gets more complex.

If someone else wants to take the time to do a more indepth comparison of the two systems and get a better conversion factor, that would help a lot. Depending on how different they are, it could change things substantially.

This is intentionally a very simplistic initial treatment. It's certainly enough to get an idea of what is going on. If people disagree, then the path is open for them to find the true scaling equation and demonstrate otherwise. I'm sure in the 670 odd cars in FM4 there's enough direct comparisons with GT5.
 
You're going to find a straight comparison between the two nearly impossible in GT5's current state for one major reason: tires are no longer taken into account with the PP calculations. If they were, like a very old update did it, then it would probably be closer (but by no means exact).

Considering GT5 also doesn't take the smaller upgrades into account (only those that affect power, weight, or downforce), I'm not sure if its ever be possible to get an accurate comparison.
 
You're going to find a straight comparison between the two nearly impossible in GT5's current state for one major reason: tires are no longer taken into account with the PP calculations. If they were, like a very old update did it, then it would probably be closer (but by no means exact).

It's a good point that I had forgotten. Even with tyres as part of the calculation, FM4's tyre system is far more fine grained than GT5's which could throw it off a fair bit.

I think I (or somebody) do need to pull 50 or so comparable data points from the two games and chart them. 50 being a number I pulled out of my bum as not too arduous but enough to get a decent feel. It should be easy enough to see if there is actually a correlation between the two.

If the contribution of the data that both games take into account is significantly larger than the contribution of the data that is not in both (like tyres), then there should still be something there. But maybe the two systems are just too different to be compatible in any meaningful way.


I guess ultimately you could probably get similar information by simply charting the power to weight ratio for all cars in each game. While it's a bit fuzzy, in terms of general trends it would show where each game has significant amounts of cars.
 
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