Another mixed update with good stuff but also kind of a letdown. Bathurst is overall good, a few kerbs obviously wrong and The Cutting doesn't feel right and seems to have no "hook" to it, but it's fun to drive and looks great even with the goofy fake brand signage.
Car selection is definitely disappointing. The VN Commodore is nice, and it's good to get all the others back... except the Xbox Commodore, using a re-liveried car as a FOMO reward is very lame, but hey at least now I don't have to bother earning it. Since they didn't really go all out with the new cars, it's kinda sad that they didn't give us all of the Aussie cars back from previous games. I wanted the XR Falcon back in particular as it was a versatile car, but we are still missing the XY Falcon and the old Holden sedan thing from previous FM/FH games too, as far as Aussie things are concerned.
Still no manual grid order, no mention of fixes for the car collision bug, now it appears every time you go into event setup it changes the time of day to "Random" for some reason(?), the HDT Commodore and Holden Formula drift cars don't appear to be in the showroom even though the Ford ute is available and the press release thing says they both should be, no BoP changes for multiplayer, etc.
The Forza AUS hopper seems weird being all Bathurst. I mean Bathurst is a top 5 track for me personally, but I still want to mix it up. I can see the hopper being dead after like 2 weeks because people just get tired of doing the same track over and over.
BMW month is... a thing. Hoping for the 635CSi but beyond that I dunno what I want really. The M4 GT4 would be cool but I'd way rather have a GT4 update with multiple GT4 models since we are in such desperate need of them. I'd welcome back the non-GTS version of the M4 and the regular E92 M3 as they are both more versatile then the models we have now but that's hardly that thrilling. Everyone says LMDh but... kinda meh there for me personally as the only LMDh manufacturer I care about at all is Cadillac, but it drives wonky as **** so LMDh as a class in Forza just doesn't excite me much.
Weakest update yet, makes me scaried for the new year since they had not put a single new car, only 2 cars and they are return cars
to make things worst, instead of make series with fixed setup they decide to cave to "try hards" and doubles down on open setup instead of make series for people that dont want expending a hour trying to config a setup just to be destroyed by someone that got a meta setup from a friend by 10 seconds each lap
You are being dramatic.
There are tons of tunes that are more than good enough available to download. In the lobby you can push Y to go to the player list and it will even show you what tune people are running if it's shared, so you can try out the tunes the top guys are using and put yourself on even ground with them.
I think you will find the tune isn't really as big of a deal as many people like to make it out to be. "It's the tune that's the problem!" is a bit of a tinfoil hat thing, the reality is that as long as your tune wasn't ****ed, a new tune is the difference between a podium and a win, not a 13th and a win or something.
Our league has run many races where no tuning is allowed, and are currently finishing up a season where everyone had to use a locked spec tune all season long. As a general rule, people finish in about the same place they do as when tuning is open, and the gaps in the field are about the same. We have also had several guys who are fighting for podiums every week share their tunes with guys struggling to get into the top 20 and it has very rarely made much of a difference.
I'm not saying a fixed hopper would be bad though. In my opinion the Ginetta G40 Jr is darn near perfect for racing out of the box and it would be a prime candidate for it, as would the MX5 Cup car. They can't really just keep adding hoppers without diluting the player pool too much though, and a lot of their default setups are very understeery so lots of race cars wouldn't be much to drive without tuning.
Seems like the theme in this era of racing games is the true sims get first dibs or all out rights to certain cars while games like GT7 and FM have to wait an extended period of time or not at all...or fork up a lot of money for a particular car. Really sucks to see iRacing getting the new gens and we don't get them in FM.
I don't think it's necessarily sims, that mobile game Real Racing 3 has a decent selection modern race cars. I haven't played it, but I'm assuming it's easier for them because they just need the model good enough looking to be acceptable on a phone and don't need to worry about simulation or realistic driving dynamics of course.
If you haven't before, check out its car list if you want to be depressed:
http://www.igcd.net/game.php?id=1000009424
It would actually be interesting to see what the hold up is. This has pretty much always been something Forza is bad at, sadly. Definitely frustrating/disappointing, but Forza has been frustrating/disappointing me for years now so I've built up a tolerance.
I thought I would check out how Bathurst looks, but then the update got stuck and I had to re-download all 143 GB again 🙄
I'm feeling underwhelmed, almost disappointed by the "new" cars. It's nice to have Bathurst back though. I love the technical section up on the mountain.
Also, I wonder when we'll get a blog post with the roadmap for early 2025. I'm very curious which tracks that'll be added next 🤔
On console? Did it get stuck on the "Downloading..." and just never start? Did you try pausing the download and resuming it like I've posted here a few times before? Unfortunately too late now but that happened me back for the update after the Nordschleife I think, and ever since then it has done that to me for every update except the Sunset Peninsula update, but I've been able to get around it using that method.
My guess is the "roadmap" (a slightly generous term for what they do, when you compare it to other studios) for future content will be with the next update. We still haven't caught up with the last one since we are still missing career changes and share hub and stuff.
The barriers are much taller than they should be, gives off a weird funnel effect, makes everything look even more narrow. The barriers are taller than most cars. At Forrest Elbow (the hairpin before the long straight), you can the see the concrete barrier is much higher than the tyre barrier, which is the height it should be.
Yeah I felt that funnel effect at first and couldn't put my finger on what it was exactly, but noticed it a few laps later when moving the camera around looking stuff. I feel after I ran a handful of laps I sorta stop noticing it, but then every once in a while I look around with the camera and re-notice it again.
I guess we will get used it and in a month or two it will just feel "normal" to us though.