There are a few issues that are heavily involved with the difference between GT5 and the Forza series. Beware, readers, I'm going to discuss Forza, warts and all, so if this annoys you, I suggest you depart from this post right now.
While it's true that the series is notorious for lots of high quality content, primarily Forza 3 and 4, there is a huge reason for this. Microsoft spent untold tens of millions of dollars to produce those games, and never disclosed the budgets. Part of the reason for the huge cost is the farming out of modeling work to shops in the orient, from India to Vietnam. The overall team went beyond 400 members! That's a massive bill right there, as most of the cost of any product is human labor.
This did result in a lot of content, 330 some odd cars in F2 - though fewer tracks, 400 some odd in F3 and almost 500(?) in F4, and around 100 courses, if variations are included. Along with this came a wealth of (mostly) delicious bodykits, and a fantastic if buggy livery editor.
And herein lies the problem. The first three Forzas were very buggy, and I don't just mean a model was off or you could drive through walls at key spots. The cars were sometimes asymmetrical, or the bodykits were. Misalignments caused vinyls in the livery editor to misbehave. Sometimes, vinyls would do bizarre things like curve sharply, warp, flip, reverse, invert, or appear somewhere completely off in limbo! Vinyls wouldn't line up properly from side to side. Some surfaces refused to accept vinyls or decals. In Forza 2, random vinyls would shift around whenever you took the car out of the garage.
There were physics issues. Exploits caused Turn 10 lots of headaches when loopholes were found and used to rocket certain cars to the top of the boards, then everyone would use them. Which caused anger with fans of other cars, and periodic leaderboard wipes as car after car was tested by sneaky players and exploited. The worst offense for many was the fact that doing an all wheel drive swap instantly turned every car it could be performed on into a racing beast, and it ruined competititveness.
And there are others, like the garage scrolling bug which would crash the game after a few dozen cars were scrolled past, or the Auction House bug which could get you permabanned from Live if you got disconnected from the net or turned off your system. And my big gripe with Forza 3 being the atrocious file handling system which made a chore of sorting through any non-car folder with more than 120 some odd items, or the photo sharing ordeal of sending up to 18 pics to the Forza site, only to have them compressed and the colors washed out and shifted.
The physics and other things, I lay fully at the feet of T10, but the car modeling weirdness seems to stem from work being farmed out across the planet, as well as T10 not taking the time to properly test and fix issues. When the team grows beyond 400 people and spans continents, everyone has to be on the same spec page, or there are going to be problems.
Polyphony Digital does it all themselves. They really weren't as big as they needed to be to properly render Kazunori's vision, plus they were yanked around by SONY too much while trying to focus on GT5. The size of the team now, I'm not sure of, but it had reached approximately 150 late last year. While quite a big team, this is still small compared to what T10 was able to do. However, M$ is made of money, SONY is not. Someone dug up the stats on available revenues between the two companies, and MS has almost ten times the cash to spend as it pleases, because they really don't make much but software, and charge exorbitantly for it. GT5 already cost SONY more than $80 million as of summer 2010, and it still wasn't done. Heck, it
still isn't done! How much Forza 4 cost is anyone's guess, but it has to be far more. And yes, it's still not done either, as DLC is coming for it as well.
To me, as well as many of us, we prefer PD's way of doing things. Quality is high, bugs are fewer, especially the horrendous ones in the previous Forzas. Sure, none of us want just Standard cars and tracks if we can have Premiums. But given the choice of having more content versus far less, most of us have stated that the Standards are an acceptable compromise. Just look at the list of old Gran Turismo tracks, and how many of us are asking for those "ugly" things as DLC, tracks we'd have to buy. You can't ask for a bigger vote of approval than to vote with your dollars.
I have so much fun with GT5 that I even feel that I haven't paid enough. Sounds strange? No, it isn't. I work with digital media production (3D and graphics) and I sorta know the ammount of work required to do a part of the process... Those guys have worked hard. GT5 It's the main reason of my PS3 life and damn, I'll spend every buck I can on DLC to make it better and to make possible for them to do the next steps.
