Yahoo Autos Forza Is Finally Fixing Its Ancient, Ugly, Inaccurate Car Models
How long do you typically wait for something before you give up all hope? Months? Years? A decade-plus? Longtime Forza fans have fallen into the latter group, pining for multiple console generations for developers Turn 10 Studios and Playground Games to rebuild beloved cars in the franchise, like the R32 Nissan Skyline GT-R and E30 BMW M3. The 3D models for some of these date all the way back to the very first Forza Motorsport, which turns 20 next year. While their textures have been improved and their edges smoothed out to look fairly appropriate on modern, ultra high-def displays, they're still proportionally all wrong—which is why it's very welcome news that the devs have confirmed some of these wonky cars are being rebuilt.
The good news comes from Forza's official forums, where a number of "Troubleshooting" threads pertaining to inaccurate car models have been closed with messages from forum admins that the studios will be rebuilding these cars in the future. As it stands now, these are the models that have been marked for fixing (the links take you to relevant threads on the Forza forums, where you can see GIFs comparing the in-game models to their real-life counterparts):
1992 BMW M3 (E30)
1999 Dodge Viper GTS ACR
2002 Ferrari 575M Maranello
2003 Ford Focus RS
1997 Mazda RX-7 (FD3S)
1999 Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution VI MR
2000 Nissan Silvia Spec-R (S15)
1993 Nissan Skyline GT-R V-Spec (R32)
1985 Toyota Sprinter Trueno GT Apex (AE86)
Again, it's hard to stretch how big a deal this is for Forza's most loyal players. The franchise's modern car models look fine, but many older rides that date back to the first entries are just all wrong, and the list certainly goes far beyond these nine. The Honda S2000 and first-gen NSX, Mk IV Volkswagen Golf R32, and 996 Porsche 911 GT3 stick out in my mind, and it certainly hasn't helped that this generation of '90s and 2000s enthusiast metal are really hitting their legendary status now that we're 20, 30 years on. It stands a great many players want to drive these cars today, which makes it all the more apparent when they look terrible.
We're not the only ones to call it out. And while Turn 10 and Playground have redone specific vehicles in the past (the Subaru Impreza 22B STI looks much better in the latest Forza Motorsport, after a previously botched front-end remodel), the fact multiple cars are being confirmed at once is the first public facing indication that the dev teams have been paying attention and are ready to address this sore spot. For what it's worth, I reached out to Turn 10 leading up to my review of Motorsport way back in September, asking if anything was to be done about models like these, and simply never got a response. Forza's Community and Communications Director provided some additional background to this week's news on Reddit:
Yes! We have a list of cars we're chasing down to be rebuilt - really exciting stuff. It may take a while to get them showing up in games - sourcing and building cars takes many months or even a year+ depending on how hard it is to find a museum-quality car, licensing, etc etc. When the refreshed cars do come out, it will likely be with future games as we aren't able to just swap out the old models for the new in existing games without potentially breaking other things in the process.
T10_Chupacaubrey via Reddit
If I had one concern, it's that Forza Motorsport is obviously billed as a live service title, which means we likely won't see a sequel for a very, very long time. That's all well and good, but I'd hope Turn 10 can figure out a way to indeed swap out old models for new, because it would be a shame to only see these in the next Horizon. Fingers crossed.
Wanna talk racing games? Hit me up at adam.ismail@thedrive.com
