I Played the First Two Hours of Forza Motorsport. Here’s What to Expect

When the last Forza Motorsport game released in 2017, Forza Horizon 4 wasn’t even out yet. Assetto Corsa was still awaiting its sequel, Project Cars 2 was hot on the scene and nobody knew exactly what Gran Turismo Sport was supposed to be.

Point is, six years is a long time in sim racing. A long enough time for Turn 10 Studios to tear almost everything down and start over, to dream up a new future for the hardcore side of the Forza brand. The result, for better or worse, is the biggest departure in series history since the team gave Gran Turismo its first genuine competition 18 years ago.

The Drive was fortunate enough to go hands-on with the new Forza Motorsport, due to release on October 10 for Xbox Series consoles and PC, at an event in New York. There, I sampled the game’s overhauled physics as well as the earliest slice of its experimental new single-player campaign, the Builder’s Cup.

Tire Swap

“New physics” are table stakes for any updated driving sim, but Forza Motorsport’s story truly begins where the rubber meets the road, as the team sought to raise the skill ceiling at the highest level of the game’s competitive multiplayer scene. That required punching up the handling, and the resulting investment quite literally informed the direction of the game’s development, as Turn 10 Creative Director Chris Esaki explained to me in an interview.

“I am a mechanics guy. I've always thought about game mechanics as kind of my specialty,” Esaki said. “And so I kind of approached it in that way. I took the lens of like, ‘OK, well, that means deeper gameplay, what does deeper gameplay mean for Forza? What are the systems that would have to be rethought if we were to really go after that skill and competition layer?’”

Those questions touched off a multi-year project to redevelop Forza Motorsport’s physics code, with tire simulation being Esaki’s “number one thing.”

“I just suspected that we need to readdress the tire model, and that was the first thing we took a look at,” Esaki said. “We went from a single point of contact for the [tire’s] entire contact patch, to now eight points of contact that really represent the outer edges of that contact patch [...] and then increased the polling frequency of the physics model by six times, just to get a lot more fidelity there.”

That increased fidelity uncovered deficiencies in the way the game replicated suspension behavior, so the team had to sort that out next. In the process, it found that the new physics were causing cars to collide with the old track geometry in strange yet invisible ways, in a manner Esaki likened to porpoising in Formula 1. And just like that, all the environments in the game suddenly had to be rebuilt, too.

Driving Forza Motorsport

So how are those physics, then? Bearing in mind I’ve had a sampling of only three cars in the introductory championship of the Builder’s Cup (the last-gen Ford Mustang GT, Subaru WRX STI, and Honda Civic Type R), I don’t think hardcore Motorsport fans are going to be blown away here. But they should be impressed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FCtm0xew2I

You feel it most in rear-wheel-drive cars that invite you to steer with the throttle, like that bone-stock Mustang. Forza Motorsport 7 offered pin-sharp turn-in, but when grip left you, it disappeared all at once. All of a sudden, you were hanging the rear out whether you wanted or not, never quite swapping ends but never going fast, either.