Good news for anyone razzed off about Forza Motorsport’s AI driver behavior, race regs, and RPG-like car leveling systems: Turn 10’s going to fix it all.
That’s according to a quarterly update post from the developer, in which it outlines that fan feedback has been heard, listened to, and collated and that the devs intend to act on it with a focus on three key areas.
One of them is driver AI behavior, which some players have reported as erratic or overly aggressive. We love a bit of elbows-out, ’90s BTCC-style racing so the latter didn’t detract from our enthusiasm in our Forza Motorsport review.
However, the AI system powering your offline opponents is new to this game, and it’s fair to say there are still Verstappen-like tendencies to iron out.
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Here’s what Turn 10 has to say: “We have seen feedback about our AI’s driving behavior: abruptly braking and slowing down; not accelerating out of exits, braking too hard on mild corners, and following racing lines too strictly.
“We understand how important it is to have fair and competitive AI in Motorsport and are our top priorities in early 2024 are addressing overly aggressive AI, while also getting a cleaner race start into turn 1 where many of the issues above most severely manifest and impact players.”
Another area due for some tinkering is the way you upgrade your cars in Forza Motorsport. The more time spent with a particular vehicle, completing mini-objectives like setting clean laps and fast sectors, the more you raise its performance level and the number of parts that can be bought and applied to it. Not everyone loves the way that works.
“We know that the progression system in Forza Motorsport is a divisive topic among our players,” says Turn 10.
“It is clear from looking at feedback that while many of our players are enjoying the system as is, for many others it isn’t delivering the upgrade experience that they expect from Forza Motorsport. To address this, we are exploring changes to the system. Our goal with these changes is to retain what is working for those that enjoy it, while resolving the issues many of our most dedicated players have with the system.”
Finally, and with a degree of inevitability, some players aren’t happy with the way penalties are handed out.
“We have heard about inconsistent or unfair penalties in instances of intentional ramming, being pushed off the track, and spinning cars pushing drivers off the track.
“We have also heard that high-speed collisions sometimes have no penalties while low-speed collisions have mild penalties. It’s important that we capture all the data that we can about a race when FRR rulings happen in error, so over the next few months, we will be working with some long-time competitive Motorsport players to gather direct telemetry from them while they’re playing.
"They will be capturing these instances and feeding data to our team so that we can issue tweaks to make FRR more accurate and reliable. We appreciate your patience as we work on improving the system.”
