Forza Motorsport Looks Fantastic, But the Release Date's Still Up in the Air
Image: Xbox Game Studios
The rebooted Forza Motorsport was one of the stars of Microsoft’s Xbox Developer Direct on Wednesday afternoon. The Xbox and PC racing sim remains due for release this year — although, suspiciously, the word “spring” appears to have vanished from the game’s ETA.
The good news is that it’s still shaping up to be a massive improvement on 2017’s Forza Motorsport 7. Last year, Turn 10 confirmed three major details, including a big physics overhaul, support for real-time ray tracing and complete weather and time change simulation. We now also know that the next installment will feature more than 500 cars at launch, with 20 environments “built from the ground up for this generation” per Director of Motorsport Content Arthur Shek.
Credit: Forza via YouTube
One hundred of those cars are new to the franchise, while five of the tracks have also never been seen before in an FM game. Those include Kyalami in South Africa, as well as the Mid Ohio Sports Car Course, a mainstay of the IndyCar and IMSA calendars. Both look phenomenal thanks to ray-traced global illumination, physically based lighting and volumetric fog as well as a procedural cloud system. They’ll also drive more realistically than ever before — track surface temperatures fluctuate and the racing line now “rubbers in” over the course of a session.
Image: Xbox Game Studios
As you’d expect, the cars themselves haven’t missed out on the love. Turn 10 used spectrophotometers to capture the intricacies of individual car paints and how they react to light; even the dirt accumulation model is unique to every vehicle, based on how air and particles flow around the body. That’s why the recesses around the engine cover of a Corvette C8.R will look more grimy than the rest of the car at the conclusion of a hard-fought race.
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Audio development has continued where Forza Horizon 5 left off, with hardware-accelerated reverb that reacts dynamically to a vehicle’s surroundings and support for Dolby Atmos spatial audio. FH5 was an excellent sounding game, and based on the clip provided, the new Motorsport entry will continue that streak.
While this info dump certainly gave us lots of footage to pour over, equally interesting are the parts of the experience we haven’t seen. At the end of the video, Turn 10 Creative Director Chris Esaki teased a “new online racing mode” and a “car building-focused single-player career.” Given that FM7’s career was typically regarded as one of its weak points, we’re especially curious to see how the offline experience has evolved for the franchise’s new era.
Image: Xbox Game Studios
We’re also disappointed — and frankly a little surprised, given the lengthy development period — that Turn 10 wasn’t able to provide a concrete release date, and that Forza Motorsport has seemingly shed its spring launch window. Six years will have passed since FM7 by the time its sequel hits shelves. That’s a long wait for what used to be an every-other-year series.
For what it’s worth, The Game Awards’ Geoff Keighley tweeted a “before end of June” ETA upon the event’s conclusion, and we’ve reached out to Microsoft to inquire about it. If the game lands by June 21, technically that’s still spring.
Below you can peruse a sample of cars from the full roster that Turn 10 revealed in a blog post. I for one am loving all the Group C prototypes, but the focus on modern race cars is encouraging to see, too.
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