So you think you can race with the big boys? Well even if you can't, Forza Motorsport is one of the small handful of racing titles that actually simulates racing in an effective manner.
The only problem is that Forza Motorsport 2 has been out since May of last year and there’s no new racing title that's come along to take its place. But that's neither here nor there. The game has garnered more longevity than most games have seen on Xbox Live; even on the MaddenMania forums, its following lasted through January and there’s still an effort being made to continue the Live tradition.
However, the game has been out for a long enough period of time that we can finally start looking to the future. To this point the game has innovated on a number of levels and has essentially forced Gran Turismo to start incorporating some of the things that made Forza so great. What can Forza do now to keep the innovation going? What should developers put into Forza Motorsport 3 to keep us coming back for more?
The most obvious "upgrade" is more cars. There are plenty in Forza 2, yet there were still cars I wish I could’ve had that I didn’t get access to. One of the main top-end cars I wanted most was the Bugatti Veyron: It gives you all the power you could want and in a great body. Top that car off with some lower end speed cars, like the Dodge Caliber SRT-4 (I badly want the fast version of the car I drive in real life), a 1995 Mitsubishi 3000GT (in place of the title they gave it in Forza 2 -- the Mitsubishi GTO) and a 1999 Toyota Celica GT4.
Rather than clutter my wishlist with the near endless list of cars that didn’t make it in for one reason or another, let’s look at the other tweaks that Turn 10 Studios can make to take this game to the next level yet again
While damage modeling is nice, there’s one thing that was a near constant gripe amongst the MaddenMania gamers when playing this game: the ability to roll your car. Now there’s really no easy way to implement this as you’d lose some realism due to your car resetting after flipping -- otherwise the person just has to sit there on his or her roof waiting for the race to end (not so fun). While the car being morphed magically back onto its four wheels might lead to a realism slippery slope in one regard, I think it would be alright in this case to sacrifice a tiny bit of immersion/realism for more entertaining crashes.
While on the subject of crashes, another thing that would make this already great game better would be to update the damage modeling. The damage has already been implemented correctly in terms of the driving control, but visually the damage modeling on the car itself needs some work. While zoomed out in the camera mode, car damage looks alright; zooming in on the damage, however, makes it look like someone took markers and drew the scrapes on.
I might be exaggerating a bit for effect, but it still needs fine-tuning.
Speaking of the aforementioned camera mode, the issue with said camera was quite possibly the biggest gripe many folks had when I spoke with them about the game. Not only was the quality of the pictures taken compressed upon upload, making many of the photos come out pixilated, but the size of the photos were also smaller than they could/should have been. It seems like it would be a great time to get with Bungie and see how they did it with Halo 3.
Another fix that could be applied to the camera mode is allowing the user a wider range of picture options. A countless amount of times I've tried to move the camera back to get a good panoramic shot only to be hemmed in by the restricted view around the car. Sure, the range was large enough most of the time, but there were times when I wanted an even wider shot and couldn’t do it without playing with the zoom options, thus changing the picture in a way I didn’t want to.
As with last week though, I know there are cars I left out, things I missed, and even things that might not work, so I turn to you the reader. What do you think can be done with the next Forza title to make it even better?