Initial Thoughts on Forza 3

So I've been playing Forza 3 for about four days now. I'm already up to Level 30, where the game gifts you with the amazing Bugatti Veyron 16.4. That's right. No need to buy the $1.4 million credit supercar.

While that's fun and all, this iteration of Forza has managed to delight and frustrate. It is now the sixth or seventh console generation. Video games have been under serious development for almost thirty years. "Simulators" like Forza and Gran Turismo have been undergoing the same development for at least a decade.

Yet little has changed. It's kind of pathetic, really. The developers seem to treat these games as little more than virtual test drives. They trumpet their success with physics engine this and polygon count that - yet they've overlooked basic details that clash with their claims of realism.

I understand the desire to crack the simulator barrier and open up the game to more casual players who can be intimidated by ultra-realistic racing. That's fine. But Gran Turismo did that with its arcade mode - a system that has been copied right down to today. So that 'excuse' is just stupid.

So what has changed for the better? Well, for starters the Forza programmers have finally managed to catch up with Gran Turismo 2 and get the physics of rear-wheel drive correct. I never played Forza, but in Forza 2 any unmodified rear-drive car like a Toyota Supra, Mazda RX-7, or Nissan 300ZX would instantly spin out when taking a corner with just the tiniest amount of extra throttle. That always bothered me, as I've driven plenty of rear-drive vehicles and they simply don't handle like that. I could understand it being the case if one had a 450 bhp Supra on stock tires, but bone stock? The result of this mayhem was that no one would drive a pure rear-driver in a race. They would only use front-drivers or all-wheel drive. It was ridiculous, and I'm glad they finally fixed it.

Secondly, they've upped the polygon count of the tracks and the cars. That's pretty nice, but I would rather have had more cars on the track - say, 12 instead of 8. But the tracks are breathtaking. It's like you're actually there, and that's pretty awesome.

Thirdly, and this is probably the only true breakthrough development of the game, there is much more subtle communication about how the car is behaving than ever before. From tiny screen shakes to excellent rumble control, the cars feel more alive than ever before. It's difficult to get the feel of driving a car at the limit with just a game controller, but the Forza guys have managed to do it. As the virtual car approaches the limit, it begins to complain just like it would real life. Little cues like a slight shudder in the steering wheel or a subtle shift in the seat have been translated into code and applied to the gaming experience. It's really quite amazing.

Unfortunately, that's about it on the newness front. The Microsoft boys are touting the new in-car view as this major breakthrough. Sorry, the original Need for Speed did that way back in the mid-90s. And Need for Speed: Shift does it better anyway. It feels like they just tacked it on at the end. The driver's hands never even leave the steering wheel!

Another "improvement" that was really kind of a no-brainer and the industry should have figured out back with Gran Turismo 2 is the ability to load upgrades along with car settings. Any player could tell you it's stupid to load up a car's settings and then have the game tell you that such-and-such parts need to be added. Why couldn't the game simply add them itself, and if some of the parts needed to be purchased, give me the price and let me choose whether I want to buy them or not? Well, in Forza 3 we can finally do that. Halle-freakin'-lujah. That it's taken the Forza guys three iterations to figure this out shows just how little innovation and creativity exists in the industry today.

There are other problems, as well. As I said earlier, it's the sixth (or depending how you count) seventh console generation. Things like clunky menus should be behind us. While Forza 3 is better than its predecessor (half the game loads to the hard drive so it's not so slow switching menu options), it still manages to underwhelm me with its sheer stupidity and clunkiness.

Part of the reason I play simulators is to be able to "drive" cars that I'd never be able to in real life. I also like to compare cars. I own a Cobalt SS Supercharged. And I like to have virtual drive-offs between it and cars like the Acura RSX and Honda Civic Si. Now, Forza has a fun option for that called hot-lapping, where I pick my car, pick my track, then go race alone against the clock. That's wonderful, fantastic, I love it.

But when I want to race another car on the exact same track, I have to exit the track, wait for the menus to load, back out of the track menu, select another car, re-select the track, wait for it to load, then begin playing.

I can't possibly be the only one who thinks that is incredibly stupid. Why can't we just leave the track loaded and allow me to select a different car? I realize I'll still have to wait a little bit to load the car physics and all that. But that would be WAY better than the rigamarole above.

But it gets worse. Sometimes I like to drive the same car, but at different spec levels (Forza has a cool system called the Performance Index that has different classes from F to S and beyond). One would think that I could simply load different spec levels for the same car while at the track. But no. Forza sees that as an error, and kindly asks you to set the car up BEFORE entering the track. That's just stupid.

While I'm complaining, I might as well register another gripe that's been bothering me since Gran Turismo 3. Why do I always have to race the A.I. opponents in the same cars in the same order? It's stupid. Under Forza 3's Freeplay option, one would think one could set up a race any way one wanted. But no. Let's say I pick a B-class car to race, and I chose Quick Race. First of all, it's only one lap, which is stupid. Why not let the user pick the number of laps? But secondly, while I admire the computer's ability to pick cars that are in the B-class for me to race against, why can't I pick cars from my garage and let the A.I. drive those?

Let's face it. Even on "expert," the A.I. simply cannot beat me if I have a B-500 and they only have a B-461. Why not let me give the A.I. a fighting chance and have them drive my highly modified cars? That would make for a real interesting race.

Recently Game Informer and other video game media have wondered how the industry can breathe fresh life into the simulator world. Games like Grid and Need for Speed: Shift attempt to answer those questions by shaking somethings up, but they took away the most important part of the simulator - the ability to buy and modify my own stable of cars. Idiots.

Now, to me it seems like a no-brainer. "User-generated content" is all the rage, after all. I've outlined above several very simple ways to breathe fresh life into the simulator crowd - things that would probably be regarded as "revolutionary" by the media. Shows what they know. This kind of stuff should have been making its way into the genre starting with Gran Turismo 3, or maybe the fourth one at the worst.

Now I know Forza's graphics creation thing is fantastic, and that's wonderful and all. But would it really be that hard to add the the suggestions above, and maybe a few others? Surely the programming is not the issue. If it is, that's just sad.

No video game has ever failed by giving gamers what they want in a well-executed, highly polished package. However, whole franchises have sunk (I'm thinking of From Software here) by refusing to change and attempting to dictate gameplay to the gamer. I'm not saying Forza and Gran Turismo are doomed to that fate. But they could be if the industry doesn't wake up and sprinkle a little creativity into these things.

If I wrote for Game Informer, I'd give this game a 7. If I worked for G4 TV, a 3. It deserves those scores for failing to innovate, and worse, trying to pass off "innovations" that happened a long time ago as true breakthroughs. Boo. That said, I'll still play the crap out of it, and love it, because there's nothing better out there. And that's just sad.

PS - they've taken steps forward and backward in the aural department. Cars sound better overall, yet the engine sounds don't change with modification - a staple in the genre. That's just stupid.