Is Forza Motorsport secretly a dating sim? Turn 10 is very keen for you to ‘have a relationship with your car’

Turn 10 Studios wants you to have a relationship with your car. He wants you to fall in love with him. Oh really. In a closed-door presentation after Xbox Games Showcase, Forza Motorsport General Manager Dan Greenawalt and Creative Director Chris Esaki really wanted to emphasize that this is a game where you fall in love with your car and treat it like to a lover

To drive this point home (pun intended), there’s a huge difference in Forza Motorsport compared to the other Turn 10 and PlayGround Games titles before it; You build your cars, you don’t buy them. The hope here is that you know them inside out, that you’ve pored and pondered each of the elements that make up your vehicle, that you feel the buzz and bite of each piece of assembly as you take it around the track.

But let’s back up a bit. There is a whole new progression cycle in Forza Motorsport 2023, according to the developers. “Level, build, master.” That language is perhaps a bit violent or overwhelming for a romantic relationship, but hey, different styles for different people, right? This means that, from the beginning of his career to the end, he is convinced to treat his car as if it were one he actually owns, left by the wayside. You don’t want to total it in a race, you don’t want to damage it; you want to go out every saturday morning and spend proper time with him, wash him, sing to him (probably).

“This game isn’t about exclusive automotive fantasies, it’s about attainable, desirable cars,” Esaki says as he takes us through a full playthrough of that core loop: leveling, then building, and finally mastering. It starts with a test run. Each event in the newly redesigned Career mode features a robust open-ended practice set that Esaki wants you to “get to know the car, practice with it, participate in, and be rewarded for the challenges.” [we set].” But, more than that, he wants you to “have fun on the track, drive fast laps, trying to be faster and better all the time.”

When you start a new event, there’s quite a bit of car porn trailer you can enjoy, all done like ‘Marks & Spencer does Ford’. Slow, languid shots of pretty curves caught by the overhead light, a close-up of the spoiler, the chrome exhaust with lens flare at an angle that’s just perfect. And none of this is pre-rendered, it’s all running in real time. Greenawalt and Esaki mention ‘falling in love’ again. These small showcases are designed for you to choose a car and accompany it for life.

So far, so Forza. But because the team wants every little thing you do to make you love your car more, the rewards are much more incremental than they’ve been in Forza to date. Car Mastery’s revamped parameters ensure that “every corner of the game is a target”, so that every time you pass any corner, you get a score of 10 and gain Car EXP for each corner you take based on that score. The built-in user interface is designed so you can see what you did right and what you did wrong, so you can retake the same corner, better, next time.

It sounds a lot like Turn 10 wants to take all the basics you may have learned from Forza Horizon’s more arcadey races, for example, and convince you to take it to the next level. This demo was hands-off, so I can’t tell you how it felt, but I can tell you that, for example, the tire model is completely new, improved from a single point of contact with the track to eight per tire. “The tire model alone has gained 48 times more detail,” says Esaki, beaming. He shows that he is proud of what the team has done with the details.

The real upshot of all this is that you know exactly how your car feels when you take it into a good corner or a good line: you know how it should feel, and if it’s driving badly, it’s because you did something. mistaken. Once you’ve defined the feel of your car, everything should be intuitive, like knowing when your partner is upset and needs a hug, or stressed and needs a beer, or mad at you and needs space. Turn 10 genuinely wants you to have that level of relationship with your car.

Whether this all works out remains to be seen and is something that will appeal to more people than just those who play Forza games. I must say that this preview piqued my interest more than other sim-heavy racing games, but I guess I’m in the perfect Horizon-to-Motorsport pipeline. As Microsoft’s big exclusive this year, Forza Motorsport has a lot to prove, and maybe, just maybe, it will appeal to those beyond the core fandom with this interesting reboot.

Forza Motorsport launches on Xbox Series X|S and Steam on October 10. It also launches day one on Xbox Game Pass.