I feel like I'm in the wrong place here, since I'm not going to buy Forza 7, but I kinda need to get this off my chest:
Forza's economy was shit before, definitely for me. A lot of the very desirable cars - an Impreza, an old Golf GTI, a Supra, Renault 5 Turbo, AMC Javelin... are super cheap. It feels wrong to my to buy new supercars, if I can 10 other cars that are just as cool. Taking credit price tags from real world values never really seemed to work. Now an impreza and a Ferrari are closer together which makes more sense to me.
I always felt that gamifying assists was wrong. Turning off ABS to get 5% more race credits, when the real money actually came from level up money, not from race winnings meant under 1% (from the december 2015 economy change, it meant even less, maybe 0.3%)... and for what? Less than 1% more credits for turning off an ABS that is shit anyway and makes me slower, it's much easier to buy a brake upgrade and tune the brake pressure according to the calculated ideal braking distance and floor the brake pedal without ABS ==>shorter stopping distance, more earned credits. And why encourage ABS off anyway? The real life car comes with ABS, it was designed with a modern ABS in mind. The brake discs on modern hot hatches are show-off big, using the brakes without ABS sometimes means lock-up at something like 30% brake pressure.
Now you don't get credits for turning off assists anymore, which is - not great, but in theory better than before to me.
"turn racing fans into gamers and gamers into racing fans." - I loved that motto and love how Dan Greenawalt talks about their simulation. The simulation always comes first - make it the most realistic possible, then build game systems on top to make the cars controllable without a racing wheel and still let the player feel in full control. Where did this spirit go in the last 6 years? They're improving the simulation less and less, just adding more cars, a few more tracks and reorganizing a career mode that isn't immersive at all just so have somewhat of a path to follow to collect all the cars again.
I'm over that. I want that game where I can drive my old car from the 90s around the Nordschleife and everything is like I'm sitting in it. I want to read about this new feature of the BMW i8, try the car in Forza and this car feature is in the game. I want to watch Top Gear and see that the Lancer has Active Yaw Control and traction control modes for a wet track and be able to turn those nobs in game like in a flight simulator. Explore a Peugeot 504 in Forzavista with my dad and he'd talk to me about how he remembers this exact engine starter and door handle noise. That's the direction I wanted Forza to go, make the cars like I'm in them, fully functional.
They pick people up that are just "let's try this Forza thing, I'd like a good car game" - then they fall deeply and absolutely in love with the game - level up to level 500+ when they originally thought they'd only put 10-20 hours into it. They look forward to how awesome realistic this game will get with next iteration, what new cars will be in the game. But now we're at a point where 95% of the coolest cars ever are already in the game, every new car pack is less likely to have this amazing thing you always wanted to try but never could in any game so far. There are no new features in Forzavista, no new upgrade parts to try, no new tuning options, no new electronics simulated. It's not good enough.
Maybe when the current car models aren't good enough any more, maybe when VR takes off and you expect to be able to press these cockpit buttons, maybe then Forza will go where I wanted it to go again.