foureightsix interactive

When it comes to those of us who absolutely love video games, each of us has that one genre that we absolutely love. It may have been due to the genre being the first you played, or it’s just the mechanics just scratch an itch that no other genre can provide. Hell, it might just be because you’ve just mastered the underlying theory and mechanics. For me, this genre has always been the racing genre.

but first, a bit of personal context

My earliest batch of games on the family 486 were comprised of Day of the Tentacle, Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, and Stunts. (Stunts was also known as 4D Sports Driving, mainly for marketing and branding – which is strange that nowadays I’d wager no one actually remembers the 4D branding.) From there I managed to get my hands on various racing games for MS-DOS: Crazy Cars 3, Grand Prix Unlimited, Super Off Road are ones that come to mind. I also remember having Newman-Haas Indycar for the SNES, and that’s definitely something I’m going to have to look at in the future. In 1998 I was the proud recipient of a brand new PlayStation, complete with the game that would set the benchmark for what I would come to expect from the racing genre. Gran Turismo.

10,000 credits and a dream

To say that I was obsessed with Gran Turismo is an understatement. It was the game that really cemented my love of the racing genre. The biggest paradigm shift for me was the fact that there was no difficulty setting in Gran Turismo mode. The difficulty was set by how well you could upgrade and tune a car, and that I could essentially supplement my utter lack of skill with a stronger car was amazing to me. What I didn’t realise at the time was how the structure of the Gran Turismo mode allowed me to really dig into the mechanics at my own pace. When you first enter GT mode, you have 10,000 credits and a map screen which serves as the gateway to the different car manufacturers. What isn’t explained is that 10,000 credits isn’t really enough to buy a new car – well at least a new car that’s actually worth racing. I’m reminded of the time when Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond, and James May went to Vietnam for a Top Gear special, and are handed boxes with around fifteen million Vietnamese dong in them. The elation was soon drained as they found out that all they could afford was some used motorcycles, much to the chagrin of Clarkson. To actually have a chance to compete you have to hunt around the used car lots, whose inventory will change on a regular basis. What will soon become apparent is that you will have a choice when it comes to used cars: Do you spend all of your budget on a powerful car that can compete straight away, or do you get a cheaper, less powerful car, and save some of your budget for aftermarket tuning parts? The way that Gran Turismo just lets you just off the leash and allows you to actually make mistakes was mindblowing to my twelve year old self. as i said, I never realised how unique the idea was until a long time later, when searching for something that would scratch the same itch over twenty years later.

a lesson in frustration

Last year, I picked up the Xbox Game Pass for around 5 dollars, mainly so I could play The Outer Worlds without having to humour Epic Games and their anti-consumer wankery. Despite having a terrible interface on PC, and being nigh impossible to actually find where the friends list is, the amount of content offered as part of XGP is quite substantial. There’s been games I’d have never played if not for the pass and after various offers, I’ve managed to end up with around six months of XGP for about five dollars. However, as part of the XGP, I now had access to a game series that I had completely missed, a game series that was apparently carrying on the legacy of simcade racing and was now available on PC. I was finally able to play a Forza game. I had never played any of the Forza series, mainly because I’ve never owned any XBox console. I had always found that anything that I wanted to play on the XBox was available on PC, and the things that weren’t available on PC, I had equivalents that fulfilled the same niche. I also didn’t play certain genres on console, so I would always default to PC first. However, the PC platform has always lagged behind the consoles when it came to my pet genre of the racing game. Sure we had things like the Need For Speed games, as well as a lot of really dry simulator games, but the PC never really had anything that held a candle to Gran Turismo’s simcade style. To say I was very interested in trying a Forza game to satiate my desire for hurtling snarling mechanical monsters around a ribbon of asphalt was a bit of an understatement. To say I was mildly frustrated at the new user experience is also an understatement.

There’s a wonderful interview with Hugo Martin from id Software where he talks about the design of DOOM 2016. In that interview he mentions that the first fifteen minutes of a film, or any piece of media, is key in setting up the experience. He essentially says that a game should be good from the moment you hit the new game option, not waiting until the third hour to actually become good. I wish the team from Turn 10 Studios subscribed to the same idea. I also wish that Turn 10 Studios also subscribed to the idea of show, don’t tell, or the game equivalent; let the player do things, rather than showing them.

First time launching the game, you’re not given any menus or anything, you’re shoved straight into an unskippable cutscene that is far more interested in telling you how great the in-game Horizon event is, and is nothing more than a thinly veiled self-congratulatory masturbation session that’s smugly crowing about how awesome they are. What’s more, is that this cutscene drags on and on, as it edges it’s way through showing that the game has seasons, and essentially just flops it’s dong on the table with the same charm and grace as a drunken Collingwood player. What’s worse is that the game feels like it has no trust in the player’s intelligence, as it carefully over explains every small detail in case a five year old is left behind.

Horizon then indulges in another tired and infuriating trope, the unskippable tutorial race with an endgame car. Even here, when you’re able to actually control parts of the game, the developers are so terrified of people getting lost in a racing game that they coat everything in padding and actually make the initial experience even worse. Firstly, You still can’t change any options. Don’t like the default controls? Too bad, can’t change them yet. Want to tweak difficulty and assists? Not during the tutorial you can’t. This second point is something that really drove me to insanity, as the default assists that are enabled are so intrusive, that actually trying to take an optimal line through corners led to the assists hitting the brakes and slowing me down and countersteering away from the apex. What’s worse is that the entire race has AI that rubberbands to such a degree that you will only ever overtake the leader just before the finish line for a “thrilling” finish. The entire sequence is nothing but a gaming version of one of those cinematic thrill rides found in an amusement park. You watch a series of videos that patronisingly tell the audience about what’s happening, you get in a facsimile of a batmobile, there’s a whole heap of bright lights and rocking of the car, but nothing actually changes, and you’re just left mildly nauseous afterwards. This was where my first of many rage-quits happened.

You would think that the game would then open up a little, allow the player to actually express themselves a little in their vehicle choice, right? Oh no, we’re going to restrict the player to a handful of cars that all pretty much handle the same. Even then, after selecting an avatar, (by the way, you can’t customise your avatar until you unlock individual items through another god damned unlock system) you would think that the game would let you actually play the game, right? You would be wrong. You only have a very restricted amount of races to choose from, all of them having an unskippable cutscene parading another interchangeable smug twenty-something douchebag around in a vain attempt to appear hip and relevant.

what lies underneath

The thing that infuriates me so much is the fact that the underlying gameplay of Forza Horizon 4; the driving model, the physics, the whole package underneath the thick layer of masturbatory smugness is incredible. It took me about half an hour in the overworld to get an understanding of how it behaves, but after removing a lot of the assists and tweaking some sensitivity settings, it’s one of the best driving models I’ve used. Combined with the astounding visuals and rather well optimised engine that the game runs on, the core of Forza Horizon 4 is really solid, and it’s a blast when you finally get into a race.

The car customisation options are also insane, albeit a little to indepth for my liking, (There’s no default option to just add a simple dual racing stripe.) and the fact that the developers put this powerful of a tool in the game shows that they are willing to give a lot of customisation over to players, but only in the designated areas.

The final straw for me came after I finished the last race of the Autumn qualifiers. The game took complete control over the map screen and proceeded to smugly explain all the new events one by one, for about a minute straight. At the end of this, the girl painfully overexplaining everything had the gall to ask the question: “All these new events are unlocked, What are you waiting for?”, only then for the game to keep going and smugly unlock more shit. I tell you what I’m waiting for Forza. I’m waiting for you to shut the fuck up and let me play the fucking game.

That was the final straw for me. I had given the game multiple chances, and every time I ended up angry that the game kept taking control away from me. I’d get into flow state during a race, but the races are too short, and the downtime in between just ruins any enjoyment I could have with the game. For every three minutes of racing, there was another three minutes of pointless menus, open world menu selection, and some smug fuck crowing about how great the game is, and how awesome I am for playing it.

There’s a core issue with Forza Horizon 4, and it’s not just limited to the Forza series. Gran Turismo 6 did the same thing when it forced you to buy one car. Hell, even the first GRiD was guilty of this with it’s unskippable tutorial videos and intro race. As games have become more mainstream, and developers feel the need to add tutorials to everything, developers have forgotten the fact that they need to let go of the player’s hand at some point. It’s one of the reasons why DOOM 2016 was such a breath of fresh air, it was awesome from the get go, and actually introduced it’s mechanics in an organic, unobtrusive way rather than cramming everything down the player’s throat.

The greatest flaw with Forza, and with a lot of other modern games is that they’re too busy telling the player that they’re going to be awesome, rather than letting the player actually be awesome.