Is Forza Motorsport a secret dating sim? Turn 10 would love you to "build a relationship with your car"

Turn 10 Studios wants you to connect with your car. It wants you to love it. seriously. In a closed-door presentation following the Xbox Games Showcase, Forza Motorsport general manager Dan Greenawalt and creative director Chris Esaki were keen to emphasize that this is a game that makes you love your car and treat it like one.

To really drive this point (pun intended), Forza Motorsport has one big difference from 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 get to know them inside and out – you’ve carefully studied and thought through every element that makes up your vehicle, and when you walk around with it you can feel the hum of every last bit of assembly Buzz and snap. track.

Xbox used the game as a tech showcase to highlight the features of the Series S/X.

But let’s take a step back. According to the developers, there’s a whole new progression loop in Forza Motorsport 2023. “Level, build, dominate.” That language might be a little violent or overbearing for a romantic relationship, but hey—different people have different strokes, right? This means that, from the beginning to the end of your career, you are tricked into treating your car as if it were a car you actually own, sitting on the road. You don’t want to add up to the game, and you don’t want to damage it; you want to go out every Saturday morning, spend the right amount of time with it, rinse it, sing (probably).

“This game isn’t an exclusive car fantasy, but achievable and desirable cars,” said Ezaki, who walks us through the full game with this core loop — leveling, then building, then dominating. It starts with a test match.Every race in the newly reworked Career Mode features a robust open-ended practice suite, where Esaki wants you to “know the car, practice it, engage in challenges and earn rewards from it [we set]’ But more than that, he wants you to “have fun on the track, take the hot laps, and try to be faster and better all the time. ”

When you start your new event, you can enjoy some proper car porn trailers, all about Marks & Spencer doing Fords. The slow, lazy shot of the beautiful curves in the overhead light, the close-up money shot of the spoiler, the chrome of the exhaust with lens flare, all at just the right angles. And none of this is pre-rendered, it’s all running in real time. Greenawalt and Esaki again refer to “falling in love”. These little showcases are designed to allow you to pick a car and keep it with you for the rest of your life.

So far, Forza. But – because the team wants every little thing you do to make you love your car even more – the rewards are far greater than in any Forza game to date.Improved Car Mastery parameters ensure that “every corner of the game is a goal” so that every time you pass any

For corners, you’ll get a score out of 10, and based on that score, you’ll gain car XP for each corner you take. The built-in UI is designed so you can see what you did right and what you did wrong so you can better use the same corner again next time.

It feels like Turn 10 wants to take all the basics you might have learned from Forza Horizon’s more arcade racing, say, and coax you into the next level. The demo is automatic, so I can’t tell you how it feels, but I can tell you, for example, that the tire styling is all-new, upgraded from a single point of contact with the track to eight per tire. “The tire model alone gained 48 times the detail,” says Ezaki beamingly. You could tell he took pride in the little things the team put into it.

The net result of all of this is that when you take the car through a good corner or through a nice line, you know how it feels – you know how it should feel, and if it breaks down in the middle of the drive, That’s because you did something wrong. Once you’ve settled on how the car feels, 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 really wants you to maintain that relationship with your car.

So, do you have a physical attraction to this car?

Whether this all works and appeals to more people than just those who play Forza games remains to be seen. I must say, this preview did pique my interest more than other sim-heavy racers, but I guess I’m in the perfect Horizon-to-Motorsport pipeline. As one of Microsoft’s big exclusives this year, Forza Motorsport has a lot to prove — maybe, just maybe — that it’ll appeal to people beyond its core fans with this intriguing reboot.

forza motorsport Releases October 10 on Xbox Series X|S and Steam. It’s also released on Xbox Game Pass for the first day.