You've had a month to finish some new games, so let's get some reviews!
To get us started, I'm doing an unconventional re-look at Forza Motorsport, which I did a review of and then deleted late last year:
This game is probably the most vivid example of a lynch mob mentality among players of any game I've ever seen. I decided to analyze the situation and see what happened.
First of all, let's start with the composition of user reviews. When a game has "Overwhelmingly Positive" user reviews, there is rarely one defining factor that causes the reviews to be so positive. The same can't be said for reviews that are mostly negative. Generally speaking, you have one predominant issue that many people point out. This frequently balloons into quite a few "everything is wrong" sorts of reviews (which is unlikely for most games), and, no matter whether positive or negative, there are always a few people so angry and disconnected from reality that you wonder if they played the same game.
I actually gathered a bunch of examples from all of these that I was going to post here, but decided that would be rude. People can have their opinions, and I'm a poor person to select to speak about other people writing dumb things. I do it all the time. Sometimes my emotions about a game take over, and I write a scathing review that I later become embarrassed about. It happens. I understand what it's like to be disappointed about a game, and so my review here isn't really criticizing anyone. It's just pointing out what happened. But let's get to the point...
The two things that are mentioned most in negative reviews are that the developer lied about the game being "built from the ground up" and bugs/optimization problems. To quickly speak to the latter, bugs on PC are sometimes related to specific systems, as sometimes are optimization problems. For this reason, I can only speak of my experience, but wouldn't consider my experience to be representative of the entire community. For me, after over 100 hours on Game Pass, but only a couple of hours on Steam, I haven't noticed any significant bugs. There have been a couple of small things here or there, but definitely nothing that impacted my overall experience. As for optimization, my experience is that the game is optimized at this point about the same as FH5. Take it or leave it. Your experiences on your system will likely vary. As for occasional connection issues, there has never been a Forza game without them, so nothing to see here.
The big issue, which was the inspiration for this review, is really the phrase "built from the ground up", and the truth is that, while Turn10 did utter those words on multiple occasions, they were always related to something specific. Turn10 never, that I can recall or find, stated that the entire game was "built from the ground up", only that large parts of it were; for instance, the AI, the physics and locations. and, most important to our discussion, the materials and shaders used for car model finishes. This is extremely important because the lynch mob mentality started when YouTubers and folks on reddit noticed that the game was using, in some cases, old car models. This quickly ballooned into Turn10 lying about building the game from the ground up, but they never actually said all the models were new. They said the materials and shaders were new (to simplify, materials in game development are paint). But it didn't matter what Turn10 actually said. As is usually the case, no one actually cared if this was accurate. They were just mad.
Just as a side note on this. There are over 500 cars in the game, and while most of them were built from scratch, a number of them used older models. With that many cars, my personal opinion is that having a few older models is not exactly equivalent to treason. But if you feel they all should have been brand new, I won't argue with you. That would have been nice.
Another thing that I would like to mention is the much maligned singleplayer campaign. Many seem to hate it, but they never go into detail about what you are getting. For starters, there is no story, just a series of championships to participate in, just as in other Motorsport games and nearly every racing sim. That can be good or bad depending on the player. There are 4 permanent major series and 2 additional series, one special and one that changes every so often like the weekly challenges. So at any given time there are 6 series and usually at least one new one. I can't say this will always be the format, as these things tend to change. Each one of these series has 4 championships of either 5 or 6 races. I didn't count how many had 5 and how many had six, so to be pessimistic, let's just say they all have 5. So you have 24 championships of 5 races, so the singleplayer career has 120 races. Only you can decide whether this format or quantity is enough for you if you are primarily a singleplayer person, but each of those races will last about 15 minutes, so that's 30 hours if you do nothing but those races one after another, never decorating your cars, never running any custom races or multiplayer or never start a race over (guilty), etc. And this also ignores the new series that are always being added.
Edit: As I was writing this, they released a patch that got rid of the CaRPG aspect of the game, so this paragraph is no longer relevant, but I'll leave it here anyway. One final bone of contention is the CARPG style of leveling and improving your cars. I understand why people who want to do nothing but race would dislike it. That's fine. It's a grind. Actually, I didn't think I would like it at all, but now I think it adds character and strategy to each championship.
So there you go. Those are my largely rambling thoughts on the game and why it is rated so low. By the way, professional reviews and Xbox players seem to disagree pretty significantly. Even PC Game pass players seem to like the game okay. The bottom line is that this game is not nearly as bad as the Steam and metacritic user reviews would lead you to believe. In fact, I think it's quite good.
ETA related thread Member Game Reviews 2023
To get us started, I'm doing an unconventional re-look at Forza Motorsport, which I did a review of and then deleted late last year:
Forza Motorsport
This game is probably the most vivid example of a lynch mob mentality among players of any game I've ever seen. I decided to analyze the situation and see what happened.
First of all, let's start with the composition of user reviews. When a game has "Overwhelmingly Positive" user reviews, there is rarely one defining factor that causes the reviews to be so positive. The same can't be said for reviews that are mostly negative. Generally speaking, you have one predominant issue that many people point out. This frequently balloons into quite a few "everything is wrong" sorts of reviews (which is unlikely for most games), and, no matter whether positive or negative, there are always a few people so angry and disconnected from reality that you wonder if they played the same game.
I actually gathered a bunch of examples from all of these that I was going to post here, but decided that would be rude. People can have their opinions, and I'm a poor person to select to speak about other people writing dumb things. I do it all the time. Sometimes my emotions about a game take over, and I write a scathing review that I later become embarrassed about. It happens. I understand what it's like to be disappointed about a game, and so my review here isn't really criticizing anyone. It's just pointing out what happened. But let's get to the point...
The two things that are mentioned most in negative reviews are that the developer lied about the game being "built from the ground up" and bugs/optimization problems. To quickly speak to the latter, bugs on PC are sometimes related to specific systems, as sometimes are optimization problems. For this reason, I can only speak of my experience, but wouldn't consider my experience to be representative of the entire community. For me, after over 100 hours on Game Pass, but only a couple of hours on Steam, I haven't noticed any significant bugs. There have been a couple of small things here or there, but definitely nothing that impacted my overall experience. As for optimization, my experience is that the game is optimized at this point about the same as FH5. Take it or leave it. Your experiences on your system will likely vary. As for occasional connection issues, there has never been a Forza game without them, so nothing to see here.
The big issue, which was the inspiration for this review, is really the phrase "built from the ground up", and the truth is that, while Turn10 did utter those words on multiple occasions, they were always related to something specific. Turn10 never, that I can recall or find, stated that the entire game was "built from the ground up", only that large parts of it were; for instance, the AI, the physics and locations. and, most important to our discussion, the materials and shaders used for car model finishes. This is extremely important because the lynch mob mentality started when YouTubers and folks on reddit noticed that the game was using, in some cases, old car models. This quickly ballooned into Turn10 lying about building the game from the ground up, but they never actually said all the models were new. They said the materials and shaders were new (to simplify, materials in game development are paint). But it didn't matter what Turn10 actually said. As is usually the case, no one actually cared if this was accurate. They were just mad.
Just as a side note on this. There are over 500 cars in the game, and while most of them were built from scratch, a number of them used older models. With that many cars, my personal opinion is that having a few older models is not exactly equivalent to treason. But if you feel they all should have been brand new, I won't argue with you. That would have been nice.
Another thing that I would like to mention is the much maligned singleplayer campaign. Many seem to hate it, but they never go into detail about what you are getting. For starters, there is no story, just a series of championships to participate in, just as in other Motorsport games and nearly every racing sim. That can be good or bad depending on the player. There are 4 permanent major series and 2 additional series, one special and one that changes every so often like the weekly challenges. So at any given time there are 6 series and usually at least one new one. I can't say this will always be the format, as these things tend to change. Each one of these series has 4 championships of either 5 or 6 races. I didn't count how many had 5 and how many had six, so to be pessimistic, let's just say they all have 5. So you have 24 championships of 5 races, so the singleplayer career has 120 races. Only you can decide whether this format or quantity is enough for you if you are primarily a singleplayer person, but each of those races will last about 15 minutes, so that's 30 hours if you do nothing but those races one after another, never decorating your cars, never running any custom races or multiplayer or never start a race over (guilty), etc. And this also ignores the new series that are always being added.
Edit: As I was writing this, they released a patch that got rid of the CaRPG aspect of the game, so this paragraph is no longer relevant, but I'll leave it here anyway. One final bone of contention is the CARPG style of leveling and improving your cars. I understand why people who want to do nothing but race would dislike it. That's fine. It's a grind. Actually, I didn't think I would like it at all, but now I think it adds character and strategy to each championship.
So there you go. Those are my largely rambling thoughts on the game and why it is rated so low. By the way, professional reviews and Xbox players seem to disagree pretty significantly. Even PC Game pass players seem to like the game okay. The bottom line is that this game is not nearly as bad as the Steam and metacritic user reviews would lead you to believe. In fact, I think it's quite good.
ETA related thread Member Game Reviews 2023
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