Forza Motorsport pledges AI, progression, and race regulation improvements in “coming months”

With the launch of last year’s Forza Motorsport – and an initial flurry of patches and fixes – behind it, developer Turn 10 Studios has confirmed its next steps for the racer will be to address three key community concerns over the “coming months”.

“While we have been heads down adding cars, tracks, patches, and other improvements,” the studio wrote in the first of a series of planned quarterly development updates on its website, “we want to acknowledge the top three areas of feedback we haven’t addressed directly”.

Those areas, specifically, are driver AI, car progression, and race regulations, and it sounds like fixing AI issues – which, as per Turn 10’s update, include “abruptly braking and slowing down; not accelerating out of exits, braking too hard on mild corners, and following racing lines too strictly” – is first on its to-do list.

“We understand how important it is to have fair and competitive AI in Motorsport and are our top priorities in early 2024 are addressing overly aggressive AI,” it explains, “while also getting a cleaner race start into turn 1 where many of the issues above most severely manifest and impact players.”

As for car progression changes, these are described as another “top priority for the team going into 2024”. While Turn 10 insists it’s “clear from looking at feedback that… many of our players are enjoying the system as is”, it acknowledges, “for many others it isn’t delivering the upgrade experience that they expect from Forza Motorsport. To address this, we are exploring changes to the system.”

While the studio offers no examples of the kind of things it might be looking to address, it says its “goal with these changes is to retain what is working for those that enjoy it, while resolving the issues many of our most dedicated players have with the system”. It does, however, seem like these updates are further out, with Turn 10 noting it’ll “take some time to properly evaluate options, make the necessary code changes, and thoroughly test those code changes.”

Last on its list for now, then, are improvements to Forza race regulations, which the studio admits are “not working as intended in some situations”. Highlighting complaints including “inconsistent or unfair penalties in instances of intentional ramming, being pushed off the track, and spinning cars pushing drivers off the track” in its post – alongside high speed collisions sometimes having no penalties while low speed collisions receive mild penalties – it says its ultimate goal will be to “issue tweaks to make [race regulations] more accurate and reliable”.

Again, however, it sounds like it may take some time before players start to see the results of Turn 10’s labours. “It’s important that we capture all the data that we can about a race when FRR rulings happen in error,” it explains, “so over the next few months, we will be working with some long-time competitive Motorsport players to gather direct telemetry from them while they’re playing… We appreciate your patience as we work on improving the system.”

“These and other issues are constantly being worked on, iterated, and given careful consideration,” Turn 10 concludes in its Forza Motorsport update. “How and what we implement and when is driven by the desire to improve the experience regularly and consistently in a way that does not sacrifice stability and minimises any downtime.”