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Forza Motorsport's recent release on Xbox Series consoles and PCs hasn't been anything short of a disaster for Xbox Game Studios and Turn 10. Apart from being the lowest-grossing Forza Motorsport title, the offering is also among the lowest-rated games in the entire Forza franchise, which is quite surprising considering the reputation of the IP.
For comparison, the previous Forza title, Forza Horizon 5, is one of the best-reviewed and most profitable racing games on current-generation consoles and PCs, far surpassing Polyphony Digital's Gran Turismo 7.
However, with Forza Motorsport, Turn 10 and Xbox Studios fumbled quite badly. The game currently has "Mostly Negative" reviews on Steam. Of these roughly 300 reviews, only 36% are positive, which is the lowest for any Forza game to date. At a passing glance, this might look like a typical "review bombing" scenario on Steam. However, there's much more to it than meets the eye.
Note: Some aspects of this article are subjective and solely reflect the opinions of the writer
Forza Motorsport's lack of technical polish is the major reason behind the negative reception
Forza Motorsport is not a bad game per se. In fact, it's a pretty competent racing simulator. In my review of the game, I called it the "quintessential racing-sim," one that I can easily recommend to fans of the genre.
While I did not face any issues with the title on PC, there have been numerous reports of players experiencing performance-related problems. It also seems like recent updates have retroactively affected a lot of players with a plethora of stability-related issues.
Most of the negative reviews for the game are centered around its poor technical state on PC. However, this isn't anything new in the world of PC gaming.
2023 has been a pretty rough year for PC gamers in general with shoddy ports like Forspoken, Star Wars Jedi Survivor, The Last of Us Part-1, Lords of the Fallen, and now, Forza Motorsport. While you can circumvent these issues by using powerful enough rigs with $1000 GPUs, that isn't ideal, and optimization should never be an oversight.
Turn 10's latest racing simulator also suffers from a dearth of single-player content and improper balancing of penalties in online race events. During my time with the game, I felt that the penalty system can feel a bit rough at times, especially online. However, the recent updates seem to have made things significantly worse.
Fortunately, Turn 10 is aware of all the issues players are facing, and the developer has recently announced a complete overhaul of the online component with the upcoming 2.0 update. The patch will also come packed with quality-of-life features that the Forza community has been asking for since the title's release.
