Forza Motorsport sheds its stuffiness for a friendly, generous welcome

"A car's journey, from the showroom floor to the winner's circle, is the culmination of a thousand little decisions," we are told, at the beginning of Forza Motorsport. "All carefully chosen by great builders who know what it takes to push a car past its perceived limitations." Fair enough. But it does make you wonder, as the camera whips through a montage of lime-green Porsches and rain-lashed tarmac, what exactly are the perceived limitations that the great builders at Turn 10 Studios are trying to push past?

The obvious answer is: Stuffiness. The Forza Motorsport games have, since 2012, suffered something of an image problem. The problem being Forza Horizon, their sister series, developed by Playground Games - a studio whose title doubles as a perfect description of the product that it pours out. The Horizon series loves cars, but what it loves about them is their relation to the world, the way they cruise through it, offering up fresh sights as though the windshield were a widescreen TV. The cars in those games are like mobile viewing pods; the real vehicle being driven, over the course of five Horizon games, is the planet Earth, with its endless vistas and ailing fuel consumption.

Forza Motorsport, on the other hand, loves cars for being cars - difficult, argumentative, beautiful. Its fans include those for whom an afternoon is ideally spent deliberating over fan belts and brake calipers, in a quiet, petrol-scented gloom. Certainly, this most recent entry (which is due out on 10th October, on Xbox Series X and S, along with PC) caters to the monkish, but it's keen to hold its arms wide. Hence the lack of number 8, chopped off the game's title, the better not to daunt any potential newcomers. Hence, too, the narrator, who beckons us into the experience, talking about how "we gather at iconic cathedrals of speed," and how we are "united by passion." The message is clear: don't be scared, there is plenty here for all! "Welcome to a new era of Motorsport," he says. "Welcome to Forza."

Read more