• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

Career and progression in Forza Motorsport is confirmed to be online-only

Rac3r

Member
UPDATE: *Career and progression in Forza Motorsport is confirmed to be online-only*


A Best Buy listing for preordering Forza Motorsport (Launches 10/10/23) reveals the cover art, with a banner that states "requires internet"

6547747_sd.jpg;maxHeight=640;maxWidth=550


As far as I know, neither Forza Horizon 5 nor Forza Motorsport 7 include this statement on their covers, and both games ARE playable offline. However, Diablo 4 includes the same statement on its cover for both PS5 and Series consoles, and the game is NOT playable offline. Interestingly, GT7 launched as an online-only game, just over a year ago. As a result, the game was bombarded with negative user scores on metacritic. What are your thoughts? Do you think this is a situation where the disc acts as a license, but the downloaded game will be fully playable offline; or, will this game go the same route as GT7?
 
Last edited:

ZoukGalaxy

Member
Microsoft became really the worst publisher on physical release with Nintendo third parties with their empty boxes with a code or games that require download with a cartridge...

jurassic park deal with it GIF


Far is the time where Gears 4 (or 5, not sure) were re-released on 2 discs with all updates included.
However not surprising, most Xbox owners are going digital only.

Not trying to create a discussion between physical vs digital, we have enough threads for that, so please don't.
 
Last edited:

Rac3r

Member
This isn't necessarily related to always online, but games are getting too large to even fit on the disc. Previous Forza games was pushing the limits of size and physical media, and publishers are reluctant to use more than one disc.

It seems like recent games that explicitly state "requires internet", are not playable offline (like Diablo 4), or block features and player progression (Riders Republic).
 
Stupid if really needs to be online to play it. Apart from the downsides for the players I would like to ask the dev team why they implement absolutely unnecessary dependencies in their game. I understand if they want the metrics, but how about just use them WHEN the player is online.

A one time download would be okay though.
 

Rac3r

Member

Monad

Member
Giving the fact that the game appears to have a much more serious multiplayer competitive focus (a la GT7 and iRacing), I don't see the surprise anywhere.
 

MidGenRefresh

*Refreshes biennially
It’s only a problem if the game is actually good. I play Forza Motorsport 4 to this day, if the reboot is as legendary as that entry it would be a shame if one day servers go offline and you can’t play it.
 
Last edited:

StereoVsn

Member
The decision to make GT7 online-only was made to prevent cheating, particularly in the competitive modes, which GT has been emphasizing ever since GT Sport. Forza might have the same goal here.

And it was still dumb to lock SP mode behind that. They should have had online "competition" profile and SP offline one.

Same here if this is the case with Forza as well. It's BS.
 

Riky

$MSFT
So now we know the game is over 50gb and has to download the rest?

As far as I know MS uses bd50 dual layer discs

I’m assuming the game is over 100gb or such and needs download to complete, not always online to play.

Exactly, I doubt much of the game is actually on the disc so you will need internet to download the rest and start the game, it's probably that simple.
 
Isn't Starfield 125 GB at least? Because that means it's going to require internet at least for an initial download for the remaining files and for patches.
 

lh032

I cry about Xbox and hate PlayStation.
why is this even surprising? The all digital future is coming hot and heavy. There are games from big pubs already announced with only digital release. This game prob needs it for all the leaderboard/drivatar/ lootbox/analytics junk.
Digital is one thing .

Always online is another story .
I'm required to download 100 GB file to play my game ? Sure it's digital

I require always online to play SP? Fu
 
Last edited:

TheDreadLord

Gold Member
Probably the game is bigger than what a BD can store and MS wants do save a few cents by not including an additional disc lol
 

RoboFu

One of the green rats
Could just be for online mp or whoever made that box mock up just got some vague instructions. I wouldn’t be too concerned just yet.
 

TheShocker

Member
If I’m ever in a situation where my console(s) don’t have an internet connection, there is either an outage, which rarely happens. Or I’ve intentionally unplugged from the world for a few days.
 
For me it is not about my internet connection, it is about the Forza servers and Xbox live.
Sure, they don’t get down very often, but why make me dependent on that when there is no need to?

You wouldn’t accept a car or a fridge which would not work when it cannot connect to its server. This is just not okay to prevent the use of something which doesn’t need the internet to work in the first place.
 
Last edited:

DeepEnigma

Gold Member
The decision to make GT7 online-only was made to prevent cheating, particularly in the competitive modes, which GT has been emphasizing ever since GT Sport. Forza might have the same goal here.

Was also required by FIA for GT Sport due to how much money and possible drivers going real race car Pro is on the line with these tournaments. And now that GT7 is having their own world series and eventual Olympics, it will have to be there as well.

If Forza wants to get back into the tournament scene, they would do the same. But as of right now, this could either be that, or due to games in current year not being completely on the disc.

Until then, we wait until they reveal more.
 
Last edited:
The always online connection doesn't bother me for the most part. Outages are rare, uptime always ends up being like 99%.

What bothers me more is when support for the game is dropped, and there comes a day where I can't play any of the single payer modes because I can't authenticate with the servers. I have zero faith in T10/MSFT patching the game to address that scenario.
 
My daughter will be born sometime in October. I wish she could enjoy new games the way I did; slap a cartridge into a console or even click a CD on to the top loader, and press the power button and it just works. No missing content you need to download to a storage device, no massive patches, no online accounts. Just complete, amazing games ready to play and switch from game to game at a moment's notice. Fuck this soulless corporate world we're in right now. Take me back to the 80s and 90s please.
 
This true?

It was weird because he sort of tried to walk it back and said "all progression is saved on our servers."

Basically means this game is online-only. Even if you're going to play it solo, you're going to need a connection for save of progression and delivery of content.

The career mode isn't going to be static, I think it'll be like Forza Horizon's seasons where a block of events is released every month or whatever.
 

DeepEnigma

Gold Member
It was weird because he sort of tried to walk it back and said "all progression is saved on our servers."

Basically means this game is online-only. Even if you're going to play it solo, you're going to need a connection for save of progression and delivery of content.

The career mode isn't going to be static, I think it'll be like Forza Horizon's seasons where a block of events is released every month or whatever.
So like GaaS, much like GT7 with releasing new race events and menus.
 

Nydius

Member
Paging all Xbox-stans that grilled GT7 for this.
Awkward Cricket GIF

Was just about to post the same thing when I saw the new post notice pop up.

Everyone that shat on GT7 for being always online better keep that same energy for Forza Motorsport. None of this “well it’s okay now because it’s my preferred plastic box” justification.

It was a crap decision in GT7 and it’s a crap decision here and has guaranteed I will only play the game via Game Pass.
 
So like GaaS, much like GT7 with releasing new race events and menus.

Yep. Sort of like what they seemingly wanted to do with FM7 but then had to walk it back.

TBF, I think racing games work well as GaaS, because people always crave new cars and tracks. There's very little reason these days to get a new Motorsport every two years. My worry is that rather than, "here's some new cars and tracks this month, have fun," it'll be "here's some new cars and tracks this month...have fun trying to earn them." Aka pure FOMO grind.
 
Top Bottom