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Forza Motorsport 3 Demo Discussion Thread

I just spent a good 45 minutes working on my mini cooper drifting, 8th in the world right now woooo :lol I was never a big fan of drifting in F1 or F2 but now that the game scores you I love it.
 

acm2000

Member
fuck this noise...

my times disappeared! i had 1:01.939, then did 1:00.910, after that i only got a 1:06 in the time trial, and it saved it over my time! now im only back up to a 1:01.448 :(
 
JRW said:
The game will just start hitching / pausing every couple seconds while racing, the audio isn't affected. after about 10 seconds of this it stops doing it. then randomly starts up again. Seems to happen more often if I switch to cockpit view.

what revision is ur box? sounds like its dying
 

Bitmap Frogs

Mr. Community
Captain Pants said:
That pic is awesome. Maybe Che can answer, but is this track based off of City of Rocks National Park in Idaho? I went camping there this summer and can't help but see the similarities.

5420_1085086050991_1341581249_30221894_7992668_n.jpg

Maybe there are a lot of places that look like that, and I just haven't seen them. I can't wait to get home and play this demo.

When you play the demo you'll notice it's called Camino Viejo Montserrat because it's based on the landscape of the mountain Montserrat, in Spain.
 

eso76

Member
just finished my second race. First was with lancer, second with ferrari california.
Game looks A LOT better than direct feed captures lead me to believe, but...ok, cars do feel heavy and connected to the ground...but is this how they are supposed to feel ?
Forza 2 didn't feel quite right, cars would skid around the corners like crazy, even with racing tires, and i'm not sure that's accurate either but i'm full throttling out of corners with a rwd.
I am not sure what to think.

I mean, it still feels good, you really do feel the weight of your car, but..dunno
 

CrunchinJelly

formerly cjelly
acm2000 said:
fuck this noise...

my times disappeared! i had 1:01.939, then did 1:00.910, after that i only got a 1:06 in the time trial, and it saved it over my time! now im only back up to a 1:01.448 :(
Maybe 1.06 was your only clean lap.
 

DaFish

Member
amar212 said:
Yeah, good for you - I would not know that BECAUSE I'M USING THE OFFICIAL MICROSOFT FORCE FEEDBACK WHEEL.

Speaking of which, I CAN'T EVEN SEE MY MIRRORS AT ALL.

Che, can anybody take that into consideration?

Will the buttons be mappable?

Like, please?

If IRCC, FM2 was mappable so you can put the "look around" on the D-pad...
 

Captain Pants

Killed by a goddamned Dredgeling
Bitmap Frogs said:
When you play the demo you'll notice it's called Camino Viejo Montserrat because it's based on the landscape of the mountain Montserrat, in Spain.

Oh thanks. I was having a bit of deja vu when watching the videos and looking at screens. It looks very similar. If I ever have the money to travel outside of the country, I'd love to see that place. Anyway.../derail
 
The cars have got to be at least 5 times more detailed than Forza 2... They look incredible.

Environments are about 1,000,000 times better than Forza 2 and that is not an exaggeration. I have never seen that much detail in a 60FPS racer.

Image is crystal clear there is not a jaggy in sight. 720p Bravia display here hooked up properly (no overscan, proper cables).

Vast, vast improvement over Forza 2 at least visually. Gameplay wise, the cars feel a lot "heavier" than Forza 2 if that makes sense. I love the new feel. Now I understand what they meant by "magic carpet" in Forza 2. Compared to this, the cars in F2 are so light and slidey if thats a word.

Music during races is nice.

I'm completely blown away. This and Bayonetta will make for an awesome Christmas.

Oh, and BTW, cockpit view is a full 60FPS. Cool to mess with but I don't think I will be using it to race.
 
JRW said:
The game will just start hitching / pausing every couple seconds while racing, the audio isn't affected. after about 10 seconds of this it stops doing it. then randomly starts up again. Seems to happen more often if I switch to cockpit view.

I had something like this, it only happened when someone on my friends list signed in, i turned notifications off and it seems to have stopped now
 

Gowans

Member
Leaderboards, Ghost Races/Time Trails, certification & not being stuck in 2lap races has just added so much playtime to the demo for me.
 

Pimpbaa

Member
After playing NFS Shit for since it came out, the Forza 3 demo looks and plays mindblowing :lol Wish I still had GT5 Prologue so I could have had a better game to compare it to. Anyway, will be putting some heavy time into this game next month for sure.
 
Spaceman Spiff said:
I won't be able to play the demo for another day or two, so I'm really looking forward to hearing your updated impressions. Hopefully, something is amiss since I'd been reading impressions like these from the AFX Challenge:



There's more in this thread:

Granted, these impressions are a few months old now, but I hope they haven't toned things down in a concession to accessibility. I suspect that's not the case, and that hopefully, like you said, you merely missed something in the TCS. Perhaps using a wheel as opposed to a controller has some impact as well.
I give you something to read a little later tonight. Hopefully I won't jump to any more conclusions. :p

Cool link too. These guys should know what's up, you'd think. Reading it now.
 

acm2000

Member
cjelly said:
Maybe 1.06 was your only clean lap.

nope, was clean, had no (!) next to it :( and it still doesnt explain the 1:01 time disappearing, as that was on the leaderboard itself, my friend even looked at it... the 1:00 wasnt, i got that chasing a ghost lap, but it never saved :(
 
BCD2 said:
TThe phenomenon I was talking about you can kind of see later in your video, although you never go fully through with it. 1:06 and 1:21. If you're on a very slight roll, going dead straight with little or no steering input, and give it full throttle, the car won't lose traction at all. Steering input will make the tires spin wildly, but they won't without that input.
As I said before, there's obviously something wrong when you're already moving and you can't light up the tyres... the vid was really just about the stop / go wheelspin issue. As best I could tell (it varies a lot based on if you're flat / uphill / downhill), it seemed to be about 15mph before your car no longer wheelspun when you plant the throttle. When I started doing it I thought it was probably best I didn't continue as there were simply too many variables to go through. :)

On the bright side though, it WAS different for each car. The mini will only wheelspin to about half way up first gear (I can't remember the exact speed) and it will only wheelspin from rolling at around 5mph. Could do with tweaking though obviously.
 

KHarvey16

Member
I was doing some laps a little while ago and the leaderboards disappeared. I don't think it was connectivity issues since everything else was working fine in Live, and my computer was still connected too, so I wonder if your problems with your time are because the boards were down momentarily.
 

JRW

Member
evanswolves said:
I had something like this, it only happened when someone on my friends list signed in, i turned notifications off and it seems to have stopped now

I just noticed this as well. Definately something they'll need to patch for full retail.
 

Slayer-33

Liverpool-2
Seep said:
Hold the right stick up and move it left to right and you can view the inside of the cockpit as little or as much as you like.


I know bro I do it like that, they should just have tied some animation when looking over, that's the only thing I did not like (and have not liked since the beginning like I said) it's not a big deal.

Otherwise bring on FM 3, only a few more weeks! woot lol
 

Hawk SE

Member
eso76 said:
just finished my second race. First was with lancer, second with ferrari california.
Game looks A LOT better than direct feed captures lead me to believe, but...ok, cars do feel heavy and connected to the ground...but is this how they are supposed to feel ?
Forza 2 didn't feel quite right, cars would skid around the corners like crazy, even with racing tires, and i'm not sure that's accurate either but i'm full throttling out of corners with a rwd.
I am not sure what to think.

I mean, it still feels good, you really do feel the weight of your car, but..dunno


Yeah this game just FEELS different, not bad or good, just different
 

Iknos

Junior Member
I'm going to spend more time with the demo.

I have a list of:
-Love
-Like
-Dislike
-Hate

That I'm building. :)

My first impressions are obviously overwhelmingly positive.

My biggest concern was framerate drops and tearing because the tracks are so incredibly detailed I thought it would have sacrificed framerate or vsync. I was really skeptical about this.
 

DJ_Lae

Member
Loving the demo. Loving the clutch, although out of habit I still find myself forgetting to take my finger off the right trigger and overrevving the engine. It makes the whole act of shifting more fun for me, which was part of the reason I never played racing games with manual transmission. I'll definitely play Forza 3 with all the assists off, although I might bump difficulty down to normal as hard is pretty damn hard when you're already fighting with the cars a bit.

However, the game does seem easier than Forza 2. The cars are much more forgiving, and even the R3 Porsche is surprisingly manageable with the assists off. The race-class vehicles in Forza 2 were absolute beasts as soon as you turned traction control off, and I seem to be able to get away with being harder on the gas and brake in the demo than I could in the previous game. It's not bad, it'll just take some getting used to.
 
Have the demo on pause. Very nice. I dig the attractive, clean, no-b.s. menus. Cars look great and the demo track looks lush. Tried the California first, now R8. I like the red outlined dials in the Audi's in-cockpit view...and they aren't cut off by the steering wheel like in the Cali.

Edit: much more satisfying after disabling most of the "auto-" nonsense. Auto-braking is obnoxious.
 

dejay

Banned
JRW said:
Whats with the random pausing while racing? Probably just a demo bug I'd hope. Its pretty severe at times.

I noticed some periods of slight pausing (about four or five times in a three second period) just before a friends notice popped up. Nobody else mentioned it so I assumed it was me. I didn't try resetting the console or going out and back into the demo, which usually fixes such things up.
 

Yoritomo

Member
DJ_Lae said:
However, the game does seem easier than Forza 2. The cars are much more forgiving, and even the R3 Porsche is surprisingly manageable with the assists off. The race-class vehicles in Forza 2 were absolute beasts as soon as you turned traction control off, and I seem to be able to get away with being harder on the gas and brake in the demo than I could in the previous game. It's not bad, it'll just take some getting used to.

If you're in the realm to get top 500 times or so all the cars get squirrelly
 
Ok, so here are my initial impressions, after a few hours of play. All impressions using 'Extreme' settings, and then when I got tired of the clutch (on my MS wheel I have to use the A button for clutch, which although it's nice to be able to, isn't a whole lot of fun), CUSTOM settings with the same as Extreme but with the clutch off, unless specified otherwise.

Track: it's a nice track, but when when raced competitively there are no good/safe overtaking spots, which is a shame - it's basically worse than Monaco, in that respect. Hopefully they have a variant that does have one or two safe spots for overtaking, or else this will become mostly a Time Trial track.

AI: drivers behave decently most of the time. They suck at some corners though, and still aren't really great at FWD cars (I could overtake all of them in the first slow corner, and they are really slow through the next two following it also. They still rather easily crash into you, giving you the feeling that the rewind feature was very necessary to keep the game enjoyable. Initially I had my kid on my lap and when I was driving slow and the AI was coming to lap me, the first car braked but still clipped me, the next car rammed me, and all the others piled into that one.

Graphics: mostly quite good. Obviously, Photo mode shots were photomode, but at its best the game and the car models still looks really good. At its best can in this case be very clearly specified - cars that have a metallic surface and are reflecting either the environment or light look great. As soon as they go into the shadow however, the shaders are a big letdown. Non-metallic paints look like a very ugly kind of plastic (and not that awesome in the sun). On this track you drive mostly in the sun though, so it looks pretty good in general. The hood view shows very good reflections, but is sometimes amazingly low-poly. HDR implementation is somewhat limited (maybe the 10bit precision mode?), but mostly sufficient. Replays have motion blur added mostly and seem to be 30fps like the other game, not that many differences otherwise.

The cockpit view is great and I prefer it, but for some reason the framerate doesn't feel the same. It's as if the whole game runs at half the regular speed internally or something like that. It's a strange experience, but I started driving with in-cockpit view for maybe an hour, and then went to hood view with a feeling that the framerate just didn't feel right. Since I think gamesmaster measured the cockpit view already to be 60fps according to his tools, it may need a special look by a few of our specialists to determine what's really going on.

Handling: this is still clearly Forza, but the problem with the rear of the car breaking out for no good reason is gone. Elevations still seem slightly off though, and in place of the binary switch between grip/no-grip models, we now get a very grippy model altogether.

This has advantages and disadvantages. You can't spin out a car anymore at all, basically, and to drift a car you have to be pretty aggressive in a very powerful car. When you come over a hill and you are almost or even fully airborn, the brakes work much stronger and sooner than I would expect them to and there is little instability. All in all the grip feels much like Standard mode in a certain other game in these respects. This is great for most people and will make the game much more accessible, but not as hot for some others.

Sideways grip is still pretty realistic though, maybe even improved a little from Forza 2. Also, the wheel lock still happens at 50% when ABS is off - even if you can change this to 75% in the settings (haven't tried that yet), it's still a bit weird, and I'm surprised this wasn't changed - even the Prius in low-speed mode isn't that aggressive. I also think there's a small bug in the demo as when I started setting the difficulty to CUSTOM, I experimented with ABS on, and felt no difference. What I could test with the clutch (taking into account I only had the digital A button on the wheel) made it seem pretty realistic, in that you can shift fast in the higher gears, but from first to second you win time by easing off the throttle while shifting (rev-matching).

At the highest difficulty, tires heat up nicely and realistically, and this affects the handling as expected. However, when you start driving the tires feel pre-heated (which may be right, it seemed as if they started at 50C) - they're definitely not as slippery as you'd expect cold tires to be. In reality that would vary of course between the different types of cars you can select here, but I can't feel a difference in that respect even between the Mini and the Porsche. In a sense, it feels like some cars (Mini and Evo X for instance) get less grip in the second lap, but what you're really seeing is understeer caused by the front tires heating up slightly faster and getting more traction. Which brings me to note that the telemetry is still excellent, and probably even more so than last time.

It sounds like I have a lot of complaints, but actually these are my only complaints, and for the most part the different types of cars feel right, and the handling is pretty good and enjoyable. I think most people will like it. Especially a FWD car like the Mini drives quite nicely. Bit more PGR4 than it used to be, but not necessarily in a bad way.

Controls: all cars seem to have the exact same amount of power-steering, or lack thereof, when using the force feedback wheel. You really have to work to get the thing to turn. This is definitely an area where there is a lot of room for improvement. However, the basic force feedback model that is there is still pretty good compared to a lot of other racing games.

Damage: it mostly works, in that you don't want damage to happen. It affects your handling in predicatable ways, and what it affects feels pretty nice - for instance if your wheels won't steer quite the way they should, the wheel pulls to the left in a satisfying manner. I don't think I'm going to like it much in multiplayer though (small bits of damage affecting your performance basically mean you're out of the race straight away), but we'll see. Other than that it mostly makes your car look really, really ugly - for next time, I'd recommend leaving a few patches inbetween the damaged bits that still reflect light/environment when applicable - that would look much better I think.

I'm slightly disappointed that the game isn't more realistic at the higher difficulty levels, but overall this seems to be shaping up a pretty good game. I can't make a good final judgment until I've driven some racing tracks and some more cars - right now the basics for FR, RR, FF and AWD for instance seem pretty decent, but I'm suspecting that personality of the individual cars is missing a little, which is something I won't be fully able to judge until I've been able to compare a few similar cars using the same drivetrain. And I can't fully compare the handling of the game until I'm able to compare it to tracks I know from other games and/or real life (ok, the latter is only the Nurburgring, though watching races on TV also counts for a little there ;) )
 

Zaphod

Member
I'll be trying the demo soon. With all the talk of extra grip I wonder if the cars have racing tires on. I always kind of liked fighting the cars in forza 2 so I hope the game is not too easy.
 

Echoes

Member
Loving the demo. The scenery is absolutely wonderful. Feels like watching a BBC documentary. Seriously, this is leagues better than FM2.

Can't wait for the full game.
 

GuessWho

Member
fuck the gameplay is simply amazing in this one. The cars feel like they have some weight, and the cockpit view is the best out there available. Good job turn 10!
btw why is it called turn 10? what does the 10 signify?
 

Yoritomo

Member
GuessWho said:
fuck the gameplay is simply amazing in this one. The cars feel like they have some weight, and the cockpit view is the best out there available. Good job turn 10!
btw why is it called turn 10? what does the 10 signify?

10 is a number. It's common amongst our culture because most of us have 10 digits on our hands.
 

kinggroin

Banned
GuessWho said:
fuck the gameplay is simply amazing in this one. The cars feel like they have some weight, and the cockpit view is the best out there available. Good job turn 10!
btw why is it called turn 10? what does the 10 signify?

Judging by the comparison thread, I'd say the developer title is a nod to the age of this game's target audience


:p
 

Kolgar

Member
Against.

It's been a long road to the demo, and now that it's here, I guess I can move along.

The graphics look flat and totally inorganic and the cars hug the road pretty damn tight, despite the fact that they sometimes appear like they're somehow pasted into the environment or floating just a bit above the road.

The lighting is a real downer because it isn't really there. Dust kicked up in a shadowed area just doesn't look like it should. The car right next to me isn't reflected in my paint, and far-off trees that are "reflected" look like blocky bitmaps.

My first reaction upon seeing the first big car model appear on screen at the start of the demo was, "What the fuck? Who put this cartoon car in my Forza?" The colors and lighting just made that poor car look like it was hand-drawn or cell shaded or something.

Don't waste your time coming at me with knives over this post, for I'm out as soon as I finish typing. After all these months of anticipation, I felt I'd earned the right to post my impressions.

Have fun and enjoy, boys.
 
BuckRobotron said:
My only half-serious Mini time trial ends..."You are in the top 7%"...nice...

~4,000th out of 59,604 players...bah. :lol
I usually aim for top 10% these days. I was probably top 1% at games when I was a kid... but I'm old now. :(
 
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