Turn 10 Studios' Dan Greenawalt has had a rough few weeks. While his company successfully survived the launch of Forza Motorsport 5, the first next-gen racing game for the Xbox One, the reception for that game was less than stellar. And since that time, Greenawalt and his fellow team members have been doing a fair amount of damage control.
While Forza 5 itself is a solid game, and has been receiving mostly favorable review scores from critics, the backlash surrounding the title stems from its use of heavy use of microtransactions. In Forza 5, microtransactions can be used to do anything from earn XP faster to purchase better cars earlier.
Although the system isn't terribly offensive on its own, players of Forza 5 have apparently felt that the game pushes them towards using those microtransactions, and feels more "grind-y" than past iterations. That doesn't mean the game will stay that way, though; in fact, as Greenawalt tells Eurogamer, the Turn 10 team is hoping to win fans back through a series of updates and improvements.
"My biggest hope is that we can win back the fan's trust - we didn't do this for any other reason besides getting people excited about cars and games, and whenever we work against that purpose we take that very seriously, because it's not our intention, and we're going to make changes as needed."
And, as we have just learned, the first of those updates will hit some time this month, although no official date has been announced. This latest update will lower the price for on-disc (read: non-DLC) cars and will add two new game modes: Drag Racing and Tag.
Drag Racing, as you might expect, lets players compete in straightaway races with either one opponent or up to eight friends. Forza 4 had a similar mode, and it looks like Turn 10 is bringing it back for Forza 5.
Tag comes in three different variations, all centered on the classic children's game. Those three options are:
- One player is "it" and must avoid all other players.
- One player is "it" but tagging another player makes them "it" as well. The mode goes on until one player is left "not it."
- The "it" status passes once tagged, and the winner is the player who was tagged the least amount of times.
As far as car prices, Turn 10 plans to lower the price of cars by about 45% across the board. That way, those gamers who want to earn new vehicles the old-fashioned way will see results much sooner. Turn 10 has already lowered many of the in-game car prices, but they are apparently not done tweaking.
In some regards, Greenawalt says that Forza 4 is to blame for 5's shortcomings, as Turn 10 built a lot of the Xbox One iteration's features based on response to its predecessor. Similarly, the developer looked at how gamers like to play their own titles and tried to give them advantages in return for a small fee. Unfortunately, the idea didn't quite meet the execution.
Turn 10 clearly wants to turn things around with Forza 5 — they have acknowledged the game's faults and want to improve the base product for fans. And lucky for them Forza 5 is a launch title, meaning there will be a growing fan base of new Xbox One owners who will come in unaware of the game's prior problems.
Do you think this is a good step in the right direction for Forza 5? What are your chief complaints with the game, if any?
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