Unfulfilled Expectations

The date is October 4th, 2023. I was getting ready to stay up all night, as I had preordered Forza Motorsport 8 earlier that week and wanted to play it when it released at midnight. Since I bought the premium upgrade, I got to play it 5 days earlier than anyone who hadn’t. I sat at my desk, watching the timer go down. All night, I tried so many different methods to pass the time. Playing other games, watching YouTube, scrolling social media, but nothing curbed my excitement. It had been 6 years since the last Motorsport game, and everyone was excited for the reboot, which was “built from the ground up,” including new tracks, cars, and even a new physics engine. It felt like weeks, even though it was only around 7 hours after I got home from school that it would release.

I stared at the timer in anticipation. 5 hours left. 4 hours. 3. With around 2 hours left to go, I started to play the game’s sister, Forza Horizon 5. I was just trying to grind out the whole Festival Playlist, as cars were all I could think about. I got it done with about an hour and a half left on the timer. I started watching the trailer for the game over and over, each time looking for new details I had missed the previous times. Which cars were in the background? Which race track is this corner from? How has the audio system changed from the last game? One hour left.

As the timer went from counting hours to seconds, my excitement rose even higher. I started regretting not buying the game with a New Zealand gift card, as that way I would have gotten to play it almost a full day early. Too late for that now. 50 Minutes left. I started reading the product page for the DLC that I had gotten with my preorder. I didn’t know or like half of the cars there, I just knew that this game would be so good that I would want to collect every single car in it. 40 minutes. All of my friends were asleep at this point, so I started scrolling through all of the single player games I owned. Even some of my favorite games weren’t able to take my mind off of the timer. Skyrim, Fallout 3, Celeste, Minecraft, Trackmania; nothing was enough. Only 30 minutes left now.

At this point I realized how tired I was. It was, after all, nearly 2 hours after I was normally asleep. But it was too late to nap now. 30 minutes of sleep would just make me more tired, if I could even fall asleep in the first place. It was like Christmas when I was younger: the more excited I got, the longer it took for it to be tomorrow. With 20 minutes left, I could barely keep my eyes open. But I had to stay up. I watched the timer keep ticking down, each second feeling like hours. 10 minutes left. 5. 4. 3. 2. As the timer ticked over to a big display showing 59 seconds, I grabbed my controller and just stared at my monitor. I probably blinked twice during that whole minute.

As the timer finally reached 0, I clicked the play button. I had preinstalled the game, so all I had to do was load in. I was greeted with the sight and sound of the Microsoft and Turn 10 logos. Finally, I saw what I had been waiting months for: the title screen. Press A to start. I followed the instructions, and was brought to the main menu. I found the career option, watched the opening cutscene, and was thrown into the tutorial. Straight away, I could tell it was off. For a game that was “built from the ground up,” it sure did feel a lot like the previous game…

I finished the tutorial and loaded into the main menu again, where I could finally change my settings. I went with the same ones I always use in Forza games. All assists off except ABS, and simulation steering. I started playing the first race in the career, driving a 90s Ford Falcon. Going into the first corner, I got some oversteer, which is natural considering it’s a heavy rear wheel drive car with a lot of power. As I countersteered, however, I spun out in the other direction, much more violently than what should have happened. This was a bug that’s been in the Forza Motorsport engine since the first few games. The issue with this, however, is that they claimed the game’s engine was “built from the ground up.” This was the first time I realized that the entire marketing campaign for this game was built on lies. I kept playing the game, experiencing many more bugs and glitches. In the coming weeks, people online started to discover similar issues in the game, and over time the game drastically dropped in player count.

“Mazda RX-7 GTO – 1994 – Le Mans 24 Hours race” by PSParrot is licensed under CC BY 2.0.