The rebooted Forza Motorsport has been a very long time coming. After putting out a new entry every other year since 2005, Turn 10 Studios took an extended break to reinvent Xbox’s first-party sim racer following FM7's release way back in 2017. The next chapter was slated for a spring 2023 launch as of last summer, before the word “spring” was mysteriously removed from the ETA back in January. At last, we have a release date: Forza Motorsport will land on Xbox Series consoles and PC on October 10.
This marks Forza Motorsport’s first outing on the Xbox Series hardware since the platform was released in 2020. With it will come 500 cars and 20 environments, dynamic weather and time-of-day change for every track, support for raytraced reflections in-game, an overhauled physics model, a renewed focus on car damage, and a “car building-focused” single-player campaign. One hundred of those vehicles and five locales are said to be new to the Motorsport franchise. Xbox served up a new trailer to coincide with the news as part of its upcoming games showcase on Sunday.
The footage doesn’t reveal much, outside of the car upgrading interface and some cosmetic parts for the Corvette E-Ray. The Cadillac V-Series.R that just took third and fourth at last weekend’s 24 Hours of Le Mans will accompany the hybrid Vette on an all-GM cover. We also get to see an in-game snippet of a fully animated pit stop play out in real time, a first for the franchise.
Tuesday we’ll get our first look at the Builder’s Cup career during June’s Forza Monthly showcase at 2 p.m. Eastern on Twitch. It’s one of the big question marks surrounding the eighth Motorsport installment.
Turn 10 hasn’t been shy to highlight the work it’s put into bringing its series to the latest generation, touting how the fundamentals have been “built from the ground up” to take advantage of Xbox Series silicon. At one point, Microsoft seemed to be toying with the idea of releasing the game on Xbox One as well, but thankfully dropped that plan to make the experience on consoles currently on the market as strong as possible.
Forza Motorsport is a series that really needs to feel fresh again after FM7 left things off on a dull note. Here’s hoping for a return to form in four months’ time.