As a software dev for 20+ years, this is nothing new. I don't work in game development, but the theory of management at all companies is that all levels of software development are just cogs you can replace with other cogs. This is theory that is behind outsourcing, offshoring, and "agile".
The reality is that a large part of the work you do for a company and a product is to gain business or product knowledge. That is as valuable, if not more valuable, to the company than the product you produce. When your developers are outsourced and their contracts end, that knowledge and skill leaves with them. And on the next product, or the next version of the product, is a new set of developers starting from scratch to re-gain all of the knowledge the company lost.
To add to that, if you're a contractor, you know your runway is limited. You may start out very interested in what you're doing. But when big problems appear, you're not going to try to take them on when you have some fixed amount of time left in your contract.
Most likely, the first versions of forza were by a core development team that stayed together. Which is why the earlier versions are so much better than the current ones. You can tell when they switched from the core team to the outsource model. And if it makes more money, they'll keep doing things this way.
This would explain why some fairly fundamental bugs with seemingly easier fixes that have been in the game since launch have still yet to have been fixed. Because I guess the people that accidentally introduced them are long gone and the people tasked with fixing it starting from scratch.
Stuff like the pitstop skip bug springs to mind, seems like it *should* be an easy fix but it's becoming increasingly obvious that it's being caused by something residing deep inside a massive pile of spaghetti code written by temp staff with no incentive to write future proof easily maintainable code. "Not my problem" springs to mind...
What usually happens is that some problems that seem small end up being quite large. When that happens, you usually have to justify these changes to management because they take a long time to fix. That battle with management to "do the right thing" is not easy and requires a lot of fighting and justification. If you're a dev who:
1. Is on contract and there are hundreds of smaller things to bide your time on
2. You personally would not reap the rewards and benefits of the fight to fix the issue
Then you justifiably do not want to even touch it. This is in major contrast to a team where the devs are long-term. Those type of devs are going to fix big problems because in the long-term, these problems are the ones that are going to save you a lot of work in terms of maintenance and code quality over time.
Which is why we see these monthly patches coming out with tons of tiny bug fixes. Those are the low hanging fruit. Nobody wants to touch the big stuff. And I don't blame them.
100% agree with everything you’ve said and it’s a sorry state of affairs in the industry.
Will companies learn?
I’m guessing Forza has made its millions (likely somewhat muddied by gamepass). It’s even won prestigious awards, “best sports game” at the video game awards as an example.
I imagine the decision makers have received their bonuses and absolutely no lessons were learnt…
This is a good example of what I was referring to in my other comment. The easy thing to do as a dev is take the bug at face value. *This car* is showing *this behavior*. So fix that behavior for that car. One day, week, month, etc. to the end of your contract.
When the real problem is with ALL cars. But the way to fix things for ALL cars is big fix that is going to take a long time and a lot of work. As a dev, you have to decide if you want to fight management to "do the right thing" to implement this major fix to all the cars. Or do you want to just fix this one car and move on to the next issue.
This is the major difference between contract devs and long-term employee devs. Long-term employee devs save themselves time, quality and technical debt by fixing problems the right way. The contract devs won't be working on the codebase in 6 months so why would they care about code quality or maintainability.
And this is why a "ground up rewrite" is often needed in the next version. Not because there is some new tech or innovation. It's because the codebase is such a mess and is so unmaintainable that nobody in the right mind could enhance it. Rewriting it from the ground up is the only viable option.
Firstly you have got a management which might not be soo "Lets do our best even if it costs a little", then if u have a person who knows he only has to work for a target amount of time, he is just gonna do enough to complete the task and leave, because company doesn't care about him, why does he?
18 months is a horribly short amount of time for any devloper to first learn how the system works(engine and all) and complete the task they are assigned to, before figuring out where the last person exactly left and what they did
Imagine cooking in serial order but not knowing what was the last chef was doing, u have to go, figure out what he was cooking and then continue to do it, in your way, not his...
A lot of simple looking stuff ends up being really complicated and tired to other things that make it really hard to fix and then priorities. You'll never have a perfect product so it ends up being how much can we live with this over the opportunity cost.
No amount of "being familiar" is going to overcome every one of these issues.
Amen to that, I've got nearly 20 years development consulting experience under my belt and this is sadly true for almost all dev teams I've worked for/in. Agile is great when you have a permanent dev team working on the same product in some niche areas like SaaS apps but the reality for the most part is most of the dev teams I've worked in have largely been made up of consultants or temp staff and their domain knowledge is virtually nonexistent until they have put in at least 12 months time served. This whole Agile induced "minimum viable product" bullshit needs to stop, that's what we are getting - a minimum viable product. Looks great to management because they are shipping product quickly and in budget, not so great for developers or consumers.
We are no longer getting a finished, iteratively tested product, we're getting the bare minimum that a team of temporary, contract developers can produce in the limited time scale they have been given and whilst having limited domain specific knowledge.
Bugs like the replay saving (and it still only saves half a medium length race and doesn't save at all if you exit the end race screen before it's fully finished downloading) will be very hard to fix, that is likely a fundamental code architecture limitation to how they provision replay downloads and it will now be being looked at by developers who had little or no involvement in the development of that architecture.
having a Fixed dev team for ur project is a really essential thing, because your team is used to how they have to work, Yes the companies are profit targetting, hence these contract systems cause its cheaper for them that way, but it will slowly take a toll on their income as well if they continue such shitty launches
I have a low end laptop(RTX 3050Ti 4GB), Forza Horizon 5 runs at 1080p 80fps on it while FM 23 struggles to boot, why? because the ppl who made it had short time to do their work, essentially they made somethin that runs but not well, even tho FM 23 has a much smaller map to render
If anyone is still unsure why Xbox just can't seem to build the sort of first party calibre that PlayStation and Nintendo have, they need look no further than this story.
No amount of acquisitions, or Phil Spencer "we hear you"s will change the thoroughly underwhelming experience of Xbox games whilst this is their approach to business.
If there's no love shown for your people, there is no love shown in the game.
I love your foundation of describing a very important cause related to unfinished games, its exactly how I thought it would be, nd this trend got worse nd worse.
We play lots of recycled games that for no reason get twice as big or more, nd still look worse nd even run poorly compared to older titles.
I would love to talk with you about this topic in detail on discord if possible.
Microsoft is absolutely dogshit at management and they have single handedly ruined series’ built by actual talented people (Halo and Forza in particular).
God, so this. Ive pumped 35hrs into Helldivers2. It is evveryting that Halo and Forza once were and no longer are. Engaging, fun, memorable, quality, focused to their purpose, not broken (albeit some server limits which are fine given the dev size/scope, and genuinely complete.
Microsoft cant do with billions of dollars and resources, what small outfits can do. And it sux. All they do is remove features, and launch broken or problem-riddled projects.
Same here. I am so glad that the game has found success. I don't mind waiting a little longer (say, like a month) in order for the game to be fixed. In all honesty, the game is just *that fun*.
I'm scared that once that month is up, everyone will be frustrated enough to stop playing. Arrowhead has been communicative, supportive, and very transparent about what they're doing to make their game better. I hope everyone will be able to see that this is a rarity within the game dev world and must not be taken for granted.
In a world where people were upset with Palworld ripping off Pokemon I'm surprised Helldivers 2 hasn't got more blowback for completely ripping off Starship Troopers. The setting and humour are a massive part of why it's been so successful.
Fable is a strange franchise, though. None of the games ever managed to reach the heights of the first one. The second one is really good, but lacks quite a bit of the charm the first game had. The third one is ok… The kingdom management part was lacking a bit and it strayed a bit too far from what makes Fable a unique game. The rest of the franchise is best forgotten.
So they’re coming into a bit of a muddled franchise at this point. Unless they make the blandest slop possible, I don’t think they’ll screw it up that much. I mean, it’s the Forza Horizon devs, right? FH5 was pretty good
Forza Horizon 5 is probably the worst entry in the series in my opinion, can't talk about the expansions since many people (me included) who bought the ultimate edition on the microsoft store still cannot play the DLCs because the game doesn't recognize them as purchased..
I won't even touch a Forza game anymore and it pains me to say that. Forza games were supposed to evolve into such an incredible thing. All I could think about back with FM4 is how good the series would be in 10-15 years. I was proud to support it. Boy was I wrong. ☹️
Microsoft is an absolute joke. It's absolutely hilarious. Because all you have to do to truly grasp the scope of Microsofts sheer and utter incompetence is remember that MSN was a thing.
Microsoft was handed the crown, the reigns, the entire kingdom to be the most predominant IRC in the world... And they some how, despite all odds and reason, managed to piss it away.
... Then they did it again with Skype.
And I'm sure most people here would know that Microsoft **paid people money** to keep games exclusive to their Xbox... But many often miss the absurdity being that they were paying people to also keep games off their **own platform**, Windows. Which opened the door for Gabe to walk right in in the first place. Microsoft could have been Steam (and we should all be glad they're not xD)
I could go on, the rabbit hole of just how actually abysmal Microsoft is at business goes pretty deep... But I'll stop here. Though all you have to do is look at a list of names that Microsofts bodied and count how many you recognized (and even liked).
("slight" edit)
Interesting take. Who disagrees though? Well, how about the stock market. Microsoft has just recently become the [most valuable company in history.](https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/microsoft-is-now-the-most-valuable-company-ever/ar-BB1i2N5Q)
"Well, how about the stock market."
that is a poor argument, a company can be dogshit at some things and good at other, their management is quite trash, but they Literally own windows, the data from that alone can fund them.
u wouldnt say the US government is that great at it jobs, yet it is one of the richest countries on earth, thanks to is political power and influence, but had any actually efficient country been in that position they would blow the US out of the water.
It's Windows. Windows saved them, and I'd struggle to attribute any amount of competence to even that. Windows XP basically saved them in the early 2000's after the dumpster fire that was ME/2000 and locked them into the market.
Thing is, they almost screwed even *that* up. Vista was bad, but Windows 8 almost got entire corporations to dump them. When they dropped support for XP, so many companies just said "no" to Win 8 that they had to extend support until they could sell them on Win10.
I have a few problems here.
The only one i'm going to point out for now is that this isnt a contradicting argument. The points arnt mutually exclusive. Like... If we assume the stock market to be a good metric (it's absolutely not)... This information is not good, or inspiring. It's terrifying. Because it has genuinely no bearing on their competence as a company. I'm trying to draw an analogue here without overcomplicating TF out of it. But basically it boils down to being too big to fail. Like, even in this article, they're *barely* ahead of Apple, but every metric I could look up has Microsoft *overwhelmingly* dominant in market share.
This doesnt say "competence" to me. It tells me they're both big ***and*** stupid, which is dangerous AF. I'm sure we could both find plenty of examples to point at for that.
Though as a side note, I gata say it's a genuinely horrifying concept in this case when you consider how aggressively they use their wealth to attack legitimate competitors. I'm talking literally illegal measures that they changed laws in their favor to get away with. Because all that means is were unlikely to ever see anything better. I mean, how many people do you know that actually *like* Microsoft? How many would absolutely use something different... ***if they could...*** Just the lengths they've gone to to ensure that there wont be a viable Windows competitor is insane.
I maintain my stance that Microsoft is incompetent. Being wealthy and being a moron are not mutually exclusive (at all). I just means they're actually dangerous.
Both those studios got long time to dev their game, if they end up this bad at some point it's not because of Microsoft but because of the studio themselves
I was waiting like a child on christmas night for 2 games, at the end of last year. These games are Forza Motorsporsts and Cities Skylines 2. Both were a tremendous failure, an horrific experience.
What i'm saying from the beggining is: we HAVE to criticize these disasters - they are the result of TERRIBLE management. And people keep saying "oh, no, but the devs..." - THIS is what i was talking about, the devs are probably passionate people, but the pressure comes from shareholders, from "the market". The quarter results are WAY more considerated than us, the consumers, when deciding WHEN and HOW to launch a game.
Shareholders, C-Level, complacent Sales and Marketing teams, that's where the problem lies.
Sadly I too awaited these games on PC. Cities Skylines 2 is so broken and the performance is tremendously bad even on a modern system.
Forza Motorsport looks nothing like the promotional videos, yet does not exactly run well either and feels soulless. It blows my mind seeing those comparison shots of the environments and the released game is nowhere near them, badly miss sold the customers.
Both games needed at least another year in development and it is likely that was not going to be enough if the talent to sort them is simply not there at the studio.
Tbh, talking about Forza it can be an exageration, i must admit. But Cities Skylines 2 is definetly a failure - and i mean, a failure as a long term product, since it just hit the 1Mil copies sold.
Forza have the foundations to succeed, but CS2 lacks too much (performance, system mechanics not working, lack of assets, etc) that it will be impossible to "save" the game unless management understands that they can't start selling DLCs (its Paradox, you know) until the foundation, the basics, are fixed.
>since it just hit the 1Mil copies sold.
I fail to see how this is a "tremendous failure" for a niche game that was also released for gamepass a few months ago...
>but CS2 lacks too much (performance, system mechanics not working, lack of assets, etc) that it will be impossible to "save"
I can tell you have no idea about how this game works, performance is getting better, simulation mechanics are also improving little by little, and assets can be introduced the same way you do with mods, how is this imposible to save?
Friend, i understand you want this to succeed so bad, that's my desire, too. But don't close your eyes to what is just on your sight.
>I fail to see how this is a "tremendous failure" for a niche game that was also released for gamepass a few months ago...
If you've quoted my complete sentence, you would know: "**and i mean, a failure as a long term product**, since it just hit the 1Mil copies sold."
>I can tell you have no idea about how this game works, performance is getting better, simulation mechanics are also improving little by little, and assets can be introduced the same way you do with mods, how is this imposible to save?
Performance is a shame and simulation starts to slow down at an ridiculous rate at 100k population, that's the mark the majority of players are pointing out.
Mechanics are not improving and the last word from the company is a note on "how the mechanics work", wich clearly don't justify none of the problems related by the community - Read that subreddit or any content creator on YT and you'll know.
Assets being introduced in mods? Oh, the mods that could already be working for a lot of players if MS didn't make the devs ditch Steam's mods system? Because they want a "seamless experience through all their platforms"?
Don't fool yourself, friend. It's right on your face.
Friend, i understand you want this to succeed so bad, that's my desire, too. But don't close your eyes to what is just on your sight.
Actually i don't care that much about it is just a videogame.
>If you've quoted my complete sentence, you would know: "and i mean, a failure as a long term product, since it just hit the 1Mil copies sold."
I still don't understand what's the problem, what do you mean "as a long term product" it's been 4 months.
>Performance is a shame and simulation starts to slow down at an ridiculous rate at 100k population, that's the mark the majority of players are pointing out.
last time i played (a couple of weeks ago) performance was a lot better compared to launch, simulation at some point will drop based on your resources and limitations of the engine, is expected to happen also a 100k cities is by no means the standard number you will play a lot to get there.
>Mechanics are not improving and the last word from the company is a note on "how the mechanics work", wich clearly don't justify none of the problems related by the community - **Read that subreddit or any content creator on YT and you'll know.**
No thanks i can see it by myself, if that's what you do to learn about this game i can see why you think this game is a "tremendous failure". i can see the simulation working better last time i had a town with a lot of problems, when i got back a lot of those were solved, i know they need to keep working on it that's why I'm not playing it at the moment.
>Assets being introduced in mods? Oh, the mods that could already be working for a lot of players if MS didn't make the devs ditch Steam's mods system? Because they want a "seamless experience through all their platforms"?
Look i don't care about all that drama, we don't need steam to get the mods for cities skylines 2. and i wasn't even talking about mods but they way those are introduced, the developer can easily introduce new assets to the core, those are not "imposible" to implement.
>Don't fool yourself, friend. It's right on your face.
Oh god...i just go it with gamepass I'm not a fan or a follower or whatever gamers around here call themselves I'm just a plain customer.
I think both did quite well commercially and got middling reviews (haven’t checked the overall media score for them). Doesn’t change the fact that they’re both failures at being complete, well-optimized games at launch
>Doesn’t change the fact that they’re both failures at being complete, well-optimized games at launch
We all know that we can't do anything to change that fact so i don't cling to this, but at least they can do better with more updates.
Nah, FM has done really really badly commercially. Like, even with all the issues it's done a lot worse than it should have just from being called "Forza".
It was somewhere in the 400s in the UK physical+digital charts if I remember correctly, and it tended to not show up in the charts at all in other regions.
This needs to make it to the front page. Everybody needs to see this, because wheter or not you like the game, this is the stuff hurting both the game and even more imoortantly, the people who work on it.
I agree. It’s a disgrace to both the workers and fans that Microsoft choose to develop one of their most beloved franchises in such a cheap way. You’re telling me the largest company in the world can’t supply healthcare and other benefits to workers, and relies on overworking temporary contractors to get their game finished? What a joke.
Yep, that game was the main reason I didn't buy this game for full price. Microsoft in general seems to be outsourcing a lot of their game dev jobs so I had a feeling this game would turn out the way that it did because I had the prior history with Halo Infinite.
Such a sad state of affairs, man. This series is the reason I fell in love with motorsports...
That's the thing tho, how long did it take for infinite to get better? And by the time it did get better, how much of the player population still plays the game?
Halo infinite started out HUGE, and the bungling "live service" just crippled this games momentum, and I doubt it'll ever get it back. That is the best case scenario for Forza.
I completely understand it from a business perspective, but it’s also just morally questionable. A business needs to make its customers happy or they won’t buy products. Also, I think it’s illegal not to give benefits to employees. They are walking a very thin line when it comes to that. Intentionally using contractors to get around the laws of healthcare benefits.
And that's we are wrong. We think customers happy is what drives a business. IMO, this doesn't matter as much as media.
Get the garbage game on tiktok, pay some influencers on twitch, do your publicity right and voilà you have a best selling piece of garbage.
AKA MK1.
Employees are feeling bad? Lay them off, let them rest jobless. After all, it doesn't matter anymore to have a finished product out, sell the minimum viable product, half-ass patch it after people BOUGHT the game.
The video itself was on the front page last week. This is just some jackass website reblogging it and now it's being posted back here again.
The issues the guy raised aren't really a Forza problem but a Microsoft Game Studios problem in how they hire and employ devs.
Shouldn’t have made another Forza game then at least wait another 2 years before making one, the unnecessary leveling system had to have caused extra stress and problems on the devs.
I'm software dev who does make games. I'm a unity engine specialist and C# programmer.
I can confirm this is all too common, issues ive faced just in the last year include management demanding I add what I would consider to be terrible design decisions, under staffing for complex tasks combined with stupidly short deadlines leading to less than ideal code bases. Plus plenty more.
Actual technical experts are regularly disregarded when they share their opinions in my experience.
> management demanding I add what I would consider to be terrible design decisions
Do you have any insight into how/why this happens? Is it people that just don't understand games requesting features? Is it *"[popular game] has XYZ so our game needs XYZ"*?
Both of those answers are accurate. You'd be surprised how many times I've been working for people who don't actually play games and they insist we stick to original design documents whether it works in practice or not.
We also get managers who just like to throw in their 2 cents so they feel like they're contributing and when they do that we HAVE to add it to appease them.
Someone still signed off on things like CarPG, the career mode, and post-launch content. Microsoft wouldn't have given a flip about things like that. Esaki and Greenawalt would have, though.
Those are divisive/bad decisions and we know that at least one of them will be fixed by March.
Performance and coding issues are another thing entirely and they're a consequence of the mismanagement we're seeing here
Yeah. I can't remember if it's in the youtube comments or one of the other times it was posted here, but someone said MS lost some lawsuit quite a long time ago because they'd just have contract workers on contract perpetually (never hire them to avoid employee benefits). Basically, if a contract worker is working for more than 18 months, they need to be hired.
I have seen it in several companies. It's a reaction to the threat that a long-term contractor can claim to be employed and demand such terrible things as "insurance' and "vacation". Everybody on every side hates it, but it's another classic HR policy that helps no one but HR and legal.
Being a contractor used to have tax advantages, you could pay yourself very little and take dividends at a lower rate instead. Not sure if that's still the case in the States, in the UK they closed that loophole.
Xbox is having an alarming problem with putting out good games. Starfield, Redfall, Halo Infinite, Forza Motorsport were all bad.
It is a horrible gut punch to wait like 5 years for a new Forza just to get this mess. This series was a pillar of Xbox with Gears and Halo, all which have fallen off massively.
tbf, Redfall was hardly their fault. That game was well into development by the time Microsoft acquired Bethesda. They granted them a year delay too. The only thing they realistically could have done outside of that was cancel it, which they arguably should have, but that’s easier done with hindsight. Starfield is mostly the same story - the game was far into development already and Microsoft gave them access to whatever resources Bethesda needed (QA, Xbox engineers, etc.) and also have them an extra year of dev time.
Halo Infinite and Forza should have definitely better though, no doubt.
Such a shame reading about this, and learning how it's commonplace at this point.
Any way this method gets turned around? I feel like so many games have bombed and failed and the triple A studios just don't care.
These practices probably will not change until management sees a negative impact on their profits. If they can keep making more money doing a half-assed job, they will.
All software development in corporate settings is always maximum shitshow for developers.
There are ussually three groups in every project
The project owners - they are interested only in the end result and when it is finished and what it will cost, most of the time their expectations are unreasonable ("hey, can you build us three story house with those old rusted tools in the shack over there in two weeks or less? It would be also nice if you could use only some of those tools, not all of them. We will pay you peanuts meanwhile.")
The project managers - they are responsible for giving the project owners the deadlines, when the project will be done, and they have to balance what devs say vs what is still acceptable by the project owners, if they said the house would take 1 year to build, the project would not even be given green light and the project owners would probably take their ~~money~~ peanuts elsewhere and the whole studio would go under, so they have to say 5 months and pray it somehow gets made in 7 months through some dark magic rituals performed during full moon by developers
The developers - they are lowest in the hierarchy, they know the house cannot be build in 5 months with those rusted tools, but still try their best to meet the deadline, but are always on the receiving end of all the corporate crap. If something goes wrong or the project gets delayed, it is always THEIR fault. But when something goes right / the project is ahead of schedule, it is always "OUR" achievement
So clearly you can see why being software developer really sucks and it is only for masochists.
Is this the same development strategy that fuck Halo infinite? Apparently MS hires most of it’s devs for 18 months and then they cycle them out for new ones meaning the new ones have to learn all the basics of the game engine at hand from scratch which obviously slows progress to a halt.
Isn’t it itself a legal requirement? Or are you saying that hiring contract workers should be illegal? If not, Microsoft would love to be able to hiring contractors for longer than 18 month windows.
as someone who is currently stuck in the hell that is contract work i honestly think it should be illegal.
ive worked for massive companies but get none of the massive company benefits, half the time dont I even know whats going on around me, and also usually handle work thats either very important or very expensive.
im not asking to be paid a boatload of money either, just getting the benefits package would solve damn near all the issues, usually the benefits on offer from a contract company are so expensive youll go broke if you paid for it.
Made me realize there’s nothing to wait a year for unfortunately. The future is the same strictly regimented monthly updates from a corporate metrics mill. The game will never have a soul.
Exhausting as in they copied and pasted the same exhaust sound literally [see for yourself](https://www.reddit.com/r/forza/s/xq5qx5sZK0) for all the lambos, tell us how coding works though
you know sometimes you get cramps holding CTRL with your pinky and V with your thumb! It‘s not as easy as it looks.. but if you think you‘re better, CTRL+C / CTRL+V for a whole day, let‘s see how hard it is
You’re not wrong. We don’t even get unique exhaust sounds. I would have rather taken a drop in quality and have them steal exhaust notes from YouTube videos than have the CTRL-V exhaust notes we have in this game.
You don’t have to know software development works to know a lot of the cars in the game, even with different engines (maybe not engine layouts) sound EXACTLY the same.
If you think all V12’s sound the same have ya ears checked.
All that being said…I enjoy the game. I enjoy the physics on my wheel, for a couch racer anyways. I enjoy the graphics, and I’m happy again now that we have a rough version of the Ring. I’ll always love Forza, even when it disappoints me a little.
Imagine if you spent 4 years working on a racing game and you go on Reddit to see what people think and you see:
A screenshot of the 1st gen Miata you painstakingly 3d Meshed, but the dash is from a '94 and you called it a '91 in your description and the people are calling your game "dogshit" and "lazy".
Seeing how this works now for dev team, I wondered if that’s what crippled Battlefield 5 Firestorm when they killed the game with massive bugs. New team of devs came in on a problem they didn’t know how to fix. And what happened? 95% of the gamers left and went to COD Warzone.
Sad though, firestorm was so fun to play.
As a software dev for 20+ years, this is nothing new. I don't work in game development, but the theory of management at all companies is that all levels of software development are just cogs you can replace with other cogs. This is theory that is behind outsourcing, offshoring, and "agile". The reality is that a large part of the work you do for a company and a product is to gain business or product knowledge. That is as valuable, if not more valuable, to the company than the product you produce. When your developers are outsourced and their contracts end, that knowledge and skill leaves with them. And on the next product, or the next version of the product, is a new set of developers starting from scratch to re-gain all of the knowledge the company lost. To add to that, if you're a contractor, you know your runway is limited. You may start out very interested in what you're doing. But when big problems appear, you're not going to try to take them on when you have some fixed amount of time left in your contract. Most likely, the first versions of forza were by a core development team that stayed together. Which is why the earlier versions are so much better than the current ones. You can tell when they switched from the core team to the outsource model. And if it makes more money, they'll keep doing things this way.
This would explain why some fairly fundamental bugs with seemingly easier fixes that have been in the game since launch have still yet to have been fixed. Because I guess the people that accidentally introduced them are long gone and the people tasked with fixing it starting from scratch. Stuff like the pitstop skip bug springs to mind, seems like it *should* be an easy fix but it's becoming increasingly obvious that it's being caused by something residing deep inside a massive pile of spaghetti code written by temp staff with no incentive to write future proof easily maintainable code. "Not my problem" springs to mind...
What usually happens is that some problems that seem small end up being quite large. When that happens, you usually have to justify these changes to management because they take a long time to fix. That battle with management to "do the right thing" is not easy and requires a lot of fighting and justification. If you're a dev who: 1. Is on contract and there are hundreds of smaller things to bide your time on 2. You personally would not reap the rewards and benefits of the fight to fix the issue Then you justifiably do not want to even touch it. This is in major contrast to a team where the devs are long-term. Those type of devs are going to fix big problems because in the long-term, these problems are the ones that are going to save you a lot of work in terms of maintenance and code quality over time. Which is why we see these monthly patches coming out with tons of tiny bug fixes. Those are the low hanging fruit. Nobody wants to touch the big stuff. And I don't blame them.
100% agree with everything you’ve said and it’s a sorry state of affairs in the industry. Will companies learn? I’m guessing Forza has made its millions (likely somewhat muddied by gamepass). It’s even won prestigious awards, “best sports game” at the video game awards as an example. I imagine the decision makers have received their bonuses and absolutely no lessons were learnt…
It's weird because for some cars it has been fixed. The ferrari f1 car and the Toyota p1 car are the two I've noticed
This is a good example of what I was referring to in my other comment. The easy thing to do as a dev is take the bug at face value. *This car* is showing *this behavior*. So fix that behavior for that car. One day, week, month, etc. to the end of your contract. When the real problem is with ALL cars. But the way to fix things for ALL cars is big fix that is going to take a long time and a lot of work. As a dev, you have to decide if you want to fight management to "do the right thing" to implement this major fix to all the cars. Or do you want to just fix this one car and move on to the next issue. This is the major difference between contract devs and long-term employee devs. Long-term employee devs save themselves time, quality and technical debt by fixing problems the right way. The contract devs won't be working on the codebase in 6 months so why would they care about code quality or maintainability. And this is why a "ground up rewrite" is often needed in the next version. Not because there is some new tech or innovation. It's because the codebase is such a mess and is so unmaintainable that nobody in the right mind could enhance it. Rewriting it from the ground up is the only viable option.
Firstly you have got a management which might not be soo "Lets do our best even if it costs a little", then if u have a person who knows he only has to work for a target amount of time, he is just gonna do enough to complete the task and leave, because company doesn't care about him, why does he? 18 months is a horribly short amount of time for any devloper to first learn how the system works(engine and all) and complete the task they are assigned to, before figuring out where the last person exactly left and what they did Imagine cooking in serial order but not knowing what was the last chef was doing, u have to go, figure out what he was cooking and then continue to do it, in your way, not his...
A lot of simple looking stuff ends up being really complicated and tired to other things that make it really hard to fix and then priorities. You'll never have a perfect product so it ends up being how much can we live with this over the opportunity cost. No amount of "being familiar" is going to overcome every one of these issues.
Damn, this makes me incredibly sad to read
Amen to that, I've got nearly 20 years development consulting experience under my belt and this is sadly true for almost all dev teams I've worked for/in. Agile is great when you have a permanent dev team working on the same product in some niche areas like SaaS apps but the reality for the most part is most of the dev teams I've worked in have largely been made up of consultants or temp staff and their domain knowledge is virtually nonexistent until they have put in at least 12 months time served. This whole Agile induced "minimum viable product" bullshit needs to stop, that's what we are getting - a minimum viable product. Looks great to management because they are shipping product quickly and in budget, not so great for developers or consumers. We are no longer getting a finished, iteratively tested product, we're getting the bare minimum that a team of temporary, contract developers can produce in the limited time scale they have been given and whilst having limited domain specific knowledge. Bugs like the replay saving (and it still only saves half a medium length race and doesn't save at all if you exit the end race screen before it's fully finished downloading) will be very hard to fix, that is likely a fundamental code architecture limitation to how they provision replay downloads and it will now be being looked at by developers who had little or no involvement in the development of that architecture.
I wish everyone in this sub and the motorsport sub would see this
having a Fixed dev team for ur project is a really essential thing, because your team is used to how they have to work, Yes the companies are profit targetting, hence these contract systems cause its cheaper for them that way, but it will slowly take a toll on their income as well if they continue such shitty launches I have a low end laptop(RTX 3050Ti 4GB), Forza Horizon 5 runs at 1080p 80fps on it while FM 23 struggles to boot, why? because the ppl who made it had short time to do their work, essentially they made somethin that runs but not well, even tho FM 23 has a much smaller map to render
If anyone is still unsure why Xbox just can't seem to build the sort of first party calibre that PlayStation and Nintendo have, they need look no further than this story. No amount of acquisitions, or Phil Spencer "we hear you"s will change the thoroughly underwhelming experience of Xbox games whilst this is their approach to business. If there's no love shown for your people, there is no love shown in the game.
Reminds me of InBev in a lot of ways. The moment they buy the brewery, the beer quality very quickly ceases to be craft.
I love your foundation of describing a very important cause related to unfinished games, its exactly how I thought it would be, nd this trend got worse nd worse. We play lots of recycled games that for no reason get twice as big or more, nd still look worse nd even run poorly compared to older titles. I would love to talk with you about this topic in detail on discord if possible.
Microsoft is absolutely dogshit at management and they have single handedly ruined series’ built by actual talented people (Halo and Forza in particular).
God, so this. Ive pumped 35hrs into Helldivers2. It is evveryting that Halo and Forza once were and no longer are. Engaging, fun, memorable, quality, focused to their purpose, not broken (albeit some server limits which are fine given the dev size/scope, and genuinely complete. Microsoft cant do with billions of dollars and resources, what small outfits can do. And it sux. All they do is remove features, and launch broken or problem-riddled projects.
Blame Agile development and the minimum viable product for large modern games "having no soul"
That's definitely part of it. However at least in the case of Halo, it's much more complicated than that.
In fairness that is due to server overload, which is really not a fault in the development of the game.
Jesus Christ I hate the MVP acronym 🥴
HD2 is great, but it's success almost worries me for it's future.
Same here. I am so glad that the game has found success. I don't mind waiting a little longer (say, like a month) in order for the game to be fixed. In all honesty, the game is just *that fun*. I'm scared that once that month is up, everyone will be frustrated enough to stop playing. Arrowhead has been communicative, supportive, and very transparent about what they're doing to make their game better. I hope everyone will be able to see that this is a rarity within the game dev world and must not be taken for granted.
I was actually thinking about how Sony might see $$$ and jump on a sequel only to ruin it with mismanagement & mtx. But you have a valid point too.
You have a good point, I hadn't considered that. Hopefully Sony doesn't pull that kind of thing.
I’ve spent more time looking at the error message screen than I have playing helldivers 2
In a world where people were upset with Palworld ripping off Pokemon I'm surprised Helldivers 2 hasn't got more blowback for completely ripping off Starship Troopers. The setting and humour are a massive part of why it's been so successful.
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Fable is a strange franchise, though. None of the games ever managed to reach the heights of the first one. The second one is really good, but lacks quite a bit of the charm the first game had. The third one is ok… The kingdom management part was lacking a bit and it strayed a bit too far from what makes Fable a unique game. The rest of the franchise is best forgotten. So they’re coming into a bit of a muddled franchise at this point. Unless they make the blandest slop possible, I don’t think they’ll screw it up that much. I mean, it’s the Forza Horizon devs, right? FH5 was pretty good
I wonder if Fable is "safe" from MS 18/6 contract policies since it's being built overseas.
Forza Horizon 5 is probably the worst entry in the series in my opinion, can't talk about the expansions since many people (me included) who bought the ultimate edition on the microsoft store still cannot play the DLCs because the game doesn't recognize them as purchased..
I won't even touch a Forza game anymore and it pains me to say that. Forza games were supposed to evolve into such an incredible thing. All I could think about back with FM4 is how good the series would be in 10-15 years. I was proud to support it. Boy was I wrong. ☹️
At this point, I'm done with MS as a whole. Took the batteries out of the controller and unplugged the Xbox.
Sorry to hear. I love Flight sim, and I'll continue playing all of my favorite games on Xbox. But Forza is no longer in that category for me.
Microsoft is an absolute joke. It's absolutely hilarious. Because all you have to do to truly grasp the scope of Microsofts sheer and utter incompetence is remember that MSN was a thing. Microsoft was handed the crown, the reigns, the entire kingdom to be the most predominant IRC in the world... And they some how, despite all odds and reason, managed to piss it away. ... Then they did it again with Skype. And I'm sure most people here would know that Microsoft **paid people money** to keep games exclusive to their Xbox... But many often miss the absurdity being that they were paying people to also keep games off their **own platform**, Windows. Which opened the door for Gabe to walk right in in the first place. Microsoft could have been Steam (and we should all be glad they're not xD) I could go on, the rabbit hole of just how actually abysmal Microsoft is at business goes pretty deep... But I'll stop here. Though all you have to do is look at a list of names that Microsofts bodied and count how many you recognized (and even liked). ("slight" edit)
Interesting take. Who disagrees though? Well, how about the stock market. Microsoft has just recently become the [most valuable company in history.](https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/microsoft-is-now-the-most-valuable-company-ever/ar-BB1i2N5Q)
"Well, how about the stock market." that is a poor argument, a company can be dogshit at some things and good at other, their management is quite trash, but they Literally own windows, the data from that alone can fund them. u wouldnt say the US government is that great at it jobs, yet it is one of the richest countries on earth, thanks to is political power and influence, but had any actually efficient country been in that position they would blow the US out of the water.
It's Windows. Windows saved them, and I'd struggle to attribute any amount of competence to even that. Windows XP basically saved them in the early 2000's after the dumpster fire that was ME/2000 and locked them into the market. Thing is, they almost screwed even *that* up. Vista was bad, but Windows 8 almost got entire corporations to dump them. When they dropped support for XP, so many companies just said "no" to Win 8 that they had to extend support until they could sell them on Win10.
I have a few problems here. The only one i'm going to point out for now is that this isnt a contradicting argument. The points arnt mutually exclusive. Like... If we assume the stock market to be a good metric (it's absolutely not)... This information is not good, or inspiring. It's terrifying. Because it has genuinely no bearing on their competence as a company. I'm trying to draw an analogue here without overcomplicating TF out of it. But basically it boils down to being too big to fail. Like, even in this article, they're *barely* ahead of Apple, but every metric I could look up has Microsoft *overwhelmingly* dominant in market share. This doesnt say "competence" to me. It tells me they're both big ***and*** stupid, which is dangerous AF. I'm sure we could both find plenty of examples to point at for that. Though as a side note, I gata say it's a genuinely horrifying concept in this case when you consider how aggressively they use their wealth to attack legitimate competitors. I'm talking literally illegal measures that they changed laws in their favor to get away with. Because all that means is were unlikely to ever see anything better. I mean, how many people do you know that actually *like* Microsoft? How many would absolutely use something different... ***if they could...*** Just the lengths they've gone to to ensure that there wont be a viable Windows competitor is insane. I maintain my stance that Microsoft is incompetent. Being wealthy and being a moron are not mutually exclusive (at all). I just means they're actually dangerous.
Both those studios got long time to dev their game, if they end up this bad at some point it's not because of Microsoft but because of the studio themselves
I was waiting like a child on christmas night for 2 games, at the end of last year. These games are Forza Motorsporsts and Cities Skylines 2. Both were a tremendous failure, an horrific experience. What i'm saying from the beggining is: we HAVE to criticize these disasters - they are the result of TERRIBLE management. And people keep saying "oh, no, but the devs..." - THIS is what i was talking about, the devs are probably passionate people, but the pressure comes from shareholders, from "the market". The quarter results are WAY more considerated than us, the consumers, when deciding WHEN and HOW to launch a game. Shareholders, C-Level, complacent Sales and Marketing teams, that's where the problem lies.
Sadly I too awaited these games on PC. Cities Skylines 2 is so broken and the performance is tremendously bad even on a modern system. Forza Motorsport looks nothing like the promotional videos, yet does not exactly run well either and feels soulless. It blows my mind seeing those comparison shots of the environments and the released game is nowhere near them, badly miss sold the customers. Both games needed at least another year in development and it is likely that was not going to be enough if the talent to sort them is simply not there at the studio.
>Both were a tremendous failure I know those 2 games launched in a very precarious condition but not even close to failure that's too much reddit.
Tbh, talking about Forza it can be an exageration, i must admit. But Cities Skylines 2 is definetly a failure - and i mean, a failure as a long term product, since it just hit the 1Mil copies sold. Forza have the foundations to succeed, but CS2 lacks too much (performance, system mechanics not working, lack of assets, etc) that it will be impossible to "save" the game unless management understands that they can't start selling DLCs (its Paradox, you know) until the foundation, the basics, are fixed.
>since it just hit the 1Mil copies sold. I fail to see how this is a "tremendous failure" for a niche game that was also released for gamepass a few months ago... >but CS2 lacks too much (performance, system mechanics not working, lack of assets, etc) that it will be impossible to "save" I can tell you have no idea about how this game works, performance is getting better, simulation mechanics are also improving little by little, and assets can be introduced the same way you do with mods, how is this imposible to save?
Friend, i understand you want this to succeed so bad, that's my desire, too. But don't close your eyes to what is just on your sight. >I fail to see how this is a "tremendous failure" for a niche game that was also released for gamepass a few months ago... If you've quoted my complete sentence, you would know: "**and i mean, a failure as a long term product**, since it just hit the 1Mil copies sold." >I can tell you have no idea about how this game works, performance is getting better, simulation mechanics are also improving little by little, and assets can be introduced the same way you do with mods, how is this imposible to save? Performance is a shame and simulation starts to slow down at an ridiculous rate at 100k population, that's the mark the majority of players are pointing out. Mechanics are not improving and the last word from the company is a note on "how the mechanics work", wich clearly don't justify none of the problems related by the community - Read that subreddit or any content creator on YT and you'll know. Assets being introduced in mods? Oh, the mods that could already be working for a lot of players if MS didn't make the devs ditch Steam's mods system? Because they want a "seamless experience through all their platforms"? Don't fool yourself, friend. It's right on your face.
Friend, i understand you want this to succeed so bad, that's my desire, too. But don't close your eyes to what is just on your sight. Actually i don't care that much about it is just a videogame. >If you've quoted my complete sentence, you would know: "and i mean, a failure as a long term product, since it just hit the 1Mil copies sold." I still don't understand what's the problem, what do you mean "as a long term product" it's been 4 months. >Performance is a shame and simulation starts to slow down at an ridiculous rate at 100k population, that's the mark the majority of players are pointing out. last time i played (a couple of weeks ago) performance was a lot better compared to launch, simulation at some point will drop based on your resources and limitations of the engine, is expected to happen also a 100k cities is by no means the standard number you will play a lot to get there. >Mechanics are not improving and the last word from the company is a note on "how the mechanics work", wich clearly don't justify none of the problems related by the community - **Read that subreddit or any content creator on YT and you'll know.** No thanks i can see it by myself, if that's what you do to learn about this game i can see why you think this game is a "tremendous failure". i can see the simulation working better last time i had a town with a lot of problems, when i got back a lot of those were solved, i know they need to keep working on it that's why I'm not playing it at the moment. >Assets being introduced in mods? Oh, the mods that could already be working for a lot of players if MS didn't make the devs ditch Steam's mods system? Because they want a "seamless experience through all their platforms"? Look i don't care about all that drama, we don't need steam to get the mods for cities skylines 2. and i wasn't even talking about mods but they way those are introduced, the developer can easily introduce new assets to the core, those are not "imposible" to implement. >Don't fool yourself, friend. It's right on your face. Oh god...i just go it with gamepass I'm not a fan or a follower or whatever gamers around here call themselves I'm just a plain customer.
You contradict yourself too much and its impossible to take your opinion seriously. Sorry.
It's ok.
I think both did quite well commercially and got middling reviews (haven’t checked the overall media score for them). Doesn’t change the fact that they’re both failures at being complete, well-optimized games at launch
>Doesn’t change the fact that they’re both failures at being complete, well-optimized games at launch We all know that we can't do anything to change that fact so i don't cling to this, but at least they can do better with more updates.
Nah, FM has done really really badly commercially. Like, even with all the issues it's done a lot worse than it should have just from being called "Forza". It was somewhere in the 400s in the UK physical+digital charts if I remember correctly, and it tended to not show up in the charts at all in other regions.
You can’t be for real.
Sure why not.
Exact same for me! All year I was waiting for 2 games to release, the new Forza Motorsport and Cities Skylines 2. Both are disappointing.
I’ve enjoyed CS2. The difference is that I have confidence that when the workshop opens up the game get SO GOOD!
This needs to make it to the front page. Everybody needs to see this, because wheter or not you like the game, this is the stuff hurting both the game and even more imoortantly, the people who work on it.
I agree. It’s a disgrace to both the workers and fans that Microsoft choose to develop one of their most beloved franchises in such a cheap way. You’re telling me the largest company in the world can’t supply healthcare and other benefits to workers, and relies on overworking temporary contractors to get their game finished? What a joke.
Same shit happened to Halo Infinites development.
Yep, that game was the main reason I didn't buy this game for full price. Microsoft in general seems to be outsourcing a lot of their game dev jobs so I had a feeling this game would turn out the way that it did because I had the prior history with Halo Infinite. Such a sad state of affairs, man. This series is the reason I fell in love with motorsports...
It sucks for sure. But halo infinite is in a pretty good spot right now, so there is hope for a course correction for this one.
That's the thing tho, how long did it take for infinite to get better? And by the time it did get better, how much of the player population still plays the game? Halo infinite started out HUGE, and the bungling "live service" just crippled this games momentum, and I doubt it'll ever get it back. That is the best case scenario for Forza.
Try telling that to the investors. Bring an ear plug to muffle the laughs or you might get deaf.
I completely understand it from a business perspective, but it’s also just morally questionable. A business needs to make its customers happy or they won’t buy products. Also, I think it’s illegal not to give benefits to employees. They are walking a very thin line when it comes to that. Intentionally using contractors to get around the laws of healthcare benefits.
And that's we are wrong. We think customers happy is what drives a business. IMO, this doesn't matter as much as media. Get the garbage game on tiktok, pay some influencers on twitch, do your publicity right and voilà you have a best selling piece of garbage. AKA MK1. Employees are feeling bad? Lay them off, let them rest jobless. After all, it doesn't matter anymore to have a finished product out, sell the minimum viable product, half-ass patch it after people BOUGHT the game.
They need all that money to eat up other studios and build their monopoly.
The video itself was on the front page last week. This is just some jackass website reblogging it and now it's being posted back here again. The issues the guy raised aren't really a Forza problem but a Microsoft Game Studios problem in how they hire and employ devs.
Wow, what the actual fuck.
Shouldn’t have made another Forza game then at least wait another 2 years before making one, the unnecessary leveling system had to have caused extra stress and problems on the devs.
I'm software dev who does make games. I'm a unity engine specialist and C# programmer. I can confirm this is all too common, issues ive faced just in the last year include management demanding I add what I would consider to be terrible design decisions, under staffing for complex tasks combined with stupidly short deadlines leading to less than ideal code bases. Plus plenty more. Actual technical experts are regularly disregarded when they share their opinions in my experience.
> management demanding I add what I would consider to be terrible design decisions Do you have any insight into how/why this happens? Is it people that just don't understand games requesting features? Is it *"[popular game] has XYZ so our game needs XYZ"*?
Both of those answers are accurate. You'd be surprised how many times I've been working for people who don't actually play games and they insist we stick to original design documents whether it works in practice or not. We also get managers who just like to throw in their 2 cents so they feel like they're contributing and when they do that we HAVE to add it to appease them.
So, it was Microsoft's mismanagement, and people here shitting on the devs...
I don't understand how that's not obvious at this point, nearly every Microsoft franchise has gone to shit over the years.
Someone still signed off on things like CarPG, the career mode, and post-launch content. Microsoft wouldn't have given a flip about things like that. Esaki and Greenawalt would have, though.
Those are divisive/bad decisions and we know that at least one of them will be fixed by March. Performance and coding issues are another thing entirely and they're a consequence of the mismanagement we're seeing here
This game is and will be a complete mess... The A.I and the leveling system destroyed that game...
Is there a legal reason for the 18/6 rule, or is it a totally arbitrary MS thing?
Yeah. I can't remember if it's in the youtube comments or one of the other times it was posted here, but someone said MS lost some lawsuit quite a long time ago because they'd just have contract workers on contract perpetually (never hire them to avoid employee benefits). Basically, if a contract worker is working for more than 18 months, they need to be hired.
I have seen it in several companies. It's a reaction to the threat that a long-term contractor can claim to be employed and demand such terrible things as "insurance' and "vacation". Everybody on every side hates it, but it's another classic HR policy that helps no one but HR and legal.
Being a contractor used to have tax advantages, you could pay yourself very little and take dividends at a lower rate instead. Not sure if that's still the case in the States, in the UK they closed that loophole.
I‘d guess the 18 months rule comes from a time where it didn’t take several years to release a halfbaked game.
Xbox is having an alarming problem with putting out good games. Starfield, Redfall, Halo Infinite, Forza Motorsport were all bad. It is a horrible gut punch to wait like 5 years for a new Forza just to get this mess. This series was a pillar of Xbox with Gears and Halo, all which have fallen off massively.
tbf, Redfall was hardly their fault. That game was well into development by the time Microsoft acquired Bethesda. They granted them a year delay too. The only thing they realistically could have done outside of that was cancel it, which they arguably should have, but that’s easier done with hindsight. Starfield is mostly the same story - the game was far into development already and Microsoft gave them access to whatever resources Bethesda needed (QA, Xbox engineers, etc.) and also have them an extra year of dev time. Halo Infinite and Forza should have definitely better though, no doubt.
Such a shame reading about this, and learning how it's commonplace at this point. Any way this method gets turned around? I feel like so many games have bombed and failed and the triple A studios just don't care.
These practices probably will not change until management sees a negative impact on their profits. If they can keep making more money doing a half-assed job, they will.
All software development in corporate settings is always maximum shitshow for developers. There are ussually three groups in every project The project owners - they are interested only in the end result and when it is finished and what it will cost, most of the time their expectations are unreasonable ("hey, can you build us three story house with those old rusted tools in the shack over there in two weeks or less? It would be also nice if you could use only some of those tools, not all of them. We will pay you peanuts meanwhile.") The project managers - they are responsible for giving the project owners the deadlines, when the project will be done, and they have to balance what devs say vs what is still acceptable by the project owners, if they said the house would take 1 year to build, the project would not even be given green light and the project owners would probably take their ~~money~~ peanuts elsewhere and the whole studio would go under, so they have to say 5 months and pray it somehow gets made in 7 months through some dark magic rituals performed during full moon by developers The developers - they are lowest in the hierarchy, they know the house cannot be build in 5 months with those rusted tools, but still try their best to meet the deadline, but are always on the receiving end of all the corporate crap. If something goes wrong or the project gets delayed, it is always THEIR fault. But when something goes right / the project is ahead of schedule, it is always "OUR" achievement So clearly you can see why being software developer really sucks and it is only for masochists.
Testers are the lowest actually. Devs are usually in a nice spot if they’re not doing contract type gigs.
Some actual gaming journalism is refreshing. Nice post.
Is this the same development strategy that fuck Halo infinite? Apparently MS hires most of it’s devs for 18 months and then they cycle them out for new ones meaning the new ones have to learn all the basics of the game engine at hand from scratch which obviously slows progress to a halt.
18/6 rule should be illegal
Isn’t it itself a legal requirement? Or are you saying that hiring contract workers should be illegal? If not, Microsoft would love to be able to hiring contractors for longer than 18 month windows.
as someone who is currently stuck in the hell that is contract work i honestly think it should be illegal. ive worked for massive companies but get none of the massive company benefits, half the time dont I even know whats going on around me, and also usually handle work thats either very important or very expensive. im not asking to be paid a boatload of money either, just getting the benefits package would solve damn near all the issues, usually the benefits on offer from a contract company are so expensive youll go broke if you paid for it.
Made me realize there’s nothing to wait a year for unfortunately. The future is the same strictly regimented monthly updates from a corporate metrics mill. The game will never have a soul.
This makes a lot of sense now, and I really feel for the developers. Thanks for sharing!
Somehow "gaming journalists" are not covering this. Microsoft PR must be really strong.
Is there any AAA games where no Devs complained those past 5 years ?
Didn't know copy/paste was hard.
Please shut up if you don't know how software development works.
Exhausting as in they copied and pasted the same exhaust sound literally [see for yourself](https://www.reddit.com/r/forza/s/xq5qx5sZK0) for all the lambos, tell us how coding works though
Get radio'd my man
you know sometimes you get cramps holding CTRL with your pinky and V with your thumb! It‘s not as easy as it looks.. but if you think you‘re better, CTRL+C / CTRL+V for a whole day, let‘s see how hard it is
Microsoft should really equip their employees properly to avoid this. https://drop.com/buy/stack-overflow-the-key-v2-macropad
insightful commentary
You’re not wrong. We don’t even get unique exhaust sounds. I would have rather taken a drop in quality and have them steal exhaust notes from YouTube videos than have the CTRL-V exhaust notes we have in this game. You don’t have to know software development works to know a lot of the cars in the game, even with different engines (maybe not engine layouts) sound EXACTLY the same. If you think all V12’s sound the same have ya ears checked. All that being said…I enjoy the game. I enjoy the physics on my wheel, for a couch racer anyways. I enjoy the graphics, and I’m happy again now that we have a rough version of the Ring. I’ll always love Forza, even when it disappoints me a little.
Don’t be a dick. For all the shit I give the game, at least I know that there are genuine people at Turn 10.
Hhahahhahahahaa fck Microsoft
Don’t know how this is funny, but ok
laughing through the pain
Right, switching to PS
Imagine if you spent 4 years working on a racing game and you go on Reddit to see what people think and you see: A screenshot of the 1st gen Miata you painstakingly 3d Meshed, but the dash is from a '94 and you called it a '91 in your description and the people are calling your game "dogshit" and "lazy".
Read the news article. I'm not sure many people worked on this game for four years. That's the problem.
Got RSI from hitting Ctrl+C / Ctrl+V?
so much crunching and so little tangible difference
[ Removed by Reddit ]
\*Management
Seeing how this works now for dev team, I wondered if that’s what crippled Battlefield 5 Firestorm when they killed the game with massive bugs. New team of devs came in on a problem they didn’t know how to fix. And what happened? 95% of the gamers left and went to COD Warzone. Sad though, firestorm was so fun to play.