Vidjama Gmaes Work

Forza Motorsport cheats.

My feelings about the AI in Forza Motorsport range somewhere between it being shit and complete shit, and doing the endurance run tour of the game really put that into perspective.

I’ve had a bit of a love-hate relationship with Forza Motorsport; it’s a fine game to play and grind out tours while I’m watching a movie, giving me something to talk about here on Vidjama Gmaes Work and something to talk about on How About Notflix at the same time. How much do I tolerate Forza Motorsport? I have 106 hours in the game and my racer level is 254. And yeah, those aren’t deeply impressive numbers. But I haven’t made any effort to grind levels in the game, so at this point I only have two cars that are level 50.

I’m catching up on tours since I haven’t played the game in over a month, and I noticed there are four days left in the endurance tour from June. And what an endurance indeed. The tour is made up of nine sets of single races, and you might be thinking; that’s not so bad. Each race however is designed to last around forty five minutes. Not a problem when you’re playing them as they release. A bigger annoyance when you’re trying to grind all nine in a couple of days before it ends.

The endurance tours themselves aren’t that bad I suppose. I guess if you couldn’t pause Forza Motorsport they’d be more painful but I paused them several times to get a drink, take a dump, get another drink, and do whatever the hell I wanted. In retrospect the endurance tours aren’t much more punishing than the normal tours. A normal tour consists of four to five races each with 4-9 laps and each one takes about 10-15 minutes. So the times are probably evened out if not shorter than a regular tour.

But the one tour in this reminds me why I don’t like racing games, and it’s because racing game developers are overwhelmingly stupid assholes who can’t program good and have to resort to just letting the AI cheat in order to make the game artificially difficult. And before I continue, I’m not really talking about rubber banding. That’s an issue, sure, but in a way I’m kinda fine with it. You especially want rubberbanding AI in a game like Flatout or Burnout where if you’re really far ahead of the pack the game just stops being fun because the carnage is gone.

What chews my ass on Forza Motorsport is that the AI cheats in a few very obvious and shitty ways. AI cars are not affected by the environment in the same way your car is, and they are definitely not affected by rain. What this means is that if you’re on a map that has heavy downpour, you are slowly and gingerly taking turns, taking forever to speed up and slow down, and watching the AI zip by like nothing is wrong. I ended the 20th of 29 laps in the map in first place before the rain hit. By lap 23 I was in 24th place, by lap 25 I had been lapped, and by lap 28 I had been lapped twice.

Meanwhile the whole time the game is throwing me 1.0 scores like I’m doing something horribly wrong when I’m just trying my best to get through the worst rainstorm I’ve ever seen in this game. I think what annoyed me so much in this case is that Forza Motorsport is very blatant in how the AI cheats, you can straight up see cars taking corners at speeds that would spin you out and they keep superglued to the road, but this map just felt cruel. Watching the 23 other cars lap you with no problem while you’re struggling to control is just rubbing it in your face.

Forza Motorsport can go to hell. I’ll be back tomorrow to continue playing it.