Emerging Concerns

I’m reserving final judgement until I have the game in my hands, but early indicators are that Turn 10 has seriously fucked up some aspects of the online experience.

1. Tuning in lobbies unavailable – Many racers will have a tune for each track.   To be taken seriously as a hardcore sim the ability to change tunes for each track would seem to be a no brainer.
2. Public Room configuration – This may be FM3’s  fatal flaw. I found it very rare to have many friends online at the same time and we counted on strangers to fill out our rooms.  If the only way to play strangers is to rely on T10’s server configs, I doubt I will play much online.  T10 track record in post launch support doesn’t give me any faith that this will be improved.
3. System Link gone.  I have 2 Xboxes and preordered 2 LCE copies of the game anticipating being able to play head to head.  This isn’t a deal breaker, but would have been nice.
4. Che Chou continued failure as “community manager”.  I wonder what he does because he doesn’t seem to interact in any meaningful way with the online community that T10 has grown on the official Forza site.  For all the hype over the last couple months, Turn 10 employees have gone surprisingly quiet in the days leading up to launch.   A lot of the concerns I’ve mentioned should have been addressed with official statement to the users when the concerns became known.  At most we get a snarky post that doesn’t do anything but fan the flames. Letting the boards implode with irate users is not the best way to manage a community, but this seems to be standard operating procedure for Turn 10.

With the problems that are coming to light it seems that despite Turn 10’s marketing claims about the online modes, they really don’t  seem to want players to play the game the way the players want to.  And it seems that as developers they have no clue how their players actually play their games.