Follow the links to the right or get it here. It’s a pretty standard update to the car list, but the Event List and Achievement tabs were also updated to reflect the new content.
In case you’ve been living under a rock, the Porsche Expansion Pack consists of 30 cars, 20 Career events and new Achievements. It’s 1600 Xbox points from the Xbox Marketplace or only 1200 if you are a VIP and buy it through the in game marketplace (which finally seems to be working).
I tripped the Bucket List Achievement last Thursday. I’m not sure exactly when since I have pop-ups turned off in game. I’d been closing in on it all week. I checked my stats before I called it quits for the night and saw the achievement had been awarded, but I was only at 98.5%. I still had 4 events left on the Events List. I finished those off Friday and Saturday afternoon. My stats show 100% complete 1532 victories out of 1796 races with 15183.87 miles driven over 177 h 13:01.
A lot of losses in there. Some of the events I drove several times to get a win. Part of this was driving against Pro AI. I would start at Pro and only dialed it down if it was obvious I wasn’t going to be competitive, R1 & R2 usually, but sometimes a spec race would have the AI in a car I just couldn’t catch in the short sprints Turn 10 uses in the majority of the Event List. I also drove rewind off. If I could get through the first corner mostly damage free, I usually wouldn’t need rewind for the rest of the race anyway, so I just turned it off. This gives a nice credit bonus, but gets rid of the safety net for driving errors. I didn’t mind this so much, some of the best racing I had in FM4 was fighting back to the lead after an off. Even if it was clear I wasn’t going to podium, I usually would just finish out a race for the XP unless I was so damaged I had to pit. I did find out that in the World Championship you could still place first with a 2nd place finish in one heat if you won the other.
That’s going to be it for me and achievements in Forza 4. I still have the Drifting and Kinect achievements left and no desire to go after either. If I’m sideways, I’m doing it wrong. To me drifting has as much to do with racing as figure skating has to do with hockey. When there is subjective scoring for an event it’s a performance art and not a sport. As for the Kinect, I had a Wii, hated gaming on it and sold it. I’m not buying a Kinect for the Xbox for all the reasons I hated the Wii. I don’t know anyone with one to borrow, so that achievements isn’t getting done either.
Sunday afternoon I had some time to play and wandered aimlessly through the menus a little before firing up one of my other gamertags and going through the World Tour. I’ve got 2 other gamertags I’ve started through the World Tour when I was bored with the Event List on my main one. One drives only Japanese cars unless forced into something else and the other is American only with a more specific decision tree: 1965 Mustang > Other Mustang > Other Ford > Other USA > anything else. I’ve made it to level 30 and only had to drive a Corvette in one race otherwise it’s been all Ford. Sunday I got the Japanese driver up to level 20.
I guess I’m going to have to venture online, but I’m not to enthusiastic about putting up with lobby lockups, server outages and griefers.
I’ve always found the AI difficulty odd in Forza. I usually play with the hardest AI option, but in low performance classes this is too easy and in high performance class it’s too hard. It’s been this way in every Forza. I had higher hopes this time around, but since FM4 is just a polish of FM3 with minimal enhancements I should have known better.
Dynamic AI in World Tour was a joke. However it dynamically adjusts seemed biased towards easy. When I finished World Tour and started the Event List I could tell the AI was more difficult at the Professional setting. It forced me to get better. I’m not the fastest driver, but I can usually put up times in the top 1% which I’m happy with. I set the difficulty at Expert and then click on the Brake Line and Manual (no clutch). In the old endurance races I would dump the brake line and learn the braking zones, but overall I don’t spend enough time in a car/track combo to get consistent laps, so brake line stays on. I feel the implementation of the manual w/clutch is more of an exploit than simulation so I haven’t used it. Also, using a clutch doesn’t come naturally on my MS wheel. If I had a 3 pedal setup I might feel different, but I’ve heard that’s even slower. If all I cared about was leaderboard time, I would start using the clutch on a controller, but for now I just do my best without it.
In A-Class and lower I normally pull away from the AI by a couple seconds a lap unless I’ve got a really mismatched car. Last night I ran some R3 races in the #92 BMW M3-GTR. I was still putting up top 1% times if I could get a clean lap, which tells me I’m still driving about as well as I normally do, but the slowest AI driver was pulling away from me about a second per lap. I dumbed it down to hard AI and now I’m pulling away from the field six econds a lap. That is a huge jump. This also matches the behavior I’ve seen in the previous games. It’s a cakewalk in low classes and I have to gimp the AI in R-classes just to keep up, but an easier difficulty is way too easy. There is no good match up.
I’ve always been curious how Turn 10 varies AI difficulty, but whatever it is doesn’t seem to scale well with increasing performance cars. I’ve been asking for more granularity or just some tweaking of the existing model since I first started playing the Forza series. I don’t see why there couldn’t be a slider that gave us a ten or even a hundred steps in difficulty. I would rather dial in the AI to a competitive, but beatable setting than to just have a few that don’t really match up to my skill level.
I also did some of the Multi-Class races in R3 last night and Rossi was not driving. I noticed the #2 driver was nearly as competitive as the #1 AI driver. This is something else I’ve gotten tired of seeing, too many races are just me and Rossi. I’ll gap Rossi and he’ll gap the rest of the field by the same amount. There is no reason to even have other cars on the track if the race is always going to come down to me and just one AI driver. I’ve even lapped traffic in a couple races. Why waste CPU cycles on more cars when they are all just backmarkers? I’d would have traded the extra cars on track Turn 10 added this go around for weather and night racing.
Over the weekend I finished the World Tour and hit driver level 60 on the final race. To me World Tour was an improvement over the Season Play in FM3, but it wasn’t as great as it was hyped. I did like that I could tailor the World Tour to the types of events I wanted to run even though it took some finagling. Pretty much you go into a venue it gives a list of 3 events. Hit Y to change cars to something else (stock DeLorean is my car of choice) and see if it changes events. Bouncing around your garage you can usually get the game to present different choices. It’s always the same type of event, but you can at least get it to change classes. Select the event you want and when it asks if you want to upgrade your DeLorean choose to change cars here to run the car you really want. It would be nice if the Tour Director AI either found events for the car you entered in the venue or just gave you 5-6 choices over a wider class range.
My only complaint is the races in World Tour often did not match up to a race in the Event List. For example, you might end up at Hockenheim National Circuit and have choice of an F-Class European Tour. The problem is that if you look at the Event List for F-Class European Tour there is no race at Hockenheim National. However, there is one at Hockenheim Short. All this does is add to the length of time it takes to clear the Event List. Time spent in World Tour doesn’t necessarily help. This is different than how Season Play in FM3 worked. There you were given choices of Events from the Event list to complete. I don’t think it would have been that hard to have the game present race options that were only from the event list, but the designer’s must have had their reasons. The only thing that comes to mind is the possibility of going into a venue with no appropriate cars for races in the event list.
Which apparently does still happen. There seem to be a couple races that you shouldn’t hit in World Tour until you’ve leveled up to get a gift car that works for the event. I’ve seen several players complain that they are stuck in the World Tour Season 7 at Road Atlanta (I think), with no appropriate cars in their garage and no idea what’s wrong. FYI, you need an R3 car for the problem event, if you go run rivals or even the event list until you level up and get it gifted you will have no problems. I had run enough other events to level up sufficiently before getting here for it to be a problem.
I did come to loathe the new race modes in World Tour. Top Gear should be embarrassed for having their name associated with the bowling. Track Day feels like a gimmick. Multi-Class (at least against the AI) is a waste of time, the high class runs off and it turns into hot lapping before the first turn. The races aren’t long enough to deal with mixed classes lapping each other. I ended up hiring drivers for the Track Day and Multi-Class and I’m dreading getting trough them in the Event List.
Which brings me to the dynamic AI in World Tour. It’s very weak that it’s not adjustable. I use World Tour as training to get used to how the game feels, how the AI drives and to relearn simulated driving since the last game. As soon as I ran against Professional AI in the Event List I was shocked how much more difficult the game was. I actually had to tune cars and pay attention to what I was doing rather than coast through with stock tuned cars.
In WT it was pretty much a given you would win every race if you didn’t destroy your engine. Even if you didn’t win, it didn’t seem to matter, you completed the event and moved on. From what I’ve seen with Professional AI any screw ups could cost you the win. I have the rewind turned off and in the WT a challenging races was one where I got distracted, had an off and would work my way back through the field. If I go off in the Event List, I may not make it back to first. If I don’t make it through turn 1 without being punted off track by the AI I restart. Also if I don’t come out of lap 1 in the top 3 or 4 I may not be able to overtake the leader by the end of the race. It’s definitely more of a challenge and I wish the World Tour would have been better training for this.
Tonka Crash Tuning and Commentary 