im curious, what's crippled about Forza?
Did you not see the image comparisons? They cut the graphics WAY back after E3, turning 3-D crowds into the generic 2-D ones you see on the 360, and the overall look is downgraded (foliage is supposedly much worse, not that I care). There are comparison pictures all over the place. It's not so much that I'm a graphics connoisseur, but when they brag about how it's 1080p and 60 FPS and make it look gorgeous in demos and commercials, downgrading the visuals to a noticeable degree (even if it's mostly-minor detail stuff) is frustrating. I'd be rater disappointed if I saw all of the nice, pretty stuff, got the game, and wondered where it all went in the first race.
The thing that REALLY makes me mad about the stuff, though, is the car and track counts. They can make whatever excuse they like, but it's 100% obvious that it is a money grab for car packs.
Forza 4 had 500+ cars and 26 tracks.
Forza 5 has 207 cars and 14 tracks, and they cut out Nurburgring? That's garbage. For the record,
Gran Turismo 6 is expected to carry 33 tracks and over 1,200 cars. Yeah, more than twice the tracks and 6 times the cars, if not more. They're also giving players features like variable time of day and weather, and there's going to be a feature that uses mobile GPS to create custom tracks based on where you drive in real life.
They can talk up poly counts and physics improvements in
Forza 5 all they want, but when they say that such things are the reason for more than halving the car count, then they come back with Day One DLC, a $50 season pass with 60 more cars, and have that absurd token system (which launched with charging something like $100 to unlock some cars), it's clear that they're worrying more about money than releasing a stellar product. I hated
Gran Turismo 4, I rented it once on PS2 and wanted to throw it into a fire. However, I don't believe that
Forza 5 is going to be better than
Gran Turismo 6 to the extent that it will justify such a dearth of content and asinine costs for cars. Heck, I don't even buy that it's a big-enough improvement over
Forza 4 to justify all of the lost content.
I personally won't be getting
Forza 5 because of this. Half the content, PLUS a $50 season pass that doesn't even bring it back to par? I got about 25% through the
Forza 4 Event List before I had to take a break because it was such a redundant chore, having to go through the same tracks and race in the same cars (for the manufacturer thing). With half the tracks, I don't see how it gets anything but worse on the redundancy front.