Forza Motorsport is OK with being the boring Forza

polygon.com:

Forza Motorsport’s developer, Turn 10 Studios, finds itself in an odd position. This is the eighth game in a series that used to be a flagship for Xbox. And yet, after an uncharacteristic six years away, it returns to find that its fun-loving younger sibling series, Forza Horizon, has stolen the limelight. This process was already underway when Forza Motorsport 7 came out in 2017 — it’s probably the reason Microsoft felt an extended break for Motorsport was both comfortable and necessary — but in the intervening time, the two strongest Horizon titles yet found an enormous new audience on Game Pass and beyond. This means Forza Motorsport has to explain itself all over again to a new generation of Forza fans brought up on Playground Games’ freewheeling automotive vacations.

The good news is that it does so with confidence and authority. There’s no hint of an identity crisis to Motorsport’s rebooted return, nor of the desperate trend-chasing that marred its Xbox One era with microtransactions, loot boxes, and fussily randomized service-gaming systems. There’s barely any evidence in Forza Motorsport that the Horizon games exist, unless you count the studied way in which it doesn’t do any of the things that Horizon does. This is a resolutely focused circuit-racing game with real-world motorsport leanings.

If anything, Forza Motorsport is single-minded to a fault. Coming to it from the ebullient fiesta of Horizon 5 — or even from the eccentric nerdery of Gran Turismo 7 — you might be surprised by the lack of variety in the event design and the absence of a distinctive voice, of a personality to guide you through this world of asphalt and piston. But this is the Forza Motorsport way. The series has always worked best as a