Next ‘Forza Motorsport’ to bow in 2023 with 500-plus cars

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The next instalment in the popular Forza Motorsport simulator-type racing video games will launch later this year with more than 500 real-world cars for players to wheel around 20 different environments, including five new to the franchise, the game’s developers said late January during an Xbox-focused preview event. Microsoft-owned Turn 10 Studios used the Developer_Direct event to tease out additional details and new footage from the upcoming game, showing off unbelievable levels of realism and fidelity that it says make this iteration of Forza “the most technically advanced racing game ever made.”

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That new, breath-taking footage does kind of help us understand the five-year-plus gap between the last game in the series, Forza Motorsport 7, and this sequel (which, to be clear, will not be named “Forza Motorsport 8” and will instead just drop the numeral). While previous Forza games were released like clockwork every two years, Turn 10 Studios had to contend with Microsoft’s bringing out its Xbox Series X|S consoles in the interim between FM7 and FMnot8.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the developer says the new Forza Motorsport has been designed “to take full advantage” of the new platform, and correspondingly “delivers a generational leap in fidelity.” That meant scrapping old track models and other parts of the game’s core software to rebuild it from the ground up—this is not just an evolution of the old game.

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Other details revealed during Developer_Direct include the fact the cars in the game can be tweaked by players with “more than 800 unique upgrades and custom modifications”; and that the race cars in the game will be the most modern the franchise has ever released.

Turn 10 Studios also underscored the improved damage effects players’ cars will take on during in-race collisions, with individual scratches and precise dirt build-up more accurately rendered than ever before; as well as how the use of a spectrophotometer means cars’ paint will see “more realistic light response across colors, metal flake and gloss levels.” Old and new race-tracks have been laser-scanned so that even the grass and trees lining the tarmac are rendered in high-fidelity, along with “tens of thousands of fully animated 3D spectators.”

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Players of sister series Forza Horizon may already be familiar with Turn 10’s “fully dynamic time of day system,” but in the new Forza Motorsport, its impact goes beyond the visual. “Changes in time of day alter ambient temperatures, which, in turn, impacts the track surface temperatures. These track temperature changes will affect the grip of your car, as does rubbering in and weather.” User feedback pushed the developer to also include tire and fuel management as part of the player’s responsibilities for the first time.

The timeline for the game’s release is not quite clear, with Turn 10 Studios only saying we can expect the new game “this year.” In June 2022, it’d said the target date was spring 2023, which would suggest we can expect Forza Motorsport to drop any time now. When it does, it will be made available on the Xbox Series X|S consoles, as well as on Windows 10 and 11 PCs via the Microsoft Store and Steam.