Jesus Fucking Christ. Watching the UX Devs attempt to drive a car was fucking painful. Blowing multiple corners, not upshifting past 3rd gear, not downshifting below 3rd gear, completely blowing corners, getting passed on qualifying tracks.
Yeah, I get gaming and talking is hard... but it ain't that hard... especially when you're not talking. This is very Game Journo levels of gaming incompetence.
"I've noticed that better drivers [in ghost cars] take driving lines I would never normally take."
Bitch, the driving line is literally drawn on the road!
Bitch you went straight in a corner!
Anyways, I've been nervous about how this latest Forza would turn out simply because of how utterly fucking "Coachella Festival" Forza Horizon has felt. I'm hoping it turns out well, after all, these are just the UX devs. I'm hoping the competency crisis doesn't damage the franchise like everything else "the message" has touched.
Nope, not just the camera, since usually I only play in the dashboard view and noticed the same problems. I recently went back to finish playing Forza 7's career -- I had it for years, started the career and then stopped playing it for a while -- and he's spot on with his assessment. Even with a Fanatec steering wheel the cars handle pretty atrociously at times (some do handle fantastic, to be fair), especially the faster they are, compared to games like Gran Turismo and BeamNG.
The problem is exactly as he mentions in the video -- the game isn't simulating the roll accurately based on the drivetrain. It's a front-wheel drive vehicle but he's getting body roll movement as if there is a transfer case pushing torque through the rear axle, which isn't even the case for that model. FWD still handle differently in Forza compared to RWD, 4x4s and AWD vehicles, but they never feel real -- it always feels like you're fighting against or with some invisible force that alters the way the car handles compared to how you expect them to handle based on real life physics
It's also not consistent, some vehicles have better physics than others, like they did an excellent job with some of the classics, like the 1964 Impala, which actually has very accurate body roll according to its mass and how it handles inertia. I noticed the slower, older cars actually had better physics, while the newer faster cars had really finicky physics that weren't consistent.
Another sim racer kind of ran into similar issues: https://youtu.be/5kbbzTIerBs?t=178
This isn't to say you can't have fun in Forza, because you absolutely can. I just found myself not having as much fun as I used to coming from more focused sim racing games, and it's why a lot of serious sim racers stick to iRacing for their actual fix. iRacing doesn't have the crash damage like Beam, but it does offer more realistic, tactile feedback for the way the vehicles handle, and it makes a massive difference for sure.
I'm pretty sure you can get Forza to feel more real on a wheel, but 100% of each sim racer notes you have to spend an inordinate amount of time trying to adjust wheel settings and game settings and car settings to get the game to feel "right". It's funny because I never had that problem with Gran Turismo -- even though the AI physics and nodepaths are stupidly shallow -- the cars all feel like they handle with the appropriate amount of mass, roll, and inertia.
Actually, they recently added the skeleton of the career mode, which people have been playing, and it's actually really cool, as you start with a basic production car and work your way up completing tasks, races, etc. You even have to account for insurance if you crash or damage the car: https://youtu.be/ILmLGoTGRPs
That's not to mention that CarMighty's Car Hunt series offers better and more organic chases than many modern Hollywood movies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1YxwVL8qhdo&t=8s