AI still terrible after 15 months

I am gonna be honest and first state that I have personally staunchly defended the AI before in pervious posts. That being said, I have arrived at a state where I can no longer do this. I can’t put my finger on it exactly, maybe my skill level has improved and I expect more, perhaps something changed between FM6’s AI and FM7’s AI. I just don’t remember the AI being this bad in FM6. Granted FM6 was my first Forza game and everything was new, fresh and exciting to me then, plus I wasn’t really any good and needed to improve before making judgements about the AI. The constant Brake Checking has always bothered me. It seems depending on the settings it can vary from track to track and amongst different car combinations.

Here recently I am even noticing it with the Unbeatable Drivatars, especially at a Track like Maple Valley Short right before the last turn entering the grandstand finish line area. I have been very close to rage quitting there many times over recently.

I am just finding it extremely hard to have an enjoyable race with the AI as of recent. Like others said with the crashing all the time when racing in certain divisions. Random acceptance of their oftentimes lack of spatial awareness. They do often times seem to sway over in your space when there is absolutely no reason to do so. I cannot stand Contact racing. I’ll accept it in NASCAR and watch it for what it is and enjoy it on TV. But when it comes to racing in FM7 I want my positons gained with Zero contact, but the current AI in this game make that exceptionally difficult.

I’ve ran roughly 1800 races, granted roughly half of those would be rivals where AI aren’t present and have only 40 collisions under my Drivatar Stats. You guessed right if you thought that all 40 of those collisions occurred during Mutliplayer. 900 races and only 40 collisions means I am doing my part, but the AI fundamentally aren’t living up to their end of the bargain. They mostly just play road blocking games with ya if you are at the rear and if you make it up to the podium positions, 1st 2nd 3rd even down thru 6th all have massively different Paces leaving huge gaps in the field. The AI Pace should be must closer together across the field and most of this stems from the Coded in Brake Checking mechanic which is there to increase difficulty. No, an AI chain of cars isn’t idea, but what we have now is just way to inconsistent.

Add to the fact that faster AI or AI driving more competent cars, rarely if ever can seem to pass slower AI. I’ve done some testing and basically 99 times out of 100, the AI with the best starting position and or raceline for a track (P1 isn’t always the best attack position on certain tracks during a rolling start) wins the race. The only way to really get movement of grid positions is with Quickstops and having a Multiclass field of cars to create traffic. The fact we have no actual Pit Strategy Interface makes Quickstops extremely boring and basically useless, except to see AI cars gain or lose positions during a race.

The entire Drivatar system needs thrown out the window. It doesn’t work as intended. On paper it sounds great, but sadly that is not reality. If Turn 10 intends to keep it moving forward, it needs some serious work put in. Possibly suggestions, if we could Hire our own AI based on real life pace, and let the Hard Coded AI determine the majority of their movements / race craft. Maybe even let our AI Drivatars earn credits based on how clean we race during our single player races, encouraging a more civil Mutliplayer experience.

I thought I heard during a stream that Turn 10 intended on tweaking the AI. I just hope it isn’t a case where any improvements only make their debut in a possible FM8 down the line. Heck let us try out the improvements or tweaks during a future update. Kind of like the experimental Drag Update. I don’t even care if it releases bugs into the game. At least you tried that way making an improvement to an area that affects a large portion of the player base.

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FM7 has no competition on PC especially for gamepad drivers. If they did, I wouldn’t lobby for improvements. I bought a used 360 in 2014? IIRC, largely to play FM4. It had some problems, I played it anyway. FM7 has 95% of the same problems and many more.

I don’t think “brake checking” is a fake difficulty mechanic (rain and magic grass are); it’s their way of “turning slower laps”. Could be the Drivatar system, as you said. I played FM4’s career a few hundred hours, don’t remember anything like this.

Just to echo many of the replies to the OP. I find the AI much more agreeable than the human factor 9 times out of 10. Unless you are in a good solid room. I learn their tendencies and avoid race ending situations most of the time. When a crash does occur now when I’m running career Its usually because I have tried to fit my car into a space the size of a breadbox. The thread title should have been “Humans still drive like 4 year olds after 10 years”.

I really don’t understand why people are comparing AI experience to Multiplayer experience. They have absolutely nothing to do with one another, unless you still believe in Santa Claus. If you like comparing apples to oranges, so be it. The OP makes no reference to Multiplayer in their post. The current AI we have in FM7 does not offer a pleasant SINGLE PLAYER EXPERIENCE the majority of the time. Changing AI aggressiveness from OFF to ON or vice versa does not change anything. I once thought differently, but have since realized it was mostly a placebo effect.

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GT Racing Reborn career series. Race 6, turn 1, lap 1, at Monza.

Forza 7 Drivatar intelligence level:

Could also be a MP lobby most days.

True but you can’t fix stupid. These cars are all controlled by the game (except mine, obviously), so why can’t they simply avoid each other? It’s not like the game has no idea what they’re going to do. Their entire behavior is literally inside the game itself. There were never horrible pileups like this with the old Forza AI. But with the Drivatars, this sight is sadly quite common.

Can we turn this thread into a “best pic of AI wrecking itself” contest? :smiley:

It’s the same deal with normal steering and yaw assist. Everything the car does is because of the physics. Why not use the 2 front wheels, that work for everyone in real life, to control the yaw of the car with intelligent, predictive, weight/yaw-tracking algorithms when necessary, rather than injecting non-physics into the physics?

Has anybody compared the difference between career series drivatars & freeplay drivatars? If I wasn’t out of town right now I would do it myself. I ran through the whole career on short length races & the easiest possible drivatar difficulty. I only play freeplay mode but I have tested a few things to see the difference between the two game modes. In career mode the LMP1 drivatars navigate the carousel at Road America with no problem. In freeplay mode the only drivatars that DON’T run off the track at the carousel are the Nissan LMP1s. I should clarify in freeplay I don’t homologate the drivatars & the only cars they use are the 2015 & 2017 Porsche 919 LMP1s, 2014 Audi R18 LMP1, & the Nissan LMP1. I also only race against 9 opponents. If you were set up a freeplay race exactly as it is in career mode would the drivatars still have the turn 1 pile up?

I would bet there hasn’t been serious improvements to the Drivatars since they were introduced in FM5. They definitely have more issues with more opponents in the race. FM5 races usually had 12 or 16 cars, whereas FM6 and 7 always have 24 cars. I’ve noticed less pileups when running 12 or 16 cars rather than 24.

A major problem I’ve noticed with the Drivatars is that reducing their skill level makes them more careless . This means worse braking, slower reflexes, and more punts and running wide. Older Forzas, the AI skill level simply reduced their overall speed, so they still drove very cleanly, they just did it slower.

I remember now. FM4 AI was simple, almost pleasant to race against. FM7 AI is diabolically stupid.

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I remember people complaining about how docile the FM4 AI was. Many people voiced their frustration that races had just become glorified passing challenges. Well, be careful what you wish for. There needs to be some kind of middle ground. It’s tough because a good AI should be somewhat predictable, but not so regimented that every move can be telegraphed way in advance.

I’m fairly confident the AI has changed very little (if at all) since FM2. There was a pretty noticeable improvement between FM1 and FM2 (FM1 AI was atrocious), but since then it’s been the same late braking, inside line dive-bombing, smash-'em-up derby idiocy in every iteration.

I’m also convinced all the Drivatar system did was cut-and-paste gamertags over the old AI names. If your internet gets laggy while the game is loading the gamertag roster, your opponents will display the old “character” names, like M. Rossi and company. I suspect the game just compares how you drive to the old AI “characters” and tacks your gamertag onto the closest fit. Drive aggressively and put in fast lap times? The M. Rossi AI is renamed [Your Gamertag Here]. Drive just as fast but not like a jerk? It’s R. Takahashi (or whoever the fastest not-homicidal driver was) that “wears” your name.

At some point, they added power and grip multipliers to artificially boost the AI’s laptimes to something resembling what a skilled human is capable of. It’s a terrible solution, as it retains all the infuriating AI stupidity while making them potentially much faster than the player is allowed to be. Occasionally it works pretty well (they seem to plausibly emulate competent drivers at Spa, for example), but most of the time it either has no real impact or makes it obvious they’re cheating jerks (coughSebringcough).

That actually makes a lot of sense. A good portion of why the AI is so horrible is how poorly they handle close traffic, so having less of it to deal with should help a lot.

Which one are you?

My car is obscured by the pile near the center of the frame. I drove around this madness on the outside of the curve, '84 Skyline Super Silhouette

Heh. Gotcha. It’s a great shot; simultaneously entertaining and topically relevant.