Pad sim steering is boring and inflexible

It feels like it has a deathgrip on it’s assumed line. Sim is feeling ok since the update, I’d just like it to lighten up a bit, especially on corner exits. I think when people complain about 1st-person cameras feeling stiff, what they really mean is the car’s motions feel stiff and lifeless. When I get in the zone driving IRL, everything is free-flowing, corner to corner. Forza’s still making me fight the controls more than the car itself! Can’t even get in there to have fun with the physics it if the controls hate fun this much.

Maybe you should work with some pro rally drivers, drifters, autocrosses and track racers, to re-program the steering to let the cars flow from corner to corner. It has a lot of trouble with exits and entries over crests. Just altogether it feels oblivious and boring. Sometimes I get oversteer at 1/4 stick, sometimes I can be in a steady corner with 100% stick input and less than 100% front tire friction. Why?! These problems show in grip driving alone, not even going into drifting or anything more exciting like rallycross or even dirt ovals. Forza Motorsport has so much potential, kind of. The steering chokes the physics as hard as Microsoft must be choking Turn 10, and it, it’s employees in turn. Possibly the biggest racing game ever made, runs like crap, omnipotent car list, tuning half-baked (no damper curve editing, no diff preload or types, toe tuning is sensitive to the 0.05 degree or farther yet we only have to the 0.1; GT sport now shows NF instead of actual rate, Forza should add that ASAP), gg I guess.

I’ve figured it out, tuning; Forza is inherently incompatible with realistic street setups, on multiple levels.

Edit: When I say I wish the steering was tuned for a driver proficient in all fields, there are 2 problems.

  1. There are already a number of proficient drivers in Forza! They’ve tuned themselves to extract the most from Forza’s physics, and now the steering is as much tuned to work with them. What if I want to play my own way? Not to accuse the physics of being so haphazard, that this way is the only way that might ever work. Every game/sim faces that at times, truly.

  2. There is enough overlap between those fields/disciplines, meaning 1 steering mode could not appeal to all requests in the same race, except perhaps a race/drift mode, which would be easiest to define active toggles. I.e., 1 second handbrake and right stick, followed by gentle left stick, game engages the steering lookahead mode for drift. Or, design the grip racing modes to allow subtle opposite lock, i.e., trail braking with the rear end hanging on by a thread, steering crossing just over center gently at times to guide the weight in. Other possibilities include assist modes (grip/drift/rally/etc), or steering behavior modifiers inside car tuning. This would allow preset values for stock, street, sport, drift, and rally suspensions (Forza Motorsport would be awesome with some rallycross) to enhance pick-up-and-play factor.

Edit 2: Thinking about using the word gently twice… There is more room to use various speeds of inputs to invoke various behaviors from the steering. Often I move quickly and am disappointed to find it’s still in slow mode. Sometimes I want to make small corrections, particularly on corner entry or exit, and it’s too fast or too intense. It’s ironic too that the wheel support is now good, according to many, yet I’m asking for a better pad experience. I appreciate tuning, cars in general, and the feeling of racing. Not the “fake difficulty” of fighting with a gamepad, because the ones responsible for the game weren’t interested in putting in the work to make it play well. That said, I’m not greatly interested in undertaking such a task myself. I assume some work has gone into Forza since FH2, the last version I had any experience with before FH4 and FM7, and it hasn’t been proportioned heavily enough on playability (NOT “dampening car yaw inertia” like normal steering; that really fixed the problem)… imo.