Forza Motorsport gameplay reveals new Builders Cup career mode

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Turn 10 has revealed the new Builders Cup career mode that will provide the basis for Forza Motorsport when the game launches across Xbox Series X|S and PC on 10th October.

The Builders Cup lends the single player career of Forza Motorsport a thoroughly new tone. While it will still have a collectathon element to it, thanks to featuring over 500 cars, Turn 10 describe a new structure to the actual racing that encourages familiarity and mastery of your chosen cars.

In the Builders Cup, you’ll acquire a car, take it to track in open practice, then challenge the grid to see how fast you are. Once you know how you stack up, you will then want to upgrade, improve and tune your car, before looking to dominate in a featured race.

Within the Builders Cup are different categories known as Tours, such as Vintage Hatch, Retro Tuners, Built for Sport, Super Sedans, and these will be updated and change over time as new cars and tracks are added to the game and Turn 10 looks to feature them. That’s right, Forza Motorsport will be treated as a live gaming racing platform, as opposed to a two-year standalone entry as previously seen.

Similar to Gran Turismo 7, Turn 10 is looking to tell a car’s story, so each Tour will have a cinematic intro that showcases the cars available for this series of races.

Within open practice you’re exposed to the new Car Mastery system, which analyses your driving through each corner and rates how close you’re getting to your maximum driving potential – though this will be affected by track conditions, time of day and more. Each lap, it compares it to your previous best, putting a simplified veneer to the kinds of data and performance analysis that real motorsports drivers use. You also gain car XP and level up in real time through this.

Once you’re happy, you can ‘Challenge the Grid’ for the featured race. This lets you choose a starting position, mix up the AI difficulty and rules to increase the race rewards compared to your chosen risk, as it were.

For car upgrades, you’re not buying car parts, but are earning them through levelling up the car and spending car points to unlock upgrades. Car Points are analogous to skill points in an RPG, but you can “respec” a car by removing parts and using Car Points elsewhere.

I’m torn on this one. It means that the credits you earn can then be saved up for cars instead of draining you coffers for car upgrades each time, but it also means that you can’t just quickly buy a car and upgrade it if you’re, for example, racing with a group of friends and have an idea for a quick championship. It could end up being more of a time drain if progression isn’t balances carefully.

All in all, though, it’s an interesting shift for the Forza Motorsport career, and I’m looking forward to seeing more on what they have in store for this game, in particular with the multiplayer options.

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