FM4 No Porsche cars in Forza 4

[Derek McCord]

Well it was finally announced today that Porsche will not be in the new game. Apparently the doucebags at EA have exclusive rights for the Porsche brand. They game to an "agreement" for Forza 3, but apparently no agreement could be made for the fourth edition. They will have Ruf branded cars but that means that we will not have any Porsche racing cars, so no 962/956 cars or even 917s. Wow EA is really going bad here, you can't play a used game online without paying an extra 10 bucks and now they are restricting car brands for games? The console video game market is becoming very ugly.

 

[Dan Smith]

yeah it quite surprising. didnt gran turismo have ruf too at some point?

 

[EIF]

Its a shame Porsche isn't in FM4, they were the best cars to drive in FM3.

 

[William Levesque]

We should boycott EA Games

Greedy buisness men, that's all they are...

 

[Dylan Hember]

Its a big shame. I cant even imagine it without the name "Porsche" in the game

 

[Kevin Watts]

Thats a fantastic piece of marketing, play the victim, the yokels break out the burning torches aand pitchforks to march on EA again and you get great publicity shortly before you launch your new title.

While we respect EA’s need to run their business as they see fit, we’ve regularly collaborated in the past and hope we can find our way back to that approach. Forza had the exclusive license for all Ferrari cars, for example, on the Xbox and PC platforms. But at the end of the day, we’ve always found that we just weren’t willing to block other racing games from having Ferraris outright, as we believed that this would do nothing but hurt the racing ecosystem.

So they have never turned down a developer wanting to use Ferrari in their game? do any of you really believe that? this is a Microsoft game studio and they are every bit as competitive as EA or any other developer. Why would you pay good money for an exclusive license covering not only the XBOX but PC as well and then just have this hippy "hey man everyone can use Ferrari" fantasy portrayed in this press release?

I'll carry on buying EA games as I will Turn 10 games but this kind of devisive press release along with the similar barbs aimed at GT5 last year just create divides in the racing community in my opinion.

 

[John Martin]

EA makes crap games anyhow.

 

[Mr Whippy]

They are all as bad as each other.

Community content all the way in my view. We just need a decent engine to stuff it all into... hurry up and finish rFactor 2

Dave

 

[Kevin Watts]

I prefer to see content from industry professionals with input from manufacturers and teams rather than perfomance dreamed up in someone's bedroom based on extensive viewing of Top Gear.

 

[Mr Whippy]

You mean like the McLaren F1 road car in Shift2 that will go through Bruxelles on Spa at wide open throttle in 2nd...

Or the cars in Polyphony GT4 that get more understeer with a stiffer rear ARB, or the power-oversteering FWD cars.


Even higher end racing games have some questionable parts to them. Ever checked the track meshes in GTR2? Entry into the same Bruxelles bend in GTR2 is modelled very bumpy, so driving it in a higher end simulator shakes you to pieces and see's the car airborne... so GTR2 clearly wasn't THAT accurate, and had concessions for being a 'game'
Good consistent content can often be mistaken for quality in isolation. Consistency is a great feature of commercial products, but often the actual technical quality is a bit iffy.


I'll agree manufacturer input is great for the artistic development, but that seems to be where it can end. Ie, sounds, meshes, basic technical information.
Todays games look and sound brilliant. All part of having access to the information they need.

Shift 2 had the ability to have actual suspension geometries added for each car, but instead they just use generic types. That is a great shame considering they work so closely with the manufacturers. I've seen more detailed community projects!

So commercial stuff is looking better and sounding better, but the actual driving part hasn't really moved on with the new assets available. If anything we have seen a dumbing down of driving detail due to the console porting/sharing and the target demographic!




iRacing is perhaps the only really detailed professional industry development, but because it's all closed off data we can't even check to see HOW close it gets, or what short-cuts they have implemented... we can only trust it is accurate, or attempt to validate or invalidate what we get.


Going a bit off topic now... but the fundamental issue with professional developers is a profit margin for shareholders.

Technically, a community led game/sim with quality professional input over many years would far exceed what a commercial game ever could... getting there is the difficult bit
Things like rFactor 2 will *hopefully* be the catalyst to some great mods.


I will happily agree with you that a vast amount of community content is rather poor.


In any case, we will always get both. But I don't think the likes of GT5 or Forza4 and their future releases will give us what we really want.

Dave

 

[Kevin Watts]

The problem is very few rFactor mod makers get input from manufacturers and if we really want to go down the road of nitpickinng then rFactorCentral is full of examples. I'll still buy rFactor 2 and I'll of course buy Forza 4, I have the complete series of Forza and Gran Turismo sat on my gaming shelf but I got tired of sifting through the rubbish in the rFactor modding scene to find the gems.

 

[Ramon Alonso]

No Porsche, I guess it's all about the Benjamins, what a shame!

 

[Isaac Chavira]

Licensing is like 'Political Correctness' it just sucks.

 

[Kevin Watts]

I wish the car companies PR guys would have a bit more foresight and not sign these exclusive deals no matter if its EA or Turn10. Turn 10 or more correctly Microsoft did not open up a big cheque book for exclusive use of the Ferrari name on PC and XBOX just to give it away to anyone who asks like they maintain in that press release. You can be sure you'll be paying them very well to sub license which is why I don't believe the hippy mentality of "hey we own the license but you guys can come to us and we'll share it out man".

Exclusivity is a nice fat payment up front but with a bit of foresight I would hazard a guess that license's to EA, Turn 10, and the likes of Polyphony, iRacing, rFactor etc would have netted them more money even though aa non exclusive license would have been cheaper to buy.

 

[nylund]

I really don't care if Porsche drops out, since they are going to replace it with RUF. You get the Porsche looks and good racers anyways. I heard that Turn10 owns the rights to all Ferrari-related stuff... so maybe next EA's games are missing Ferraris, Fiats etc.