Forza Motorsport by Turn 10 Studios has been a long time coming. The latest entry in the franchise, Forza Motorsport 7, was released in late 2017. That means it's now almost six years since Turn 10 launched a game, a highly unusual timeframe given that the Redmond-based developer had previously released seven games in the span of twelve years.

　　The new game is considered to be a soft reboot, hence the lack of a number in its title. Turn 10 announced it during Microsoft's 2020 Xbox Games Showcase event, and early playtesting for participants in the Forza Feedback Panel began in the first half of 2021. The developer took a different approach this time around, involving the community from the very beginning of the process. However, there's little doubt that this is taking longer than fans expected or would have liked.

　　Still, according to Creative Director Chris Esaki, the leap in the physics simulation will be the biggest ever for a Forza Motorsport title.

　　I've been kind of trying to think about how to how to quantify this for for everyone here without actually getting your hands on it, so to put the physics work into perspective, the changes we've made from Forza Motorsport 7 till now are more than the changes that we've made from Forza Motorsport 4 through 7. It's basically a huge generational leap coming to the game.

　　From the very first Forza Motorsport till Forza Motorsport 7, our tire collision model itself had a single point of contact with the track surface and moved at about and refreshed at 60 cycles a second or 60 hertz. Our new model, this hopefully will give you an idea of how much has changed, has eight points of contact with the track surface and is running at 360 cycles a second or 360 hertz. If you're doing the math there, eight points of contact versus one, 360 hertz versus 60, it's a 48x fidelity jump in a single tire collision itself. There's just a huge amount of work that has really paid off for us. All the feedback that we got from this last play test is that you can really feel the track surface a lot more and how the cars handle, there's just a lot more communication to the player and the feeling of the tires on the track is really insane, it makes you more informed.

　　When will we be able to play it, though? Well, Turn 10 did provide a very brief update in the most recent Forza Community Hubs update dedicated to player feedback. They said they are focused on polishing ahead of the release of Forza Motorsport scheduled for later this year.

　　It sounds like the game will be launching in late 2023, as suggested by rumors from a couple of months ago. A release date could finally be unveiled at Microsoft's Xbox Games Showcase on June 11th, likely targeting October or November since there is no first-party Xbox launch on the schedule in those months.

　　Feature-wise, Forza Motorsport promises over 500 real world cars, 20 different environments, dynamic weather (including track temperatures) and time of day, real-time ray tracing, and car damage so detailed to include individual scratches on the bodywork. The game will be released on PC and Xbox Series S|X.