Forza Motorsport reboot will include over 500 cars

Do you want the good news first or the bad news? The bad news is that we're going to have to wait a little longer for the already-quite-long-awaited reboot of Forza Motorsport. Where previously the game was touted for a Spring 2023 release date, that's been tweaked to a more nebulous '2023'.

The good news is, this game is going to be enormous featuring over 500 cars, at least 100 of which are new to the Motorsport side of the franchise. What's more, there are over 800 individual customisation parts to make them your own. This game is going to have more big numbers than Stephen Hawking's maths homework.

As you'd expect from Forza Motorsport, it's going to be a technical tour de force on the latest generation of Xbox consoles and PC, running at 60 frames per second in 4K resolution and including paintwork so authentically shiny you'll want to PPF your telly. Apparently at least part of this new level of reflective accuracy is the use of a bit of kit called a spectrophotometer, which we're pretty sure we last saw being waved around by Egon Spengler.

The audio is apparently getting a similar upgrade, ensuring that when you bolt a turbo onto your Frankenstein's monster of a racecar, you'll be able to hear authentic changes to the engine note all mixed in Dolby Atmos. Given that the new career mode is explicitly about car building, rather than car collecting, this stuff is going to feel all the more meaningful.

For us, though, it's the physics we're most intrigued by, an area in which the Motorsport games have been hit and miss. Developer Turn 10 claims it's a bigger advancement in physics than Forza Motorsport 5, 6 and 7 combined, but hasn't really explained how that's quantified. The proof will be when we have a pad, or more likely a force feedback steering wheel, in hand.

With Forza Horizon stealing the Motorsport games' thunder, Forza Motorsport definitely feels like a game with something to prove. If it needs a few more months in the oven to truly deliver on that promise, we'll happily wait. Well, having spent the last few hours salivating over those screenshots, mostly happily...