Just played the demo. Lots of fun drifting those turns in that track!

Flipping the car just looks silly and it doesn't help that you can get back to the driving by just using throttle and turning the steering wheel a bit. AI seems to also love trying to bump me off the track :/ I made them pay for that later on when I tried out the damage.. I think you still can't completely destroy your car. No matter what I did it still was moving forward.

Replays are quite nice. You can use triggers to make slow motion moments like in GRID. Not sure if this was in F2.

Bah, no Brutal Legend demo on my shitty live.

Ok, i got hold of the demo without goin gold, slightly more buggy and longer load times, but ive taken that into account while forming my opinion.

The game is definately a generation ahead of 2, it looks so much better, runs so much smoother and the AI is very impressive.
I was critical of the screenshots posted earlier, and i think rightly so, they look absolutely hideous and are covered in aliasing issues, often they looked almost xbox like. However i retract the opinion from them based on the demo i have actually played.
The graphics during gameplay are very solid, cars are detailed and very beefy and AA is most definately present removing my biggest issues with 2. During replay, it's a bit of a mixed bag, often falling short of the gameplay graphics, you can get closeups on areas of the car that they are best not letting us see, for instance a hood cam looking back into the cockpit shows the fact that the interior is not being rendered, or certainly not being rendered to a sufficient standard, it refuses to be lit even when facing directly into the sun which makes the driver sitting there even more odd looking.

Also the FM3 cockpit is possibly the worst this generation, lighting is off, positioning is off and the inability to look all around the cockpit is inexcusable, especially when they have teased us with the awesome renders and "screenshots" of the full interiors. The cockpit view teased in the beginning could have been one of the greatest this gen, shadowing seemed to be more realistic, with stuff actually being blacked out as it is in real life shadow and the positioning seemed to be so much better, offering a much wider and more encompasing view of the cockpit. I still believe the current cockpit is a result of trying to achieve better performance than improving the gameplay experience because the cockpit in shift is sooooooo much better and creates a far more fun experience.

I DO think this will be a day 1 purchase, especially as GT5 has been confirmed as not shipping till next year, there ARE issues here, but they have made a reasonable effort to improve things from FM2. I just hope they dont try and screw us with DLC.

Push up on the right stick, then move left and right to look around the cockpit.

Yea, i know that, but u can only look a bit to the left and a bit to the right, lookin too far it just changes the view to like the hood cam where u see none of the car. Plus youre too far forward, you only see the very top of the dash.

Ok the front page is a major fanboy fuckup so I'll post it here. The leaderboard is up (finally) and I made my first benchmark time with the RSR, all aids off but with automatic (since I can't map the controls to my preference). I managed to pull off a 1:01,444 certified time. Place 149 on the scoreboard still 2 seconds away from the top 10, I doubt I can wear off that much with a manual transmission. :D

Post your times. :)

Just noticed you can race on an empty track. When you're about to select the track press Y for the leaderboard and A to race on it. I managed to chew off a bit of my time, it's 01:01,117 now, 210th place... but that's as much as I can push it. :(

Well, Forza 3 isn't a fun racer. And i don't think that the cockpits looks below SHIFT.

Cant believe how awesome this game is, the new physics system is brilliant, you can feel the weight of the cars much more. A.I is great too, they really try to hold their positions when you come up behind them on the harder difficulty.

You all need to see this Trailer, easily the best one yet with some truly spectacular drifitng!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Znmb3BtsGos&feature...

I can't believe this shit. I pointed this out first thing in this thread and other forums, I posted about it but the fanboys were just in the usual "It's just a trailer, it's just a shot, it shouldn't be lit...", now what, "it's just a demo"? There is now interior shadowing, there is basically no interior unless you are in the interior view or the menus. This takes away so much from the look of a game. I've been saying this forever.

That is total bullshit. Everything else is pretty much what I expected as far as graphics go (a bit more jaggies too, but no biggie there). After playing the demo there is no doubt in my mind that GT5 will/is the best looking racing game out there. Considering more cars on track, what PD is doing is pretty damn special.

I think Forza looks great, it plays awesome as well, and has some nicely detailed tracks (perhaps better than GT), but credit where credit is due. Other "little things" that just add up are no shift animations (or bad drive animations as they are now). It just adds up I think. I guess that's where 5 years of development start to show. And well, that is visuals......we'll see about everything else :D

GT does look amazing.

The hand animations of the driver inside the car are also noticeably better. Remember that initially leaked list of stuff that may or may not make Forza 3? They stated something about in cockpit driver animations being taken out.

Again, shift animations not being there? Whatever fine, let it be. But I'm disgusted by the fact that they've been using the same awful cockpit trick since FM1. That saves them from obviously rendering anything substantial in the interior, and saves them from rendering shadowing. Look at the cockpit in replays/gameplay, it's freaking pitch black, in that sense, I see no improvement since FM1.

It is just concerning because I think they think it looks right. When FM1 was out it looked bad, when FM2 was out it looked bad, and when FM3 comes out it'll look bad. You don't see this in *any* of the great looking racing games out there, DIRT doesn't do it, or PGR3, 4, GRID, GTHD, GTP, GT5. That is my most disappointing aspect of the graphics actually, and probably the only major one. Again, this to me brings down the overall eye candy quite bit.

Man... those damn other cars racing dirty as hell.

I've never been run off the road so viciously before lol They don't even attempt to play fair, they're just outright dirty lol.

I wish I was able to capture this one replay.. it was the most amazing set of drifting ever to hold onto third place. Clearly wasn't done on purpose though, I dropped too many gears and I went into this wild drift around the corner, and I felt I was loosing too much control so I quickly rose my gear back up to about 4, drove for a bit, and then immediately dropped it back down to 2. Looked amazing in the replay :)

Touching on replays, they have been improved immensely, they are watchable now :D

Drifting and/or recovering from your wheels spinning out seems abit too easy... other than that i really enjoyed the demo.

Lebato, im glad you agree with me, was expecting to get some flak for posting the obvious. The thing is, with all the shots theyve shown up till now theyve shown the capability for the cockpit to be rendered from outside the car, remember the closeups of the wingmirror on the ferrari etc... Thats why i thought when it didnt show the cockpit from outside that it was from different builds.
Turns out theyve been bullshitting all along and its either photo mode putting in FAR more detail, or they were outright lying and were doing full on rendering outside the game engine. I think it's one trick too far tbh, the game looks great otherwise, except for the cockpit view as i said, but the whole illusion is lost when u cant see the car interior from the exterior. I would trade almost anything for them to do cockpit rendering, tire flex he obvious pointless addition (it adds something, but only if u look for it), lower detail cars (10x as many polies and STILL no cockpit?).

Im still gonna get the game, it does look great in 80% of situations, but as soon as you swing the camera round the illusion is lost.

Wow, congratulations, we are one in a million--believe me.

I wasn't expecting PM graphics, that'd be dumb. But I was expecting a rendered interior......at least in replay cam. It's not even there. Gameplay? Ok, it's fine, won't see it much, takes away something, but if it is to keep the game at 60......alright, go ahead. Now, not even replays where you get to see these details, it just looks wrong. I was counting on at least replays having it, I couldn't really tell from the videos that we had (gameplay I knew it was out). I was hoping specially after Che once again made an ass out of himself by saying they do not swap cars with a higher LOD one for photmode. And I'm not talking about changing the LOD depending on how close the camera is, I'm talking about entirely swapping the model.

They manage to trick a bunch of people because during the countdown for the race the game is still using the awesome model. And it's funny too because the camera zooms in from behind, you can see the interior, and then it's gone when you start the race.

Of course I'm buying this game too, but let's tell it how it is. Still looks great, and nothing about the gameplay has me disappointed, or sound, or whatever.

C'mon people, come down. Lebato, you totally overreact (like every Forza thread). Just play the demo a bit more. Most cars just looks awesome. The Mitsubishi Evo looks incredible. There are also some other awesome AI cars, you can't drive in the demo. For example the Porsche Cayenne. Just play a bit more with the demo and don't judge on your first impression. And there will be always some car models that doesn't catch up with other car models.

What irks me is that T10 boasted and touted 10x the polygons in nearly every press event, and those high poly models are only used for the menu select and photomode. The actual in-game racing models don't even look like a huge step up from forza 2 in terms of polygons.

http://i34.tinypic.com/24noew7.jpg
http://i38.tinypic.com/51zh52.jpg

It looks better in terms of contrast and lighting, but the car models look practically identical.

I"m with you guys, sadly. The amount of BS they have spewed up till now is just mind blowing. The game still plays great, but the graphics are nowhere near where they were boasting they would be.

There is a huge difference in the showroom models and the actual models used in game play, the Mini is the best example of this. Most people focus on headlights, but that's not even the most blatant issue. During the countdown you can clearly see white marking on the back window, when the game switches to game play model, they are completely gone from the back window, its almost as if its a different car.

It's also pointless having interiors if you can't even see them in the car. I even remember Che saying they lightened the windows so you can see the interior better, and they are lighter, in photo mode pictures, but in actual game play they are still just as dark as always.

I don't think I can get any more disappointed than I am with this game. As a Forza fan, I'm still picking up the game cause it plays great, but the BS needs to stop.

I don't know, I've seen more than enough actual gameplay footage to think that's a bit overboard. Not every model is going to look amazing, but there are a number of models that are out of this world during actual gameplay, the reventon for one. To me anyway.

It looks pretty good but not as good as i was expecting from all the bragging T10 was doing. Wish my 360 was working so i could dl the demo, i haven't played a racing sim since gt4 and i need a fix lol :(:(:(

Well, you definitly see them when driving in cockpit view and you will see them for cabriolet.In newer gameplay vids from fujimi kaido track you clearly see that's the case.

Looks like Turn 10 went down the same road as PD in terms of LOD variations, the drop is bigger in GT5p but atleast the cockpits are visible in game and i'm sure the Hisghest LOD is used during replays which just isnt the case in Forza 3. Its pretty clear that GT5 has the visual egde on the car models in Photomode, Replays and Ingame. However, in my opinion, the cars still look great and I think T10 have made up for it with the beautiful stunning enviroments they have created in this game, they are the best i've seen in any racer.