Forza Motorsport: the Blind accessibility review
Simply put, the world’s first blockbuster Racing game playable by the Blind!
Hello, dear readers! My name is Victor, and I am a totally blind gaming, technology, and entertainment journalist. I am also an ambassador for universal design, an accessibility consultant, advocate and tester.
Forza is one of the most recognizable and loved franchises in the gaming industry. With a history spanning almost 20 years and with tens of millions of dedicated fans all over the world, this racing simulator from Turn10 Studios remains a staple of quality for the Xbox brand. Last week, the wonderful people at Xbox Nordics invited me to take part in the Forza Motorsport early review program and you can imagine that I was delighted to check out the game before release, especially since Xbox and Turn10 Studios advertised it as blind accessible.
I’ll say this right from the start so that it’s clear. Forza Motorsport is indeed playable by blind gamers and should be the gold standard for any and all racing games from now on when it comes to accessibility and approachability.
Before I move on to the actual review, I just want to tell you that I played a lot of games on Xbox before going blind. I purchased my own Xbox 360 Arcade in 2008 with money loaned from my friend Cosmin, after another friend left his 360 with me on one weekend when he was going out of the city. Those things happened more than 15 years ago and I can still remember them like it was yesterday. I am a huge fan of Gears of War, Fable, Forza Motorsport and I even played some Halo, so you can imagine that I spent many days of my life gaming on Xbox. I also had a beautiful Limited Edition Forza Motorsport 5 Xbox One, which I think was blue.
By the time I got the Limited Edition Forza Motorsport 5, my vision had already started to deteriorate and I realized that I was no longer able to play racing games. Of course, this was absolutely devastating for me as I loved Forza Motorsport and had played it for hundreds of hours on Xbox 360.
I hope that you can understand my excitement when I learned that this year’s Forza Motorsport would include a lot of accessibility features. But that was also said about Forza Horizon, and although the game may be OK for some impaired or disabled players, for me as a totally blind individual it wasn’t. Hopefully PlayGround Games can take a look at what Turn10 Studios and Brandon Cole did with Forza Motorsport and maybe they will also improve accessibility in Forza Horizon 5. But let’s get back to our review because I have a lot of good news to share with you.
Cars, Tracks and Game Modes
We all know that Turn10 Studios can create some of the most immersive and technologically superior racing experiences as they are definitely experts of the automotive industry. Their passion and love for cars is evident every second that you are in one of their games and that’s also the case with this new Forza Motorsport.
At first glance, the new Forza Motorsport includes all the game modes that we are used to from previous titles. We have a campaign, public and private multiplayer, time attack and free roam. In my time with the game, I actually tried many of them, except for the multiplayer.
Forza Motorsport comes with over 500 insanely detailed cars, everything from compacts to exotic models, from gas guzzlers to electric vehicles that will reach top speeds in just a few seconds. Each of these can be customized, personalized, tuned and upgraded. The Builders Cup Career Mode is an all new, single-player car building experience with over 800 performance upgrades that will allow and encourage any car enthusiast to build the racing machine of their dreams.
For those of you who want to take competitive racing to the next level, we have Featured Multiplayer Events in which you can compete with friends in a race weekend. There are also other single player activities where you can jump directly in the car that you want and race it on your favorite track.
Speaking of tracks, in Forza Motorsport there are 20 completely rebuilt tracks from around the world with multiple layouts, including 5 never-before-seen circuits in a Motorsport game. Each of them features fully dynamic time-of-day with changing weather conditions, actual living crowds, and race surfaces that react to temperature changes. This means that every lap that you complete will be different from the previous one and from others you will get to experience.
I love the fact that audio descriptions give us an idea about the weather conditions, the time of day and the overall location for the race. Also, before each event we get to do a few practice laps to familiarize ourselves with the track.
Gameplay and Presentation
The gameplay feels great, the difficulty can be customized as per the player’s skills, the haptics of the Xbox controller raise the level of immersion and the fantastic sound design blends perfectly with state-of-the-art graphics to deliver the best and most realistic driving experience possible.
The new Forza Motorsport is a gorgeous game! I am blind, but players who can see will get to experience exciting photorealistic graphics with real-time ray tracing on and off the track. Alina told me that this is the best looking racing game she ever saw and definitely the title with the best graphics on Xbox Series X.
Excellence in Accessibility
With Forza Motorsport, the fantastic people at Turn10 Studios and Brandon Cole, the blind award winning accessibility consultant, decided to put accessibility in the forefront of the experience and thus we can customize all the options right from the beginning. From the start screen, the narrator is automatically enabled and we can press X for Accessibility/Settings. After that, at any point we can also select Settings from the main menu, any Pause menu or Pre-race menu and adjust all aspects of the game as per our needs and preferences.
The menus are clean, modern and intuitive. It was very easy for me to remember where a specific option is located and with just a few taps of the Xbox Elite controller I was able to adjust it.
Forza Motorsport also comes with a revolutionary accessibility feature set called Blind Driving Assists. BDA was built for players who are blind or have low vision and took years of research and direct feedback from Brandon Cole and others from the Gaming & Disability community in order to perfect it. This game has everything: menu narration, audio descriptions, text to speech, speech to text, announcer on track to tell us what’s coming next, exactly like in a rally game and of course the iconic rewind feature that allows us to undo a mistake.
As I already said above, Forza Motorsport is fully playable for gamers without sight, totally blind, living with low vision and even has one touch driving for low mobility players. The Blind Driving Assists unsurprisingly rely heavily on stereo panning and have been optimized for headphone listening. In addition, you will need to be patient while playing the game as there is a learning curve that we need to master in order to conquer the track using audio cues, but after spending over 25 hours with FM I can confirm that everything works as advertised. I know you heard this before when Forza Horizon 5 was released some time ago, but I can promise you that I actually played the game on my own and did not ask for any assistance from someone sighted.
Blind and low vision players can customize their racing experience with granular adjustments at every level and aspect of the gameplay.
I recommend that you try to turn systems on or off and use the dedicated volume and pitch controls for each assist to adjust the audible cues to your liking. I also encourage you to listen carefully to all the tool tips available as the screen reader conveys them quite nicely and I found them extremely helpful.
We have the option to choose our own combination of enabling braking, steering, and throttle assists to reduce the number of simultaneous inputs required. These driving assists will allow us to customize our driving experience and play with as few or as many assists as we wish.
I won’t lie to you, this is not easy, but it’s not supposed to be.
I still need to train myself to drive by sound and not by sight. You need to take your time, experiment with assists and sound cues in order to see what works for you. Even if you enable the one touch driving features, you will still be able to take control of the car at all times and every input that you press on the controller will be reflected on the track.
I am super happy that Xbox and Turn10 Studios decided to collaborate with Brandon and other consultants in order to ensure that this Forza Motorsport is playable by blind gamers all over the world. Brandon has a fantastic track record when it comes to blind accessibility consulting and for me this was a clear signal that Xbox and the developer meant business and wanted to deliver the best and most inclusive experience possible.
There are many accessibility consultants and even influencers who talk a lot about how they play games or how to make a game accessible, but right now I think that Brandon Cole is one of the very few who actually did something about it. From the first moment when I learned that he was involved with this project, I knew I could rest easy because we would have a game that we could finally play.
I used to spend a lot of time in Forza Motorsport before going blind, starting on the Xbox 360 in 2007 and it was great to be able to return to this series that I love so much. Thank you Xbox, thank you Turn10 Studios and thank you Brandon! You made it possible for me to race along the track once again even though now I’m blind. I’ll be forever grateful to everyone involved with this game!
Conclusion
Forza Motorsport is the game fans were waiting for since FM7 was released 6 years ago. 500 beautiful cars, 20 challenging tracks, insane customization, personalization and tuning, dynamic weather that affects all aspects of the game, superb graphics, excellent sound design and the inclusion of accessibility features make this one the best Forza yet!
This game deserves many awards for innovations in accessibility and I hope that the excellent work did by the developers and the consultants will be recognized properly. Regardless whether you play Forza with one assist turned on, all of them or none of them, the most important thing is that you can do it your way and you will have fun while doing it.
The Race Continues
Forza Motorsport was designed as an evolving racing platform and will continue to expand with new cars, tracks, career tours and online events to give players a steady flow of new challenges and gameplay experiences on a monthly basis.
Forza Motorsport launches on October 10, 2023, on Xbox Series X|S, Windows 10 and 11 PCs via the Microsoft Store and Steam, and with Xbox Game Pass, PC Game Pass, and support for Cloud Gaming (Beta). The Forza Motorsport Premium Edition allows early access beginning on October 5, 2023.
Score: 10 / 10 – Perfect
Review copy provided by Xbox Nordic
Victor Dima
Latest posts by Victor Dima (see all)
- Ubisoft shares Accessibility Spotlight and Story Trailer for Assassin’s Creed Shadows - Jan 24, 2025
- After two years of using it daily, I am still very much in love with Parallels Desktop - Jan 7, 2025
- Naughty Dog announces new Sci-fi game Intergalactic: The Heretic ProphetWatch trailer and read all about it - Dec 14, 2024
