Forza Motorsport
Release: May / Platform: Xbox & PC
Turn 10 has been working for almost six years (!) on the eighth installment in their hyper-popular racing series and all this time they have spent rebuilding the rub, from the ground up. Every single track is rebuilt from laser scanned originals, every single car has been rebuilt from the ground up to increase the level of detail by nearly 200% and the physics system is completely new, in this game. In collaboration with an as-yet-unnamed tire manufacturer, Turn 10 has modeled tires that deform and wear in a way that the developers themselves say beats all today’s racing simulators. In all previous Forza games as well as in Gran Turismo 7, 60 calculations of tire pressure, wear, slip angle and friction are made per second. In the upcoming Forza Motorsport (8) there are 360 calculations per second and the real-time deformation will apparently be on a level of its own.
Test Drive Unlimited: Solar Crown
Release: 2023 / Platform: Multiformat
I hope and I’m allowed to assume that the biggest reason why WRC Generations was just a tired, lazy, boring repeat of what was WRC 9 and WRC 10 – Stava’s Test Drive. Namely, KT Games is not a direct giant studio and thus has a limited amount of labor and I suspect that the vast majority of them are working and have been working for several years with the upcoming Test Drive Unlimited: Solar Crown which, according to persistent rumors, will be released in July for all of today’s platforms . We will get to drive around a 1:1 version of a Chinese island and just like in Test Drive Unlimited and its sequel, it’s about open world racing with gorgeous graphics and the world’s most exotic carts.
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Racing sport
Release: 2023 / Platform: PC
We don’t know much about the team behind the upcoming German upstart Rennsport, except that they are made up of “former racing pros, esports pros and sim racing fanatics” and that they’ve been working hard for several years to offer a racing simulator that can compete against giants such as Iracing, Automobilista and Assetto Corsa Competizione. Rennsport will be a free game with the possibility to later buy cars and tracks, it is based on Unreal Engine 5 and will focus primarily on GT3 and GT2 racing. The developers claim that modding will be possible, which according to us at Gamereactor sounds strange considering how Unreal Engine 5 is structured (and protected by various licenses) but time will tell how that thing turns out. We here at the editorial office have driven around 100 laps around Hockenheim in an early beta version and believe that Rennsport promises well.
Disney Speedstorm
Release: 2023 / Platform: Multiformat
The studio behind the monster hit Disney Dreamlight Valley delayed its long-awaited Mario Kart clone, which was actually supposed to be rolled out on game shelves at the end of November last year, and now it is “spring 2023” that applies. Speedstorm is, as I said, a shameless Mario Kart copy where Nintendo’s corpulent piper has been replaced by Disney’s most beloved characters such as Mickey, Donald, Wall-E and Woodie and we will of course compete on tracks inspired by all sorts of Disney movies. Speedstorm will be released to all imaginable platforms, it will have full crossplay support and it will be free-2-play with the option to buy and unlock more characters.
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Wreck creation
Release: 2023 / Platform: Multiformat
The folks at Three Fields Entertainment are the same people who created Burnout 2 as well as Burnout 3: Takedown and they’re currently working on the sequel to Dangerous Driving, which itself was kind of a spiritual sequel to Burnout 3, phew! We’ll get exactly the same things we got in Criterion’s old classics where lightning-fast road racing from point A to B is all about, including wild collisions with slow motion replays and body parts scattering like birthday confetti.
Indycar
Release: 2023 / Platform: Xbox & PC
Motorsport Games really hasn’t done very many appreciated things during their time as owners of Rfactor 2 studio 397 and their official Nascar title “Nascar Ignition” is one of the most maligned, hackneyed racing games released in the last ten years. That being said, there are expectations for their upcoming Indycar game which is based on an official license and will of course simulate the entire upcoming 2023 season of America’s answer to Formula 1.
EA Sports WRC 2023
Release: 2023 / Platform: Multi
As we report on in installments, the rumor regarding Codemasters’ next rally title seems to be correct. The team behind Dirt Rally 2.0 started the development of Dirt Rally 3.0 as early as March 2019 and as late as November 2021 the game was renamed (internally) to EA Sports WRC 23 and Codemasters started grinding on a game mode where we will get to build our own rally crew and there is also talk that the game will be Unreal Engine 5-based with clearly longer distances than in Dirt Rally 2.0. Considering that this year’s WRC season will offer Rally Mexico, Croatia, Japan, Kenya, Sardinia, Portugal, Chile and Estonia, we can probably be pretty sure that all of these countries will be in the finished game, plus Sweden , Finland, Greece and Monte-Carlo from Dirt Rally 2.0. The rumor claims that it will be released this spring, which makes us here at the Gamereactor editorial office completely hysterical.
Stunt Party: World Tour
Release: 2023 / Platform: PC
We here at Gamereactor would be lying if we said we weren’t very excited to test this game, which is being developed by a newly started studio and financed by the all-Swedish Embracer Group. Stuntfest looks like a mix between Flatout and Destruction Derby plus it’s a battle royale game where 100 scrap cars with drivers start in an open world to eventually crown a single winner, and it looks sweet. Sheet metal must be broken and various giant jumps must be treated, and letting the layout from Fortnite or Playerunknown’s Battleground cross-fertilize the racing genre is something that we look forward to.
EA Sports F1 2023
Release: October / Platform: Multiformat
It is rumored that this year’s Formula 1 title signed by Codemasters will be the first based on Unreal Engine 5 and thus the Ego engine has been scrapped. Which is not a day too soon as that game engine was originally designed for the Xbox 360 generation and has since been improved and upgraded in batches. F1 2022 was not an ugly game, it lacks detail in both the graphics and above all the physics, and with today’s rendering techniques it shouldn’t be impossible to develop a Formula 1 game that looks like photorealism, close-on. The VR support is something that many players have criticized in F1 2022 as well, something that Codemasters should work on just like with the tire physics. It is also clear that we will be getting the next version of the “Braking Point” story mode (which was the single best part of F1 2021) in EA Sports F1 2023.
