Forza Motorsport 5 will require players to connect to Xbox Live and download an extra content update on day one, developer Turn 10 Studios announced today.
“So when you first boot up the game, we’re going to ask you to log in,” said Turn 10’s Dan Greenawalt to IGN. “And when you log in you’re going to get the Drivatars and you’re also going to get a whole bunch of content: tracks and cars. Our production schedule is such that we are putting them in as late as possible and that means making them free as downloadable content on Day One.”
“[The DLC] is required content to play the game. We basically have designed the game to work with all that content no matter how late is coming in, in order to make the biggest game possible.”
The Forza 5 disc will only contain parts of the game data — in order to get the “complete” the game, players will need to download the DLC. Greenawalt says Forza is like a “fridge,” and players will need to fill that fridge with content once they purchase the game by downloading the update.
Thankfully, the DLC will be free.
When Microsoft originally back-tracked on the Xbox One’s original, unpopular DRM policies, they promised that the only time you’d need to connect the system to the internet was during its initial set-up. I suppose that’s still technically true, but players with bandwidth capped internet or unreliable connections might want to wait until Microsoft reveals the size of Forza 5’s mandatory DLC before they buy the game. It seems sort of strange that the full game isn’t actually on the retail disc, but given the rushed development schedule of launch titles and the time (and money) that producing a game on this scale requires, it’s understandable that Turn 10 wasn’t able to include the full game on physical discs, which have to be produced well in advance of the game’s actual launch date. With that said, I really hope that mandatory, day one DLC like this remains limited to Forza 5 and doesn’t become common practice with next-gen titles.
Chris Hernandez
Wow, now developers don’t even need to finish games before they sell them you. Great.
Vinny Parisi
Unfortunately, it’s been that way with a number of examples this past generation as well. I imagine half the fun of billing games as “services” instead of products is that they can be excusably defective, so long as they are eventually fixed.