After months of waiting, a little time with some prerelease builds, and a slight panic over whether I'd actually get an Xbox One before January, last Friday saw the nice UPS man drop off the new console and a copy of Forza Motorsport 5. You may have already read our review of the game last week, but I'm Ars Technica's resident racer, so Gaming Editor Kyle Orland asked me to share my thoughts on Turn 10's latest racing opus.

In doing so, I've gone back to look at the glowing review I gave the previous installment, Forza Motorsport 4, just over two years ago. I was blown away by the previous game, unhesitatingly crowning it the king of the console racers. But that was then and this is now, and we're looking at a completely new console and a somewhat different marketplace mindset. Has Turn 10 managed to keep its crown, or are the hordes of Internet forum haters right to give the game a bad reception?

In short, FM5 is not as good as FM4 was at launch, but the previous game wasn't perfect on day one either. And no, FM5 is not as bad as GT5 was when it came out. There are several reasons why, and I think they're unfortunately indicative of a number of trends affecting the industry. We may have to start getting used to them.

The Good

Don't get me wrong—there is an awful lot to like about FM5, especially when you consider just how much of the game is completely new. For one thing, it looks stunning. All of the cars are modeled in extremely high resolution, and the Autovista feature of the previous version is available for every car, letting you explore each one up close and personal (although not with your hands via the Kinect). They sound great, too; I might not have the best home theater setup on the planet, but over DTS the game is fantastically immersive.

The tracks all look amazing. In FM4, some of the tracks seemed to be quite clearly carried over from an earlier time, and they were horribly washed out (I'm looking at you, Sebring and Laguna Seca). Now, running at 60 FPS in 1080p, you can pick out the individual blades of grass by the side of the track (and it looks like Indianapolis needs to bring the mower out because it's getting pretty tall). The inclusion of Spa Francorchamps, the legendary Belgian circuit, is a very welcome addition, as is Australia's Bathurst, which will be somewhat familiar to those of you who remember Blue Mountain in the original Forza Motorsport. The F1 circuit at Yas Marina in Abu Dhabi is as eye-catching as it is on TV, and the street circuit at Prague may in time become a worthy successor to the much-loved and now missing Maple Valley.

The virtual glare of the sunlight through certain corners is just as annoying as it is in real life, and even the occasional lens flare seems in place. Little details like the way the dashboards of some cars reflect in their windscreens are also very well done. The livery editor now includes a lot of pre-made finishes, from matte carbon fiber weave to polished brass or gold (in case you want to make a C-3PO car). I even enjoy the between-race contributions of Top Gear's presenters, something I didn't anticipate. I like the show, but I wasn't sure I'd enjoy their buffoonery every time I sat down for a session. Yet the intros to each racing series are very well done, with more than enough car nerdery in there for someone like me.

Then there's the completely new tire physics. Last time, much was made of the then-new physics model that Turn 10 built to incorporate data from Italian tire company Pirelli. Two years later and all that is out the window, replaced instead by data generated by Calspan, an aerospace and transportation research company based in Buffalo, New York. Even though Pirelli's data was good, it wasn't good enough for Dan Greenawalt and the Turn 10 team.

FM4's game engine allowed the developers to input Pirelli's raw testing data straight in, but the tire company wasn't able to control for the degradation in grip as the tires heated up or wore down. Calspan stepped in to help solve this interesting research challenge. Turn 10 shipped them a load of tires, which Calspan then took to the track, turning rubber into bits, bytes, and probably a fair amount of smoke.

The new physics are subtle but evident. I notice it most under heavy braking, when they'll heat up and lose grip, and overall I'd say the game feels even closer to the actual sensation of driving a car on a race track, with the pretty big caveat of not being able to play it with a steering wheel. The inclusion of a 2013 Formula 1 car, in the shape of the Lotus E31, blows any F1 game I've ever tried out of the water: Codemasters, you've been served.

The new cloud AI is also worth noting. If the cars you're racing against aren't living, breathing gamers somewhere else in the world, they're behaving as if they were. For a game that originally started as an AI project at Microsoft's research unit in Cambridge, UK, this seems like a natural progression.

Throughout the series, the AI has learned from each player's driving style, and at various times there have been "Drivatars" that one could send off to complete races in their place. That was always a local process though; my driving style taught my AI, and my Drivatar could race against AI on my console. As the cloud takes over, that has changed, and each player's data is fed back up to the servers where it's used to populate races everywhere and anywhere. Depending on the difficulty level, you'll probably see some of the people on your friends list as well as lots of random pubbies populating the course.

By and large this is a good thing, although I'm interested in revisiting the Drivatar system in a few months once people have spent a lot more time with the game. The first couple of days after the launch featured some pretty shoddy AI driving as the various Drivatars went off into the world based on a handful of laps. Even now I find myself racing with damage turned off because the chances of a giant accident at the first or second corner remain high. Lots of folks out there are really bad drivers, and even on a pretty high difficulty level it's not uncommon to see some behavior from your opponents that seems less suited to the racetrack and more to I-95 (I'm talking to you, Virginia).

Another neat touch is the way that Drivatar cars will pull paint jobs from the cloud, too (this can be disabled). Some of them can be shockingly bad (there are an awful lot of poo-brown liveries out there), but others are quite eye-catching. Once the Marketplace gets turned on, I'm sure it will help grow that virtual community.

The Bad

As I mentioned earlier, Internet forums across the world are alight with gripes and grouses. "They left out the Nurburgring Nordschleife." "Not enough cars." "I can't use my steering wheel." "They're nickel-and-diming me." These complaints are not without merit.

The omission of the 12.8-mile ribbon of road that snakes across the Eifel Mountains in Germany is hard to accept. Widely accepted as the most challenging race track on the planet, it has been a staple of both Gran Turismo and Forza for many years. Plenty of other Forza favorites are absent in FM5 as well. The 'Ring is coming back in January, by all accounts, and I'd be surprised if we don't see other tracks join it over time. Still, this is a topic I've discussed with creator Dan Greenawalt in the past, and unfortunately he says there's much less commercial pressure to create new tracks as DLC compared to cars.

Then there's the reduced car count. Porsche is AWOL again, presumably due to IP issues with EA (who holds an exclusive license to use the German cars in video games, unless it expired recently). But even compared to FM3, the choice of cars feels slight. This will no doubt change through the release of DLC, which Forza players should be no strangers to. We can hope for another Porsche expansion pack, but those of you who have come to expect 800 cars and 25 tracks every two years for $60 an installment are going to be disappointed.

Like many of you out there in gameforumland, I can't say I'm terribly happy about the fact that Microsoft decided to throw away any backward compatibility with Xbox 360 peripherals. I, too, have a fair amount 'invested' in a super-duper steering wheel/pedal/stand setup, for which the only saving grace is knowing that at least it should still work with Gran Turismo 6 (due out next month). Back in 2011, I noted how the game truly came alive with a decent force feedback wheel, and for the last few years I've played almost exclusively with one. Having to go back to using a controller is pretty jarring, and I am counting the days until Thrustmaster and Mad Catz release their Xbox One compatible wheels.

As our review noted, FM5 delivers haptic feedback via the controller triggers as well as through the grips of the controller, so you get some information about wheelspin under acceleration (right hand) or brake lockup (left hand). Still, there's no feedback for the steering. Maybe I could be incredibly precise with a thumbstick when I was in my early 20s, but in my opinion there is simply no substitute for the control a wheel gives you. Like the Drivatar issue, this is something I am looking forward to reassessing in a few months when the peripheral market has caught up.

A bunch of other small things irritate me. Voice commands were great in FM4 and worked from just about anywhere. Now that the Xbox One accepts a lot of system-level voice commands, there seem to be fewer ways to use FM5-specific commands (and then only on certain screens). There doesn't appear to be any way of tuning your car between races in a given series or even loading track-specific tuning setups (this is a horrible omission, Turn 10—please put it back, or tell me where it is in case I missed it).

I love the addition of some open wheel cars, presumably now possible due to the progress made in processing power. It's not that we couldn't have had them earlier, but rendering the suspension components moving at 60 FPS was probably the impediment until now (although intellectual property rights probably had a role, too). With IndyCars now in the game, it's a pity that there's only a single oval track on which to race them, and it still doesn't seem possible to tune different left- and right-side suspension settings (important if you're only turning left).

The reality

Lastly, the revised reward structure has a big impact on how FM5 plays. Gone are the days of winning cars at the end of each championship. Welcome, instead, to 1970s era inflation—especially when it comes to the tokens you can buy (for real cash) to circumvent the grind.

Let's not pretend that microtransactions are new to the franchise; they've been with us for years now, and they're a dependable way for developers and publishers to evergreen a title and make a return on all those hours of creation. And now that the industry knows enough people will open their wallets for them on an ongoing basis, it's time to accept that they're here to stay. What's more, it's not like you'd avoid them if you stuck to Gran Turismo or iRacing or <insert racing franchise here>. Game developers need to eat too, and maybe it just isn't possible to put together a completely new game on the scale of FM4 or GT4 (both of which were iterative and built on their predecessors) in two years if it's only going to sell for $60.

I'm pretty sure a lot of the issues highlighted above all result from a common factor, namely the amount of time it takes to create a fully fledged racing game in the current console era. Each car takes six months to model and render. Tracks take even longer to create, and given the increased level of detail required for the Xbox One, it seems that little or nothing could simply be carried over from FM4 (and let's be honest, we saw how badly that approach turned out for GT5).

At any other point, the answer to these new development challenges would have been to delay the game for a few months. We're no strangers to this; installments of both Forza and Gran Turismo are less likely to be on time than they are to be six month (or six years) late to market. But FM5 was scheduled to be an Xbox One release title, and that meant that come hell or high water, it had to ship on November 22. You can see how that resulted in a game that feels unfinished in some regards.

But less than a week after launch, Turn 10 is already beginning to tweak things, dropping the prices of various cars for Thanksgiving as well as boosting the amount of credits you can earn (which you can claim on the game's webpage).

So yes, FM5 doesn't quite live up to its potential at launch, and yes, there are many things that diehard fans like me can point to and complain about. But don't lose sight of the fact that those fondly remembered previous installments also had their share of teething troubles. Unlike days gone by, game studios don't just ship and run these days. They patch, they update, and they fix. So don't believe all the hate you read on the Internet.