In the Storefront, you can purchase designs for specific cars or decals usable on any vehicle you own. Prices are set by the designers, as are the number of copies for sale. If someone wants to make a unique piece of art and sell it for 30 million credits, they can. And if someone wants to sell a limitless supply of Autobot decals on the cheap, that is also their choice. A ratings system helps create a leaderboard for designers, which you can search to find the biggest stars in the community. You can flag anyone as a favorite so you can easily browse their store for the latest designs.
Tuning is just like art design in Forza 3. Can I get a "Whatchoo talkin' 'bout Willis?" Seriously, tuning has been transformed into an artform and has similar functionality to liveries. Great tuners can create tuning sets and sell them on the Storefront. For those used to doing their own tuning, a word of warning. It is possible (even easy) to manually upgrade and tune your car in a way that actually worsens its performance. Basic tuning is easy to do, but delve deeper and you better know a lot about cars. That also means great tuners can help you maximize your car's performance better than you could ever manage.
And if all of that is too intimidating, you always have the option to auto-upgrade before a race. These upgrades will tune and upgrade your car to fit the track and race parameters. A great tuner can do even better by manually adjusting everything, but most gamers will find the auto-tune option good enough. The point of all of this is that the hardcore have a ton of ways to bury themselves in Forza 3 and the rest of us can click a few buttons and race. After all, isn't that why you bought a racing game?
The focal point of racing is the career mode. Forza's career mode is a series of seasons, each one longer than the last. The core career lasts six seasons, though you can continue on long after that. Each season has a bi-weekly championship race. These races are set for each season and are waiting for you every other Sunday. The rest of your career is completely dynamic.
For the two weeks between each championship race, you'll choose one event. Each event is broken up into a series of races. Some as few as three, others can be around a half-dozen races long. You are always given three event choices, but these change based on a number of factors: The cars you own, the car you're currently driving, and the race types you play the most. No two careers are alike. Having played deep into two different careers, I've seen firsthand how much seasons can change. Through six seasons, you'll race 55 events. There are more than 200 events in total. After powering through about 50 hours of gameplay to "beat" the career mode, you still have well over 150 more events to beat if you want to master Forza 3. It's insane. Because there are so many events (and a great variety at that), it's very easy to have two seasons turn out quite differently.
Completing races earns your driver experience points. For each level you're gifted a car. Free. No strings attached. The idea is to reward you for playing and encourage you to try new cars. Unlike the seasonal calendar, the car gifting is not dynamic. That means everyone who plays Forza 3 gets the same cars. You're free to buy any other cars you want (remember, nothing is locked), but certainly you will get behind the wheel of many of your gifted vehicles.
Each season gets exponentially longer. Season 2 is about twice the length of the first season and season 3 is the length of the first two put together. By the time you get to season 6, you'll be spending hours upon hours to beat each event. For me, this began to become a bit of a drag. As much as I enjoy Forza 3, I found the final season to be a real struggle to complete. What was joyous and new in the earlier seasons felt tedious by the end. Granted, many will never play long enough to reach this point and some will be thrilled at the endurance races that await, but for me, it wasn't as rewarding as the earlier seasons.
Of course, you won't be driving alone. Up to seven AI drivers will challenge you on the tracks. Forza 3 uses Turn 10's Drivatar system, which basically teaches the AI based on a player's driving style. It creates a dynamic AI that learns from you. That was in Forza 2. What is new is the AI pressure system. Get behind an AI car and, depending on the driver, they might make mistakes. You may see the AI spin-out on a turn, take a bad line, or make other noticeable errors. There are times when I play Forza 3 and forget that the AI is controlled by a computer. Often it feels like I am racing against real people, which I appreciate immensely.
The AI elements aren't perfect, however. One of Forza's biggest drawbacks is in its AI settings. There are numerous assists to alter how your car performs, but there are just three AI difficulty options: Easy, medium, and hard. Even for average drivers, medium will quickly prove too easy. But, for me, hard can be really hard at times. It leads to too many races that are either far too easy to win or seem almost impossible to compete in. If Forza 3 had one more setting between medium and hard, it would be perfect. But it doesn't and, for me, it hurts the balance over the course of the career mode.
If, while playing through a season, you long for the company of other gamers, you can give the multiplayer a shot. Turn 10 went out of its way to offer a staggering level of customization. Multiplayer may be Forza 3's crowning achievement. This is the most robust multiplayer offering ever for a sim racing game. You can customize every aspect of a race, allowing you to easily create your own game types.