Yes, Forza Motorsport is a flex. It’s a showcase for everything the Xbox Series X can do above its predecessors, and even contemporary PC hardware. But all that muscle and flexing doesn’t mean much if the game isn’t fun.
“Sports car is about competition and threat, and really going to war with your machine,” Dan Greenawalt, Microsoft director in charge of the Forza franchise, told Polygon last week. It is the dividing line between rebirth Forza Motorsportwhose last edition launched in 2017, and its cousins Forza Horizon, which have released two editions since.
The game, revealed Wednesday during the Xbox Developer Direct showcase, brings a fleet of over 500 cars, with all the audio-visual fidelity fans have come to expect from an Xbox showpiece for over 20 years. But more than those numbers – like the promise of 4K resolution at 60 frames per second, with ray-traced light rendering – Forza MotorsportThe creative director of wants fans to know that they’ll be getting a truer racing video game than ever before.
“It’s really important for this game to have this cutting-edge physics, because to me, it’s gameplay,” Turn 10 Studios creative director Chris Esaki told Polygon. “This is where the rubber meets the road; it is the real moment-to-moment experience. When it’s deeper, when it’s high fidelity, there’s so much to discover, and it becomes a game that really relies on skill and mastery.
The physics invoked by Esaki encompasses details such as the individual parts players can acquire and apply to their cars; an aftermarket spoiler is going to affect the ride more than just aesthetically, Esaki promised. Players should feel the extra downforce on their backs, to put it politely. Tire modeling has also been reworked. Instead of a single reference point under each wheel, Esaki’s team expanded the tire patch to a rectangle with eight contact points, yielding six times more CPU performance than the last Forza game.
“What that means is tons of grip,” Esaki said. “The tires search for every little nook and cranny with this high-fidelity rendering that we do, and that translates into gameplay.”
Additionally, players can expect to see their car, at the end of a race, which visually tells them the story of their day on the track. It’s not just about damage – who drives a high performance motorsport sim to beat nice cars, really? It’s in things like dirt and grime and visual wear and tear that any car acquires when it’s driven to the limit, crash or not.
“Internally we call it ‘Shake and Bake,'” Greenawalt said of Turn 10’s damage modeling systems. at runtime, and create a terrain map to know where damage and aerodynamics will occur.And then the game can run in real time to fill in those [areas].”
This means that the physics of Forza Motorsport are not only dedicated to the performance of a car; pockets of high and low air pressure will disperse and accumulate dirt from the track depending on each car’s chassis. This may seem like a stretch, but Greenawalt and Esaki were adamant that it was part of the plan for Forza Motorsport all along; it wasn’t just a side effect they discovered during development.
“Things look super real when they’re distressed,” Esaki said. “These imperfections make it look and feel more real.”
As a technology demonstration, Greenawalt swears that Turn 10 left nothing on the table. Although his studio, along with the Xbox proprietary teams of The Coalition (Gears of War) and 343 Industries (Halo) had a lot to say about the design and hardware of the Xbox Series X, they still received a device. whose limits weren’t really known internally. Greenawalt said the Forza Motorsport the developers went looking for them anyway. “We will always come up with things that the hardware can’t do,” he said.
“It’s not an accusation of the hardware, it’s just the nature of simulating exceptionally complex things. We’re trying to simulate reality,” Greenawalt said. any machine, they’re going to drive it to the limit.”
Forza Motorsport, the eighth installment in a series dating back to the launch of Xbox 360, will arrive later this year for Xbox Series X and Windows PC. While it doesn’t yet have a release date, the game will be available on day one for Xbox and PC Game Pass subscribers.
