Forza Motorsport 3

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Article supplied by Xbox World 360 magazine

Dan Greenawalt took to the stage at E3 and declared Forza 3 the only racer you'll ever need. He's the Game Director on the project and has been with the series from day one, coming off of Project Gotham Racing and Rallisport Challenge. He is huge. Both literally and figuratively.

We're seven weeks from gold during this interview. Is Forza 3 still the only racer we need?

Absolutely. Don't get me wrong - it doesn't have every feature ever made; that's not the point. We have what it takes to bring people together. We have beautiful graphics; amazing physics; user generated content no other game has - not just racing games. It's not about a checklist; it's about being the total package. This is the culmination of racing games on the 360 today.

So what problems did you identify in Forza 2 which needed fixing in Forza 3?

Forza 2 had the same problem as a lot of racers - it was such a good simulator. What we've done is keep the same amount of simulation but make it easier to play. Does that mean we have rockets and red shells? No, but it has roll overs, and damage, and you can spin the AI out, and you can make them crash, and it has a lot of fun race types.

It's hard to make a simulator which appeals to a casual audience. You have to do buffers on the controls and put all these assists on. Most games are just gonna say 'we're gonna do an arcade game and we're gonna dumb down the physics'; that's a great choice for some titles but we want to appeal to the sim guys and the arcade guys. That's a diverse group of people with a lot of different skill levels.

The Rewind system is a big part of making Forza 3 friendlier but everybody will surely accuse you of ripping off Grid.

Rewind has been on our drawing board since Prince of Persia and Blinx; Grid just beat us to market. I think Grid's a great game and I have a lot of love for Codemasters. They're a
great studio. We saw their implementation and it helped us make decisions about our implementation. I've seen comments from some developers who say they don't play competitors' games and that's either unfortunate or untrue. You really need to play everybody else's games because that's how we get better.

There are some differences between our system and theirs. You only get three rewinds in Grid, but I wanted six, I wanted eight, I wanted twenty! You have a great race and you see a great roll-over and this cool explosion of parts and you want to see it again, but you think 'I'm not gonna do that because I might need a rewind to win the race later'. But I love people to have fun, and to me, it's another tool with which to have fun.

Won't an infinite number of rewinds make the game a bit too easy?

I've worked in racing games for over ten years now, and back when we were working on Project Gotham and Rallisport there was an active debate about whether to allow the Restart Race option. A lot of people thought gamers like the punishment. Since then, every racing game does Restart Race, and nobody asks for more punishment.

When is a racing game at its best? When the difficulty is tuned exactly to you; when it's wheel to wheel and the action is tight. What you need is a game that's set exactly right for your skill level and then what you need is a proportional response for when something goes wrong - losing fifteen minutes of your life is not a proportional response to a five-second lapse in concentration.

For fifteen minutes you had fun but when something goes wrong right at the end what do you do? Do you hit Restart Race? No; you turn off the console; maybe you throw your controller! I don't wanna make that! You don't ever need that experience.

I understand peoples' concerns about rewind but I've heard this all before and in five years every game's gonna have this feature because it's that kind of game-changer. We've got some of the hardest of hardcore racers at Turn 10 and they were demanding we have a difficulty setting which turns it off. Why? Those same gamers who were demanding that are using it all the time. Mark my words - EVERY game will have this.

That works for us - we're rubbish at games.

Look, I'm not the fastest driver, I'm not the best painter, I'm not the best tuner, frankly I'm not very good at this game. Why I get so excited about it is that there are so many people who are so good at those different avenues, and I get to enjoy what they do. I don't have to wait for DLC; every day there's something new and cool waiting for me.

You have tonnes of assists and options, so what's the right way to play Forza?

Oh, I don't think there is a right way. Even myself, when I'm trying to hot lap I tend to be in first-person bumper cam and that for me is the most comfortable way to go fast. But when I'm trying to drift I always tend to be in third person because then I can really see the yaw in the car. When we've studied this in playtests we've found it's almost an even fifty-fifty split between third-person and first-person, and cockpit is almost unplayed.

But you've all spent so much time and money creating the in-car views... ?

And here's why - it's never played but it's always tried. In every car it's part of that car passion. We're a great simulation, we're a great racing game, and we do great things with user-generated content but that's not the reason for the game. The reason is to bring people together around cars, and part of that experience is the cockpit. Most people aren't gonna drive in cockpit but they're always going to check it out and maybe do a couple of half-laps in it before settling back to third-person or first-person.

You spent hundreds of man hours building something people will use for minutes?

But for that brief moment they're completely delighted.

Modelling a car's exterior and interior is a fairly obvious process but how do you go
about building a car's handling in Forza?

We attack it from multiple angles and a lot of it depends on how much we can get our hands on the car - there are cars that we never get our hands on because they're just so rare.

I've been working on Forza since its pitch back in 2002 and one of the first things we built is Automagic. We collect hundreds of points of data from the real world and feed them into this program which turns the stats into physics settings for a car. I wanted to build this huge game, and tuning four hundred cars by hand the way we tuned Project Gotham Racing would have taken us years. Part of proving we could do this was building Automagic.

Automagic has actually found flaws in cars. During the first Forza we got the real world data on the Ferrari Enzo before anyone had gone hands-on with it. We put all this data into Automagic and we loaded the physics files into the game... and the car kinda sucked; it understeered, had an uncontrollable snap oversteer at low speeds, and it pushed a lot. I thought our model was broken but a few weeks later Road and Track magazine did their first hands-on with the car and said the car pushes and has a snap oversteer. We had seen those problems without even driving it. When you know the stiffness of the rear, the downforce, how much torque it makes, the shape of the engine curve, and everything else, there are just some things you can find with a good math model.

And who makes sure Automagic gets it right?

We have our own Stig, an American racecar driver named Gunnar Jeannette. We love him because he's the perfect blend between a technical mind and real-world experience. He's driven all our tracks and most of the cars too. We're at the point where his times in Forza and in reality match one another. When there are differences he attributes them to the lack of fear; he does things he says he'd never do in the real world because if he's wrong, he's dead. In Forza he just hits rewind.

If both Forza and Gran Turismo are each supposedly real simulators why does the same car feel so different between the two games?

I haven't looked at their codebase, but I'll tell you a couple of things. We've swapped notes with McLaren about tyres and I've worked with Michelin when I was over at Le Mans... Tyres are the real root of your simulation and every ounce of time you spend working on tyres is paid back tenfold.

You can do whatever you want with suspension and we simulate the lot - that's easy math. Tyres are hard math and it's a cutting-edge science. The tyre model of two years ago is already outdated; heaven forbid you're using Pacejka's Magic Formula which was the tyre model used in most of the PC simulators - GTR, GTL, GPL - that's like a ten year-old
tyre model.

And here's another thing - we simulate our physics at two hundred and fifty frames per second; most racing games do about sixty. The lower the framerate of your physics the less updates you get and the larger the forces become with every update. You have to add them up to equal the real world forces, so if you simulate too slowly there are forces which are never showing up in the car, and it makes the handling feel kinda sloggy and weird. The car could be perfectly simulated on paper - but simulated too slowly in game.

Gran Turismo's AI is famous for riding a rail and rarely breaking its racing line, while Forza's AI simulates mistakes. Which do you reckon is better?

You need it both ways. When you're a professional racecar driver you actually want the AI on a rail because that's how professional drivers drive. That consistency is important but most drivers in our games aren't consistent - they'll go off one corner or take a wide line on one lap. For that kind of driver you want an AI that's gonna dice it out with them, run into them, make mistakes, and do crazy stuff because it makes it more exciting. It makes it horrible if you're Gunnar. When he sees our AI he's like 'that's crazy! Nobody would make that mistake!' but it's a realistic mistake for a user.

Have you finally reached the limit of what it's desirable to simulate in a racer?

No, but we're running out of things that you can simulate in real time. Microsoft do the electronics for McLaren's F1 cars and that got me a free ride to go visit them and swap notes with the guys who make the simulation Lewis Hamilton trains on. There are things they do in their simulator - like fluid dynamics; the way air moves over the car - which they run overnight because the processing power required is just too much. We're at the point where there's not a lot more we can simulate in real time without a pretty giant leap in GPU and CPU power - not twenty or forty percent, but several hundred percent.

What are you looking forward to in the next few months?

Dirt 2 and Blur are both interesting to me. Split/Second seems fascinating, too.

We found it very similar to the old Burnouts...

Personal preference - I don't like the new Burnout as much as the old one. The new open world stuff just isn't my thing. I liked Burnout not because of the exploration but because of the thrills the great designers at Criterion delivered with that scripted, explosive experience.

So you'd never take a crack at an open world for Forza?

I don't think it matches the kind of fun that Forza is. Forza is about the car; an open world is about exploring. I worked on Midtown Madness and those guys went on to make Midnight Club; I loved Midnight Club because those guys turned Paris into a skatepark. It's an extreme driving game - it's not even a racing game really - it's a driving game and it's extreme and it's fun and there's crazy explosions. With Forza we use racing to get that car passion out of people and you just don't get great racing in an open-world game.

So what lies in Turn 10's future?

The thing that excites me most is Natal. To me it all comes down to that core vision I pitched back in 2002 - turn gamers into car lovers and car lovers into gamers. Racing game? Secondary effect. User generated content? Secondary effect. Our great features - and I'll sell those features all day - are a secondary effect. What really excites me as a designer is that car passion.

What gets me excited about Natal is getting people involved with cars - touching cars, opening doors, smashing cars, taking parts out, that visceral feeling of moving and playing inside a car. Is that what Forza 4 is? I have no idea, but I'm excited about it because I can get the controller out of the way and get people even more excited about cars.

Xbox World 360