Turn 10 on pushing the Xbox 360 with Forza 4

Following a thorough run through of what’s new and great about this October’s Forza Motorsport 4, Turn 10 creative director Dan Greenawalt took a short breather then rattled through as many questions as possible in the time allotted by Microsoft’s time keeping overlord. Read on for talk of the benefits of single-platform development, why we don’t yet need next generation systems and why fans should trust Turn 10 not to dumb down the franchise for Kinect.

Q: With Auto Vista, is there some semblance of preparing for the next generation. Obviously those models, you can’t throw them around the track as they are too detailed. Now you have the models will they be useful in the future?

Dan Greenawalt: Well, you know, I think what’s most useful is the approach to lighting. Yes, there are always things for the next generation, what with the models – how many polies can you model and what have you. But the polies have actually become somewhat irrelevant. What we get from the polies in Auto Vista was all of the ‘opening’, there’s not actually a lot more polies in the outset than you have right here in the driving. The difference is, you can open up the doors and the windows and get inside. What really makes Auto Vista unique, actually, is all the interaction and moving around the cars, and learning about the cars. But I think what we learnt most, about any engine we’re going to build, is about this new lighting. The IBL, and also the new shaders – for carbon fibre and things like that – those are very cutting edge shaders. And they don’t have to be expensive. So actually working on the box, I’ve had people ask “How can you make it look so good running on the same box?” It all comes down to being clever with how you optimise, but also clever with how you set up your shaders in general – how you approach the problem. Actually, the longer you get into a piece of hardware, the more you learn about how to trick the hardware into doing things right. And when you actually get new hardware – I used to work on PC – you very rarely optimise your code. So you end up putting in new features, and never making them really sharp. You just throw them in and think “Hey, if it doesn’t work, put in a new graphics card and it’ll work.” But there’s actually a nice aspect to staying on the same console, because you get really clever with your math, and can deliver things that Hollywood has to deliver in overnight servers.

Q: Does 360 have anything more to give?

DG: Absolutely. It always does. It’s like when you’re moving from one apartment to another, and you pack up the van, and you unpack the van, and then you re-pack it, and magically you have an extra metre of space. Then you’ll unpack it, and you’ll repack it, and you’ll find and extra 10 centimetres. You unpack it and then you repack it and then you get another 5 centimetres. So you do reach a limit, but you always find more because you keep optimising, and optimising and optimising. But it’s the approach. So the IBL is not necessarily more expensive or less expensive. It’s just how you approach the problem.

I think people think of it as the power that gets you the features, but it’s not the power – it’s the creativity and the cleverness of the problem-solving. You can throw power at a problem, or you can throw intelligence at the problem. And I actually find the intelligence gets you more than the power. The power gets you the initial “Wow! This generation is crazy!” but what gets the games to look really amazing is when people finally tame that power and get really clever. We also share techniques, so we work with the guys from Epic, from 343, we work with the guys from Bungie and we trade secrets. So it means you’ve got multiple development communities – all with really smart, clever people – saying “Hey, have you ever tried to use your shaders in this way?” because we’re all working on the same platform. So you know what’s going to happen? All of our techniques are going to be shared with everybody else, and all the games in the next few years are going look better after this, but they’re also going to keep learning things that will make us better. So yes, we’re reaching the limits where’s there’s less we can optimise, but there’s always smart people doing smart things.

Q: You mentioned power isn’t really a problem with the Xbox. But in the next couple of years, we’ll see a new Xbox. If power is not the option, what does the next generation of consoles need?

I don’t even know where to start. I mean, honestly, we’re launching Forza 4, and the things we’re doing in this game are really things that have not been delivered in any other game. So when you look at changes between Forza 3 and Forza 4 on the same console, you can imagine that the sky’s the limit. But honestly, I think the sky’s the limit on the same console, because there’s always little things to be done. We’ve got a very strong vision, and we have very clever people. I’m not saying we’re the most clever people in the world, but I think we do have a track record at trying to excite our customers and bring innovation into the racing genre.

Q: Your partnership with Top Gear is part of this vision to extend the brand beyond games. Where is it going to go?

DG: Our vision is to turn gamers into car lovers and car-lovers into gamers. When you think about it, we’ve done great things in game – simulation with community – they’re all means to an end. But the moment you start thinking about our franchise that way, you start thinking the way I do. And the way I think is there’s no reason to limit ourselves to just racing or just gaming or just this or just that – because our vision is far broader. The key is to always do what you do really, really, really well – to be the best at what you do. So, we wouldn’t want to spread ourselves all over the place, because we’re not great at everything. What we’re really good at is simulation, we’re really good at weathering, we’re really great at community, and we’re really great at creating experiences that everyone can play. So those are the things we’re really focussing on.

Q: With Kinect, was there ever any concern that you might alienate your core audience?

DG: I don’t believe so. I think we if we were numb, yes, we’d be concerned. If we did it the way that they thought we were going to do it – but that’s because they don’t do my job. My job is to actually think about this franchise and think about my customer and delight them. If my job was to just not delight them, I would have done it the way they were afraid. But the way it works – I mean, you see it, right – Auto Vista you can use the controller if you want, but I think it’s more immersive with Kinect. And the voice thing just works. I mean, that’s what everyone was like. The head tracking, that’s how I play the game. And when it comes to Kinect driving – if you don’t like it don’t drive it that way. A lot of people in our community play using wheels, and say “I couldn’t drive with a controller,” but does that mean the controller option should never have been included in the game? That’s silly. Of course, most players play with controllers. So I think people have a right to have scepticism and be critical – it’s an important part of being a good consumer – to be critical and sceptical – but at the same time, my job is to entertain people. If I’m not good at entertaining people, I’m not good at my job.

Q: Can you talk about head tracking? Will it work for everybody?

DG: We actually videotaped people playing, and what we found is that every person we videotaped moved their head while they were driving. They looked to the edge of the screen with their eyes, and their heads changed just a little bit. Tiny little movements. Now, I’m a leaner – I didn’t know that until they videotaped me – some people turn their head on their neck, but we support both. So rather than saying “Hey, why don’t you look to the side a little bit?” we looked at how people drove, and said we’ll make this system work with how they drive which makes it very natural. It also makes it very subtle, that’s the big thing about it, it’s meant to improve driving.

Q: Are you supporting 3D?

DG: No.

Q: Do you want to support 3D?

DG: I think if it was a broadly adopted technology, I’d would be personally more interested in it, but as far as the vision we have for the title in getting people excited about cars – I actually found that the 3D effect that comes from Auto Vista where you are moving and going towards the car without having any glasses and still being able to turn my head to both sides. I actually found that was what I was most excited about. So I’m not trashing 3D; I think 3D’s great. It’s just, when you’re going towards a certain goal, going towards certain customers, you have to think about what sort of hardware they have, and what sort of experience and vision you want to deliver to them.

Q: At Microsoft’s gamescom press day you had a three screen set and a hydraulic racing chair. How much would that kind of set-up cost?

DG: So the hydraulic bit is actually not supported by the retail product. That’s actually when we had a demo. But the three screens actually is supported, and there are a lot of guys in our community that have built it – in fact it supports way more than three screens – but for each screen you need an Xbox, and then you system link them together. Again, in our community we’ve got guys taking pictures of their seat with a butt-kicker and got 5.1 around them, as well as a wheel and five screens. It’s a crazy expense rig, because by that point you need five Xboxes, five copies of the game, five TVs, plus the chair, the wheel and the buttkicker. But part of the diversity of the Forza Motorsport world is that you’ve got 13-year-old kids that play tag every Saturday with their friends, and we’ve got 40-year-old guys who do amateur racing on the side and have a lot of disposable income, and they set up an entire room based on their love of Forza. And what’s cool is that those two groups don’t even know about each other – the kids play with the kids in tag, and these guys would never go to tag, they are angry about it. And the kids are never going to set up triple screens – their parents would never let them.

Forza 4 will be released October 14.