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Forza Motorsport 3 screenshot

VideoGamer.com: What’s the maximum number of cars you’ll be able to have in a race?

DG: Eight cars in a race.

VideoGamer.com: Are you going for the same number online?

DG: Same number online.

VideoGamer.com: There seems to be this thing about how many cars can be in an online race. Is there a sweet spot? Is eight enough? How does it change the dynamic of the game the higher or lower you go?

DG: It’s actually a really, really good question and something I’ve wrestled with quite a bit. There’s a fundamental design change you have to do when you go to more than around six to eight cars. Six to eight is really the sweet spot in the classical design of a racing game. Classical design of a racing game is first place is good, second place is not. It’s minor. Second place is the first loser. In real motorsport obviously that’s not the case. In real motorsport second place can be fantastic. But it’s just the way people are. And then when you build a risk reward system in a game and you always pay out number one more than number two, you’re telling people you should always restart if you got number two. So what it’s really making is kind of a two-man race and all the other cars are just fodder. You need to make a design shift if you want to go to more. You need to make it so we want you to come in 12th place in this race. And if you come in 11th place, we’re not even going to reward you more, because if you did reward them more they’re going to try and get 11th and they’re going to think 12th is not good enough. Some of the NASCAR games have done this, where they’ve got 30-something cars on track and it’s like beat Jeff Gordon. Then the AI Jeff Gordon comes in 12th place and they’re not going to pay you anymore for coming in higher, it just doesn’t matter. That’s a really good way of doing it. Now online is a really interesting one. Everyone says they want to do more cars online. I’ve got in really big races online…

VideoGamer.com: Not feeling it?

DG: Not really. That’s the issue. I’ve got in some leagues where there’s really evenly matched racers, and that can be really fun with a lot of people but it’s hard to coordinate. But the standard type of just hey I’m just going to get in some quick races, actually it’s better when it’s four players. That’s just the truth of the matter. This game is all about playing with your friends. We’ve got a lot of different modes online, a lot of rule sets we’re allowing people to blend, so they can create all sorts of co-operative matches and new Top Gear-style fun little things to do with cars, because that’s what our game’s about, cars, not racing so much. I think it’s going to be about you and your mates just having a good time with cars, not necessarily always finding wheel-to-wheel action racing. And then the last point is, there are games that say they do more cars online. And there are a couple of sims that do. There are a couple of games where if you try to get online with 12 players… good luck. It just doesn’t work. The cool thing about LIVE, we’ve proven, Forza 1, Forza 2, Forza 3, eight players rock solid, whether they’re in New Zealand versus the UK versus the US it always works. It’s always great.

VideoGamer.com: Where else is there to go with Forza on this hardware? What else can you do?

DG: I’ll tell you, I’ve made my job much, much, much harder. And that was the goal, right? When I set out the vision of this game and pitched the original Forza Motorsport back on the Xbox, gamers and the car lovers, car lovers and the gamers. And people were like, yeah, yeah that’s great, make a racing game. And I was like, no, really I want to make more than that. People were like, eh, go ahead and make a racing game. I think we achieved that in version two. In this version we’re saying, we’ll perfect the racing game and start taking it beyond. So when I think about, wow, what other racing game features do I want to do? Yeah there’s a couple of little things, very small. They’re not easy, but they’re small. It’s going beyond where I think there’s a lot of potential. How we connect people, how we take this core and just start grabbing people and say, it’s about cars, it’s about the love of cars. The truth is when I look at some of the cool stuff that Top Gear does - I love the show and I watch the show – but also it’s more that idea of playing with cars and kind of ironic juxtaposition of this car and that element… that’s where you start pulling at the passion that people have for cars and that’s really interesting to me. And that won’t be racing. That’ll be… entertainment? I don’t know what you call it.

VideoGamer.com: That’s the next step up I guess…

DG: Yeah. And I don’t know what it is, frankly. Again I’ve made my job a lot harder for myself.

VideoGamer.com: Graphically, how much better can Forza get on this hardware?

DG: The cool thing about a developer community like what’s on the Xbox is everyone’s always learning tricks. It’s like Tetris and you’re learning how to fit the pieces in better. It takes time and you’ve got to just keep massaging it and massaging it until you get more pieces in. Now, it is an exponential curve. So in the first year you learn a lot. Next year a little bit less. So we’re now four years into this cycle I think… so have things started to stabilise? Yes. And we’re reaping the benefits of a lot of what Epic has learned, a lot of what Bungie has learned, and some of the beautiful games… Mass Effect… what BioWare learned. We reap the benefits of that. But the truth is there will be continued improvements. As first-party, we’re not cross-platform, we can use every improvement that’s made. So if someone figures out how to make… you name it… something they’ve done specifically for their game, we can figure out a way to make that work on ours. And then build things like original environments, maybe a track like Sebring wouldn’t have used these really long draw distances that you eventually get to the mountains or something like that. But we could make a mountain road where you see mountains way in the distance and eventually you get there. So we will always be using that tech.

Forza 3 is due out exclusively for the Xbox 360 this October.

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