Forza Motorsport 3 Preview

Forza is back

Anyone who’s read our interview with Forza franchise director Dan Greenawalt will know he’s pure headline gold. During Microsoft’s E309 media briefing Dan talked up Forza 3, Microsoft’s answer to Sony’s Gran Turismo 5, quite a bit, but it wasn’t until a UK-exclusive presentation that evening that he sent us hacks frantically scribbling in our notepads and double-checking our tape recorders. Here are some of the best quotes:

“Go find a racing game that’s running in 60fps at the show. You’re not going to find it. That’s part of being a good racing game. If you can’t run at 60, you’re not a good racing game.”

“We have 400 cars, 50 manufacturers, 100 tracks. We’re the biggest racing game of this generation. Nothing else compares to us in size.”

“A lot of the features I’ve mentioned here, and this is just a few that I’ve gone through right now, are the types of features other games hang their hat on. Oh we’ve got a cockpit view and it’s really, really immersive. And we’re done. No, that’s not Forza. Forza, we take every single feature that other people crow about, we do it to the nines, and then we add another feature.”

“We’ve got the best physics. We’ve got the best graphics. We’ve got the most cars. We’ve got the most tracks. We’ve got an online community that is unparalleled not just in racing but in gaming in general. Nobody does things with user-generated content the way we do.”

“I’ll stand behind this and say there is no racing game that’ll look better on any console.”

“We can rollover cars. No other racing game is going to rollover 400 cars I can guarantee you that. There’s a reason that we do that. We’ve got great relationships with manufacturers.”

The graphics are much improved

Wow. Dan’s nothing if not confident. Cocky, even. And unsurprisingly he’s got a lot of people’s attention, especially Gran Turismo fans’. But the time for talk is over. After the presentation we got a chance to get hands-on with the game and put Dan’s words to the test.

Sitting in a near life-size car shell, hands on a steering wheel, feet on metal pedals, eyes melted by three widescreen high-def televisions and ears bombarded by full surround sound, it’s hard to imagine a more realistic and immersive racing simulation will ever be created. Now, while we know the vast majority of gamers won’t play Forza 3 the way we were able to play it at E3, we also know that some of you will be rich enough to afford such a set-up. The game offers support for three video channels, but you’ll need three 360s and three copies of the game to make it work. And of course you’ll need three televisions (you can use a small monitor as a rear-view mirror if you fancy it), a steering wheel and the car shell. All in all, it’s a $3,000 set-up, a Turn 10 dev told us. Ouch.

For everyone other than Donald Trump a 360 controller will have to do, and playing the game with this more traditional set-up allowed us to get a better sense of what Forza 3 feels like to play. The answer? Well, very Forza. Yes the 60fps graphics are much improved and some astonishing physics-based features have been thrown into the mix, but anyone who’s played the original or Forza 2 will instantly feel at home. The game’s hard, even on the easy difficulty setting and with many of the assists turned on (although not as hard as Gran Turismo 5: Prologue). Following the racing line, accelerating when it’s green and breaking when it’s red, requires focused attention. Cars satisfy as their engines rumble, and the handling is as realistic and car specific as ever.