Turn 10’s Dan Greenawalt speaks Forza 4

Turn 10 Studios has been working on the Forza Motorsport series since 2005, starting from the back of the congested racing pack but quickly trouncing most of the competition with its impressive graphics, accessible handling, and top-tier presentation. With its fourth instalment Turn 10 is looking to add more fun and flexibility from a creative partnership with Top Gear and support for Microsoft’s Kinect peripheral. We spoke to creative director Dan Greenawalt on his approach to making one of the genre’s flagship titles.

Q: Has it been a good year for racing games?

Dan Greenawalt: It’s interesting. I’m not an economist. What I can say is that we are about three months away from something that I hate every year – there’s a lot of studio closures. It’s not just in racing, it’s in first-person shooters, it’s in RPGs, it’s all over the boards. I’ve got a lot of friends in the industry, I’ve been working in the industry a long time, and that whole January/February timeframe is when studios go down. It sucks.

But I don’t think it’s just in racing. A lot of what we’re seeing is the big franchises getting even bigger and not suffering at all, and the smaller franchises – that have been around for a while but they’re just kind of smaller, a little more niche – they take the brunt. I think people look at racing studio closures, or the sales of one particular racing game, and think, ‘Oh, racing’s in trouble’, but if you actually look at the overall sales across the board the big franchises are actually doing quite well.

Q: Racing is a very hard genre…

DG: It’s a hard industry. Honestly, I think the issue with the genre is that we actually have many, many very distinct sub-genres within it – it’s more like calling sports a genre, you know what I mean? To call FIFA and Madden competitors is weird. We’ve got smash ’em up games with lots of explosions and guns and shooting things and they’re racing games. We have games that are hardcore simulators on the PC.

And then we have a game like Forza where our goal includes racing, but it’s not all about racing – it’s about cars, car culture, car passion. Our design philosophy is to build it like an onion, where at its core is the most cutting edge simulation we believe is possible on any device. Then we add assists and things that make it easy to drive, but that doesn’t make it fun, and we add variety, diversity, we add mechanics from Pokemon and World of Warcraft, we add modes like Top Gear bowling and things like that to then add the fun on top.

So at that point is it a simulator? Well of course, because it’s a simulation, but if people hear ‘simulator’ and think, ‘Oh it’s hard and it’s dry and it’s boring and it’s technical’ – Well, it’s not that. So does that make it an arcade game? Well no. Does that mean it’s in-between? I believe no, I think it means that it’s over the top – that it’s actually a car game. It’s hard to compare these niche genres and this kind of uber genre, you know, and it’s hard to put your hand all the way around racing.

Q: I’ll be honest: I’m still playing Forza 3. There’s a lot in Forza 3, you know. It’s very hard to finish that game.

DG: Our goal is that you can’t finish the game – that you find your own path. We call it the yellow brick road. It’s an open playset, and there’s tons of stuff to do, and if you follow the yellow brick road you will get to Oz. But you’re not done, because you didn’t go and explore the painting, or all the different cars, you didn’t explore all of the community features. We really don’t want people to be done with it.

Q: For a completionist that’s agonising!

DG: Sure. But if you look at our vision – which is to get people excited about cars – we’re not trying to make a game that’s like, you know, you get your thrills and you’re done and you move on to the next. That’s why, actually, our game has that evergreen community – it’s because people aren’t done with it.

Q: Forza is the only racing series where if I come second I don’t immediately restart. Is that surprising?

DG: That’s actually been a big part of… it’s really hard to get gamers to accept second place. As you add more cars into the game, let’s say you have a 48-car field like in NASCAR. In the real world of NASCAR there are superstar drivers that are coming in like 28th place. Same thing with F1, 22 cars in the field and you’ll have great teams that are coming in midfield.

Gamers just don’t want to do that. They want to be the hero. What we tried to make is a game that is still rewarding while you can still come in second place. I think there’s actually a lot more for us to be doing there, and as we move forward we’re always incubating new ideas to go forward that way. But we’ve also impelmented things in this version such as the dynamic AI difficulty, and the AI upgrading their own cars, and the World Tour which guides you through, which actually means you’re getting much more wheel-to-wheel racing in this version than ever.

But with that comes a risk of losing, and what we don’t want to do is say, ‘You lost, you’re rubbish,’ because that’s frustrating. What we want to say is, ‘You came in second, you came in third, that’s okay, don’t worry about it. Are you having fun? Good. Keep playing’.

The funny thing is, rewind… we’ve got stats from the Forza 3 community, and rewind is hugely used in the community. We have people on the forums who are like, ‘I never use it, I don’t like it’ so we allow them to turn it off now. It’s an easy feature to implement.

But the truth is those groups on the forums are not actually representing the larger population – because the larger population isn’t on the forums arguing, they’re just playing.

Q: You’ve said at times Turn 10 can be a bit dry. Is that a problem for the studio?

DG: Yes and no. Obviously with our design philosophy at our core is simulation, and simulation is highly technical. We’re a very detail-orientated people, and I’m about as mad as they come regarding details, and it’s hard for me to keep it at a high level when I talk to people.

That by itself leads to a certain amount of… We’re just a little bit more scientist than we are Hollywood actor. I wouldn’t say that is a problem with the franchise, because we absolutely need that at our core to execute towards our vision. But that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily what we want as we add layers, and add the fun. We need that help. Just as we added Pirelli’s partnership to help us do even better physics, we had Top Gear’s partnership to add levity.

Q: I played one event where I was knocking down pins – it felt like the spirit of Project Gotham Racing.

DG: Or the spirit of Top Gear, because that’s what it comes down to. It really came through that creative partnership with Top Gear, where we were coming up with ideas that really matched their brand, philosophy, and ethos. We’d go back and forth, and we came up with a lot of different ways that Top Gear is integrated.

By having a creative partnership, that wasn’t just some licensing deal, it was like, ‘Hey, we came up with this, does that really fit with what you guys think?’ ‘Yeah, but what if it was that?’ ‘Okay, we’ll prototype that’. It made everything feel natural to us, because it came from us, but [felt]natural to them because it was sharpened and honed by their own creativity.

Q: Forza has a huge community. You could bring out what you did for Forza 3 and still have a huge community. How do you continue to engage them?

DG: First off, I’ve been in the industry a long time. I’ve been working on Forza for nearly 10 years now, and I’m not getting any younger. What drives me to work every day, besides my car, is actually driving not just our genre forward, but driving car culture and car entertainment forward.

Now that is a hugely and probably some would argue ridiculously ambitious vision, but that’s what keeps me coming to work, because I basically feel like I’m sitting at the bottom of Everest. I look at it and I’m like, ‘That’s pretty awesome, if we could even try and conquer that, that’s huge’.

When we come up with new features and new ideas, the process is all about throwaway work. I tell this to designers when they come on the team: ‘Your job is not to come up with a good idea, your job is to come up with 9000 bad ideas that we can vet and turn into great ideas’. I think a lot of people think a great designer comes up with an idea and then they go do it. No, you have to come up with a thousand ideas by morning so that we can be vetting and coming up with lenses.

So we’ve broken the team into separate groups that can incubate and operate autonomously, and they have specialists in their fields. They’re tasked with coming up with ideas towards physics, AI graphics, networking, gameplay. All these different areas, and they come up with thousands of ideas, we throw almost all of those away, some of them we take to spec, and then we throw most of those away, and then we prototype, and then we come with those.

That process allows us to be innovating for different types of players. Not because we should bring in more players, but because of that vision – we need to get more people involved if we ever hope to make a big dent in car culture, and in gaming culture. It comes out of respect. I have respect for car culture, it’s diverse all over the world. I have respect for game culture, and that’s diverse all over the world.

Generally when I meet people who are really into cars or really into games, it’s amazing to me the lack of respect they have for their peers. That’s fine, they’re welcome to have that, but I am not welcome to have that. I need to respect them so i can bring them together, and let them argue and have a great time, and build that passion up.

We listen to our community, we look at the forums on other sites, but we also look at the data. Our community, while very vocal, does not actually come close to representing the way people are actually playing the game. So we use the data to hone, and we also look at our vision, and that’s really the overarching lens we use.

Q: Rod Fergusson [Director of Production at Epic Games] was telling me recently they’ve filled Gears of War 3 with loads of shiny dangling carrots. Forza does stuff like that already, but how do you approach that philosophy for Forza 4?

DG: I think one of the big things that’s helped us have a big evergreen community is that we do 10 cars a month for DLC. That really helps out a lot because people that are into cars read about it on Jalopnik or wherever and then, wow, there it is [in Forza]. Maybe it takes a while, because it takes us a while to build the car, but it’s there.

I play all the competitors, but we’re not inspired by the competition. We’re trying to shoot towards a much larger goal. We’ve got effects from Pokemon, from World of Warcraft, we’ve integrated features from Amazon stores even. They all layer in together.

We have the Car Affinity system, which gives you one layer of those shiny bits, or carrots or however you’d like to say it. We have player levelling, with the car options, those layer in. We also have the Achievements, which have been known forever, but we also now have the Badges and Titles that now change on your Playercard in multiplayer.

Each one of these has different schedules of reward, and that’s a term actually used from training children and things like that. Variable schedules of reward that come in at different times, and what that means is that it’s not that everywhere you turn that there’s some other bit, it’s that your brain is naturally tracking six or seven different reward structures, and every moment you’ve completed one and you get that kind of ‘Aaaaaah I just did one’. You’re automatically kind of thinking, ‘I’m really only half a race from doing this one over here…. I’ll just do one more race’.