Forza Motorsport 3 Interview

To say Turn 10 Studios is a confident developer would be like saying Final Fantasy XIII gets fanboys excited – it’s a massive understatement. At E3 last week, franchise director Dan Greenawalt took to the stage during Microsoft’s media briefing to unveil the worst-kept secret of the show: Forza 3. He had confident words then, and again during a UK press-exclusive presentation that evening. The following day, we cornered the man himself to find out just how confident in Forza 3 he really is. The answer? Very.

VideoGamer.com: It seems like Turn 10 has a massive amount of confidence in Forza. Is that simply borne from having two successful games under your belt or a knowledge that what you’re doing is really special?

Dan Greenawalt: You know it’s funny because we have some confidence from making two great games obviously, but most of that comes from making a fantastic simulator. Basically we’ve proven ourselves, that we can deliver a simulator no-one else can touch. For this version we made improvements but we’re actually running out of improvements to make because no-one else is doing the stuff we’re doing. What really happened in the last month was as we were getting ready to close down, code complete and come to the game conference with a demo, the game started to really kick ass. As a team we’re playing it and we’re just like, this is really fun. We also did play tests with six year-olds and 65-year-olds, something I told the team: look I want to do these play tests, see have we hit the mark? Have we made a simulator that we put enough assists around the edge of it that a kid can play it who loves cars? And is really successful? I think that’s what boosted all of our confidence. All of a sudden we were like, you know that goal we had, eight years ago when we pitched the first game? We’ve hit it. The team kind of went crazy. Honestly! Mails started going around and we were all just like, holy shit!

And then the crazy thing, part of what you’re also hearing, is we watched the Sony press conference and we were like, OK so we just brought what we believe firmly is the best racing game ever made, and our competition didn’t show up. So now you can see why I’m fairly bullish. I hate to sound so cocky but the truth is the stars have aligned. I don’t know how else to say it.

VideoGamer.com: Were you surprised that the competition didn’t show up?

DG: Absolutely. Kazunori Yamauchi-san, he is someone I have tremendous respect for, and I have tremendous respect for the team, but I am a GT fan. I bought my first car that I stressed out about buying because I played it in Gran Turismo. I’m in this industry because of that game. That said, as a fan of the series, he hasn’t done anything for me in years. So in many ways he’s handing the baton to me. He probably doesn’t see it that way, but I do, because I believe that I’m now taking what he ignited in me as a passion, and taking it to a much, much, much broader number of people. I’m not saying it’s necessarily larger, but definitely broader, younger, older, men, women. So I’m really excited.

VideoGamer.com: I’ve been to see quite a few racing games over the last few months. The thing that strikes me is that everyone is trying to broaden the audience for the racing genre. Are you tempted to put power-ups in the game?

DG: Not really. The truth is that simulation, racing, UGC, all these things are a means to an end. I’m actually trying to make the greatest racing game. I’m trying to make a game that gets people into cars and unites people about car passion. So if you don’t even play the racing game at all, I’m happy. You can still come and be a great painter, have a lot of fun, just consume great paint jobs. So power-ups would be to make the racing more approachable, but I actually want to make the game more approachable.

VideoGamer.com: We’ve seen some developers implement story elements into their racing games. What’s your take on that? Is it something you think can be appropriate for a racing simulator?

DG: Yeah I think it can be. It’s not really what we’re going after. But I think it’s appropriate. If your point is to be a good storyteller, tell a good story. We’re trying to make a game you play for two years. The issue is, you don’t tell a story for two years. I love a lot of the story-based games. Mass Effect, I can’t tell you how long I played Mass Effect. Fantastic storytelling in that game, really took the genre to a new level. First off I wouldn’t want to tell a story unless I could tell it like that. We just always want to do things to the best of our ability. What we have done is made a new career mode. So we take our existing, very hardcore career where we dump people into just, here’s 200 events, go find your way. We’ve added a calendar layer where the game asks you, hey, are you into this? You into that? You’re into this. And it gives you three options. You pick one of them and then you finish that up, it gives you another three options. It’s always ensuring you have the best races, you’re always in your favourite cars and everybody gets their own path. When you play Forza 3 and I play Forza 3 we will have completely different paths through the season. Now, nobody’s going to know that when they’re playing. All you’re going to know is that was a really, really cool season for me. Is it storytelling in the classical sense? Absolutely not. Is it like Mass Effect? No it isn’t. But is it very personalised, and is it very emotional in which cars you’re getting into and we’re exposing people to? It is. That’s what I’m pretty excited about.

VideoGamer.com: You mentioned during your presentation last night that some of the original tracks you created, internally you were talking about the history of how those tracks were created. Will that be in the game?

DG: We’re not going to put it into the game. We are talking about putting it on our website. We’ve got a lot of concept art as well as all these histories. It got to the point where I was asking the team, I want the names. I want the histories of these people. I want to be able to, when I’m playing the track, and I see whether this guard rail is dented or not dented, I want them to have thought that should be dented or it shouldn’t be dented for some reason. I want the flags, I want the colour of the bricks, I want everything to be a deliberate decision. All of those things coming together is what’s going to make it feel believable. On top of it there is this idea we call the history of violence. Racing is a violent sport. It’s not violent upon people…

VideoGamer.com: Well it can be violent upon people…

DG: Well yeah! Certainly if you watch British Touring Cars it is! The other aspect was, I wanted a lot of these original tracks to have a story. When you actually just drive around the track and you see sand that’s been disturbed and guard rails that have big dents in them as well as brick walls that have had to be taken down, the idea that when you come to it it’s like, you kind of already feel like you’re going into the coliseum and there’s a little bit of blood in the sand. That was a big deal to us as well.

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.