FORZA MOTORSPORT 7 FIRST LOOK: THE SERIES REFOCUSES ON ITS DRIVERS

Photo: Turn 10 Studios

Photo: Turn 10 Studios

It’s this approach that carved out room to add features like dynamic weather and an entirely new character component, Greenawalt explains, while also dramatically increasing the number of cars and tracks — all as the team preps the game engine to run in 4K.

“You go, hey, I’ve got this great team that can build anything. Let’s not have them build everything,” says Greenawalt. “It allows that big team, instead of trying to just boil the ocean and do everything, they focus all that innovation in one place and can go in incredible areas.”

The other big piece to getting Forza 7 ahead of schedule, though, is that Turn 10 has been developing the new game alongside Project Scorpio since the beginning. For a while, Turn 10 used simulations of the Scorpio hardware. Eventually, though, it came time to fire up the game on the real thing.

“I was coming back from lunch and [Tector] came over, and he was vibrating,” says Alan Hartman, the studio head for Turn 10. “He was like, ‘we’re running on Scorpio, you want to see it?’” Hartman followed him over to a conference room that had its windows blacked out. “I come in and I see the fan pointed at the circuit board and the ribbon cables strung out and brought around to the monitor. And sure enough, there we are, running.”

Photo by Sean O’Kane / The Verge

Running smoothly, even. “Typically,” Hartman says, “you get it working, and it’s running at 10 frames a second, and you go ‘okay, now I have to work weekends to get it working fast.’ It’s super advantageous, because we get to focus on the game, not trying to build the tech layer.”

“We talk a lot about finding the fun,” Greenawalt adds. “You do all this work so that you’re starting from a pretty fun place, but let’s be honest — it’s a hypothetical fun place until you get [the game] in your hands. And when you’re fighting the technology, just to get it to run, getting it stable, you can’t find that fun, because it’s all coming together at the last second.”

Scorpio has already been touted for its head-spinning specs ahead of the official reveal. It cranks 6 teraflops of power, has 12GB of GDDR5 RAM, and a custom GPU that runs at 1172MHz. All which means it’s set to be the most powerful home console on the market.

That power is great for the looks and performance. But Turn 10’s true focus in Forza Motorsport 7 is on something that raw power can’t guarantee, something that will be a part of Forza going forward no matter which version you play.

While many of the people at Turn 10 appear well-rested, the mottled hair and the bags under Scott Lee’s eyes are a sign some have definitely lost some sleep over Forza 7. As the lead art director, Lee’s been shepherding one of the game’s most defining features: the addition of customizable characters.

Lee’s small character team has funneled a ton of effort into creating absurd levels of detail for the now more prominent driver, by building out a catalog of racing suits, helmets, gloves, and more. The game has over 300 character designs, and about a week or more of work went into each. There are female and male models, and different “silhouettes,” or body types, for both, each of which took around five weeks to design.

What’s more, each one of the five discrete pieces that makes up a character (the helmet, the suit, etc.) has its own 4K asset. Zoom in on a helmet and you’ll see realistic scuffs and smudges on the visor — and on some special helmets, signatures that look like they were just Sharpie-d on.

That might sound like a strange amount of attention spent on something you won’t see much of while you’re racing. But for a good chunk of Forza Motorsport 7, you actually will see your driver. Turn 10 has completely revamped its menu system to put an emphasis on showing off these characters. For example, the pre-race screen that shows up before you start a multiplayer race is now fashioned more like a loadout screen in a shooting game. There are menu options on the left, and your character stands swaying on the right, as if she’s itching to hop in and drive.

Characters will also show up at the ends of races, podium-style, with the winner front and center looking proud, and the third-place finisher turned slightly away from the camera as if they’re already plotting revenge. Your character’s look will even now represent you when you show up in friends’ games as “drivatars,” a feature introduced back in Forza 5.

Players will be able to choose between everything from real race suits with HANS devices, to old-timey outfits with leather helmets, to some even goofier additions from pop culture. (Expect a lot of “era-specific inside jokes,” Lee laughs. “There’s a lot of middle-aged people that work here.”) With Forza featuring real racing series like IndyCar and NASCAR, you can also expect to see some more iconic suits as well, set to be announced later this summer.

While diehard fans are always going to want more cars and tracks, the game has long passed the point where it lacked in either of those departments. One thing it has been missing, though, is a way for players to represent themselves beyond the badge on a car’s hood. Bringing characters front and center seems to be a reaction to that critique, a step towards making players care more about what, and how, they do in the game.

“I think [the characters] might be the coolest opportunity for us to really kind of depart from Forzas in the past,” Lee says, though he admits it won’t be as deep as the character creation tools in other sports games. And it isn’t as focused on story as something like Madden’s new Longshot mode. But he thinks it’s a good foundation on which to build. “I think it’s really kind of a nod to where we want to go with the franchise,” Lee explains. “I feel like the car becomes a lot more personal, it’s ‘oh it belongs to somebody, it’s something.’”

Looks are a huge part of Forza, but you don’t play racing games on mute. Sound is crucial to an immersive experience, and so even Chase Combs, the game’s audio director, has spent the last two years trying to find ways to make Forza 7 grab the attention of your ears as much as your eyes. That starts with abandoning the sweeping cinematic score of Forza 6 in favor of a soundtrack you might mistake for what’s found in modern-day beer commercials.

“We ended up kind of going with something that felt a little more rooted in what you might hear in a garage, you know? That automotive spirit,” Combs says.

But Combs and his team went further than just shifting genres. The music in the game (which you can customize with your own songs if you’re not big fan of power chords) follows you as you hop around the different environments. It also dynamically adapts to those environments.

Go from the main menus to the garage to start tuning one of your cars, and suddenly the music sounds like it’s coming from a radio on the other side of the room. Hop into Forzavista mode, get in the car, and it will muffle. Jump over to the car selection menu, where your character is standing on a stage, and the music sounds like it’s coming through stadium speakers.

Photo: Turn 10 Studios

This follows through to the races, too. As you drive around each course, the game’s soundtrack will flash by you as you pass the track’s speakers.

“A goal of mine,” Combs says, was to “make [the music] a character in the game, not just something that we lay on top of the game and people kind of turn off. I wanted to make it feel like it was actually seated in the environment.”

It’s a slick effect, but music is less than half the battle when it comes to the sound of a racing game. The cars need to sound as real as they look, too.

“We think audio is critical component of that sense of speed and the kind of violent or exciting nature of racing. At times it’s complete cacophony, tons of noise, rocks hitting the underbody of the car,” he says. “With race cars in particular, you have no noise insulation, and so it’s just like this like giant resonating metal box.”

To get all that right, Turn 10 struck up a partnership with Warner Brothers, which got them access to some of the more rare cars that appear in the game. “We could come to them with a list of cars, and they could just go off and do all that,” Combs says. “Getting an actual race transmission has always been a challenge for us and we think that’s a critical component of what a race car sounds like.”

The end result is a game that sounds remarkably lifelike without all the different layers — the screaming engines, squealing tires, doors slamming, and the rock soundtrack — muddying each other up. You can hear the air being sucked into the engine at the same time that, say, your tires hit the gravel when you slip off the curbing of a track. There’s enough space in the mix for the click-thud of shifting gears, the raindrops hitting the windshield, and the spray coming off the tires to play together, not against each other.

Of course, Combs shows me all this in one of his small sound editing studios. So what about the rest of us schmucks playing through the tiny, drilled speaker holes on our flatscreens?

That’s a question Combs thinks a lot about, he says, especially when it comes to car crashes. “There is an initial instinct when you’re making collision sounds to try to just, like I’m gonna juice the bass. But we know that with those speakers, anything below 200 hertz or more, [they] just can’t reproduce it,” he says.

Combs has a switch on his desk that he can flip to funnel the sound through two desktop speakers, and that his team will often head out to one of the common areas and use the TVs there. That way, hopefully, their work can be heard no matter where you play. Good audio doesn’t sell games, but Turn 10 hopes it will be just as engaging as the new characters, and as exciting as the cars themselves.

Adding customizable characters and doing tricky things with the sound might seem ancillary to the core Forza experience. But with Scorpio letting the team max out the graphics and the racing engine, these are the ways Turn 10 is trying to grow its customer base beyond the 4 million players it already claims.

How do you do that? Well, for one thing, this will be the first full Forza title available on PC. There, the company hopes to court the same increasingly diverse sets of players (namely: women and kids, but also competitors in the Forza Championship series) that it says has come to the game on Xbox in recent years. One way of doing that will be through sheer compatibility — Turn 10 says it has tested everything from PlayStation DualShocks to pro racing wheels to Guitar Hero controllers, and all of them work with Forza 7 on PC.

And yes, Forza is more approachable these days. It’s tempting to think of Horizon as the game for non-racers, and Motorsport for the diehards. But the number of driver assists and the freeing up of the campaign has made Motorsport almost as accessible to new players. There will be more of that in Forza Motorsport 7. One particular new option is a “friction assist,” which lets the player turn up or down how severely they’ll be affected by driving off track.

“For some players, if you’ve got licensed cars, and you’ve got realistic graphics, you are as realistic as is required,” Greenawalt says. “We keep pushing the physics system further and further and further, and I think it’s understandable that people would go ‘wow, if you do that then you’ve made it inaccessible.’ That’s not been the case.” Or, as Hartman puts it, “realism and punishing don’t have to go together.”

In that way, Turn 10 is redefining realism. Or at the very least, widening the focus of the definition to include the more human aspects of being a racer: the way your body jostles in the seat, the sound and fury that comes with pushing a car to its limits, the silly stickers that can be plastered over a helmet. Forza Motorsport 7 is all about creating the feeling that you’re a great driver — whether or not the computer’s helping.

That’s why Greenawalt thinks pushing for unpolished realism through things like scuffed helmets and garage-speaker sound is so important. Turn 10 has already mastered making glossy racing games. To grow, it has to stop buffing out the dings that make things feel familiar and real. “What makes cars more relatable is the human hands that made them, and yes, those create imperfections,” he says. “But it’s the imperfections that really bring it to life.”

Edited by Chris Plante and Casey Newton.

[“Source-ndtv”]