Will this be the last Forza Motorsport ever?

In the normal run of things, video game developers are most happy to chat before a game comes out, teeing you up to get excited about the launch before they hoof the finished product out of the development studio door.

With the new Forza Motorsport pitched as a ‘platform’ that will continue to change and evolve over many years, and now that players have put in some serious mileage, we thought we’d check in with Forza Motorsport general manager Dan Greenawalt and creative director Chris Esaki to find out what the development team has learned from the launch, what being a ‘platform’ means for the future and whether this could be the last Forza Motorsport game ever released…

TopGear.com:
It feels like the handling in this new Forza Motorsport has been completely reworked. How fundamental are those changes? How much was left of the old model and how much is new?

Dan Greenawalt:
Regarding the ‘why’, from the beginning we really wanted this to be a rebirth of Motorsport, harking back to Forza Motorsport 4 in a lot of ways, but also becoming a racing platform where it's about competition and skill. And with the advent of Horizon after Forza Motorsport 4, we're now in a place where Motorsport can focus really tightly, know who it is, and deliver on a very singular vision towards this competition and skill. But still laddering up into that larger franchise vision of falling in love with cars.

So from the beginning six years ago, when we were first talking about this and then four years ago when we started really concepting, we knew this idea was: fall in love with cars through competition and skill. Once you start looking at that physics AI, the race ranking system, there's a lot of this bedrock that has to be great or the house we try and build that's going to be a competitive racing platform for years to come… it's just pointless if that core isn't solid.

You've probably heard me say this in the past. This has been part of the philosophy of Motorsport ever since 2001, when it was first greenlit, that we research. So rather than going ‘oh well, that's a Porsche, and therefore it should…’ we remove the badge, we remove the name, we remove all of that and we just researched the types of systems that are inherent in the car. And then when the car's rebuilt in our engine, it drives the way it should, and then when it doesn't, rather than tuning it, we go and do some more research.

So with the amount of time we took through here, we were able to do a lot more research and a lot of it starts with ‘this car just doesn't feel right’.

For the first time in a Forza Motorsport game, Porsches makes sense

Chris Esaki:
When we set off to really build a skill based competitive type of title for me that translated into making sure we had a lot to master as well as a really, really high skill cap. And then what that meant was that we had to have a really robust and deep core gameplay ‘thing’, whatever that was.

So for us, for a car game, that's rubber meets the road. It literally is the vehicle dynamics. So that's where I really was focused on initially. If we're gonna make this a platform around skill and competition, we need to make sure we have the most robust physics and thus gameplay we've ever had. So we took a look at really everything that makes the cars go. So from the rubber meets the road all the way to the top, in terms of the aero, and everything in between.

So yeah, we redid the tyres. We went from a single point of contact at 60Hz to eight points of contact at 360Hz, and that it's a full contact patch now for each tyre and that was, I think, one of the most important things that we did. It’s one of the biggest investments that we had made that I think translates to cars feeling much better now because they have a lot more grip, the tyres are behaving much more like a real contact patch and almost a fluid substance.

We then completely redid all of the suspension and it just got really, really complex and authentic and accurate this time around. And when you actually see the cars move on track, they look much more realistic now just because that's the suspension geometry changes that we made.

The third thing is we completely redid our instant roll centres. And to me, that was the biggest change in terms of how the cars looked when they were actually having weight transfer. So those are the first three big things - tyres, suspension, roll centres, and that completely changed every car.

But then we did everything else, too. We redid the aero. We redid our weight modelling and our fuel weight as well as driver weight. It's all of these little subtle things. Even just the driver position - we used to calculate it in the centre of the car, now it's actually placed where the driver is and that does subtly change how the car behaves. Those little touches that start getting closer and closer to a really accurate vehicle dynamics model. There's a bunch of other stuff that I haven't even mentioned.

It's just because as Dan said, we drive the cars. We find a problem: it shouldn't feel like this. We have a bunch of other people that come in and consult, 'hey, does this F1 car feel correct? Does this naturally aspirated car feel correct?' And then we'll go and figure out why it's not doing X-Y-Z and then we're tinkering with the physics model at that point to get it right. All of the major car classes we basically did that, and I think it really shows this time around.

So if someone's complaint was, well, the cars aren't handling kerbs properly, that's not a thing where you go in and fix the kerbs. You go in and fix the entire model and then once you've got your suspension modelling right, then the kerbs work as they would?

DG: They all interact, right. So when Chris talks about roll centre and weight distribution and then also the way we remodelled the tracks and then of course the suspension, the tyres, the thing that I really feel is: one, the car plants when you put the accelerator down rather than getting a little bit too much snap oversteer and there's far less off-throttle oversteer and that's because of some engine modification, the off-throttle engine torque has changed quite a bit.

But the thing I really love is the way that a car kind of bounces through a corner. It doesn't feel floaty and it gives you that sense of being on the edge of grip. It sort of bounces its way through if you really get on the throttle at just the right point at the apex. For me, it's massively satisfying as someone who's done a lot of track days because you know that feeling and now the game is replicating it and it's not replicating because we planned it.

And to me, the most tangible one is: for the first time for me in a Forza Motorsport game, Porsches makes sense. That's great, I just think that it's almost like the final proof in the pudding.

You’ve described Forza Motorsport as a ‘platform’. How do you guys define a platform? What does that mean to you and what does it mean for players as the game progresses into the future?

DG:
I think there's the obvious stuff, which is we supported Forza Motorsport 7 longer than we had any previous Forza Motorsport. And then Horizon 4 and Horizon 5 have had an incredibly long tail of content, so that could be races and series and things like that. So this game was developed from the very beginning with the concept of server based events.

It's very easy to update certain things. The weather, time of day, that entire career can be kind of created, recreated, changed on the fly, doesn't require a content update. So that allows us to then utilise content we add more readily and rapidly than we could in the past.

So when we then add things such as Yas Marina, which was added this month and then tracks after that and then cars — some are part of Car Pass and some just come in as rewards — we can very quickly change how you interact with the game.

Some of it will be tuning based on performance indicators of how players are playing; where the heat is, what they're enjoying. We've got a feedback system in-game that comes straight into our database, so we can react to player's feedback there. Our forums are upvoted and downvoted. Kind of like the physics answer, rather than trying to look for one key thing, we tore the whole system apart and looked for the 100 things that would, from the ground up, allow this to be more of a racing platform.

If there was one big thing, it would be the approach of reducing down to that core competition and skill, physics, AI, the practice and qualifying and multiplayer. Really getting that right because then we can build feature sets on top of it and it just grows from there. It's a very strong tree trunk that we can build everything on top of.

So the short answer is you'll see tracks. You'll see cars. The events are going to be shifting and changing based on players, how they play. And then we'll be adding features much more readily than we had in the past because it's a more agile code base.

Compared to the amount of options that are available in Freeplay, very little of it is touched in Builders Cup. People have pointed out there's not really a lot of racing car content in Builders Cup at all, it's very much road car focused. In a way Builders Cup is a very limited look at what this platform can do. What was the thinking behind that?

CE:
I think that's a great question. When we were first envisioning how this game was actually gonna play out and the experiences that we really wanted to get right from day one, it was this production car experience and this race car experience. We were really intentional about making sure that while Builders Cup was focused on production cars from day one, it doesn't mean it can't include race cars in the future.

But to really nail that core experience of taking a production car, modifying it over time, getting to know it, falling in love with it and watching it grow and feeling its progression, that was core to what we wanted to do with Builders Cup. We wanted to make sure that was as good as we can make it for launch.

Then on the other side, which was race cars, spec racing, GT, touring, that sort of thing was really focused in multiplayer. So that experience was just dialled in for what we assumed was very competitive, skill based players looking for a lot of great balanced competition, fair competition, and that's the arena we had created for multiplayer.

Now that was just to get those areas right from the start. And as you see, even on the first day, we started adding additional career content into Builders Cup that started to bridge that gap between focusing on production cars and then race cars over in multiplayer.
So that first week we started unveiling our live content that actually did have race cars and race car content in the live content. And you'll see as we go forward, that will be a continued investment there to understand how we can bring more of the race car content into our career mode, and it may not even be Builders Cup at that point, right?

So to Dan's point that this is a platform and we can continue to invest in, we see how people are playing the game. We see how people are responding to things and asking for certain types of content and experiences. We know that players are asking for some more race car content within the actual career mode and you can see we've already started investing in some of that and we'll continue to respond and create that content over time. We just wanted to make sure that those experiences, the production car content, the race car content was just absolutely nailed in terms of its core from day one.

The game’s been available for a while now, what have been the big key bits of feedback you've been hearing from the audience?

DG:
From a high level the thing that's been great to see is multiplayer has been exceptionally well received. I think we took the time to iterate on that. There was a [development] team playing on that early on, so actually our Racers Cup loop has been largely in place for years. I mean, it's amazing in some ways, how long we've been playing that. And so it was nice to see the audience responding positively to the refinement that we put in.

Now the Builders Cup and actually building those cars up. As I mentioned we're trying to hark back to that Forza Motorsport 3, Forza Motorsport 2 time, where you start in a relatively slow car and you build it up and you build that real relationship with it as it grows over time and hopefully your skills as a driver and your understanding of physics grow.

Now someone who's played a lot of racing games is more of a sim racer. They already know that, but this really does on-board people and it never talks down to them. And that's the other thing I really like is that we're treating players like: you're smart. If you can play League of Legends, if you can play DOTA 2, if you can play these complex games of incredible strategy and dexterity, you should be able to kill it in a racing game.

But people sell themselves short, like ‘oh racing's too hard for me’ and I'm like, ‘wait a minute, you're on top of the Apex Legends forums and you think racing is too hard for you? You're selling yourself short'.
So this Builders Cup was built to really give that feeling. But the other piece of feedback we got is that I think there's a player in the middle where they're familiar with Motorsport and they wanna kind of jump in. They don't want as much of that building the car up over time.

And that's another piece of feedback we look at and say, well, that's something we can tune, but also as we add new mechanics and as we build this out, we can be building new modes in the live ops that we can try out and see if that's the sort of experience that kind of grabs that player that's inbetween the two as well as bleeding some of the race car in the career and bleeding some of the career and building into a multiplayer.

So I think we're set up well to respond to that, but that is the key piece of feedback: multiplayer is great and wow, some people feel a little bit Marmite about the actual building itself.

And you guys have released updates and started addressing some of those things including the way upgrades work in Builders Cup, right?

DG: We did. I wish I could say that was in response to the players. It actually wasn't. It was a response to our own playing as we were finishing the game. So that's why we had that ready: the whole idea that you finished a series and the car is now ‘graduated’. It's ready to go into live ops or it's ready to go do a class based [multiplayer] event. That was something we were thinking about a few months before we released. That's basically what this change was: aligning that graduation. It was a little bit too far out. You'd actually graduate from a series, and you're like, 'well, wait, I'm still in primary school. Give me all the stuff'.

CE:
Yeah, I always thought of it like in martial arts, you get your black belt. And that's basically like you’ve begun your mastery right? And the series is kind of like earning that black belt with that car and then you should be ready to go. You know you should be ready to go and master more stuff with that car. So that was one of the reasons why we made those changes.

We have to ask the obvious question: you set this up as a platform, it's called Forza Motorsport. Is this the last Forza Motorsport release? Will it just be a platform that goes on from now until eternity?

DG:
It's unfortunately an impossible question to really answer. We wanted to set ourselves up with the greatest chance of that being the case. As has been the case in all these answers, it starts with the ground up. We have to look at how we set up licenses and how things are managed on the box and the thing that enables this is in many ways [Microsoft’s subscription service] Game Pass. So having Game Pass and crossplay, so you can roam from one device to the other, that actually gives it a reason why we would not want to reset the community.

It's like no, let's build up your garage over time. Let's build up your skill over time and then really build this whole game and property. But there's so many pieces that could mean it can't be the last, so it's plan for rain and hope for sun. We're planning to be able to do all of this as if winds are against us, but I actually think it's feasible.

You've talked about the addition of cars and the addition of tracks and even the addition of modes, is that the limit or are you still looking at physics? Is it the whole shebang?

DG:
It's the whole shebang.

CE:
Yeah, our physics and AI people aren't going anywhere, you know? We're constantly investing in everything that makes the game tick.