Forza Horizon: Forza 4 cross-over, crazy upgrades, off-road racing
Turn 10: "realism doesn't always make fun"
Till the reveal of Codemasters' F1 Race Stars yesterday, Forza Horizon was the racing reinvention calculated to raise eyebrows highest this year.
An open world take on the famed Xbox 360 simulation series, Horizon is designed to win over automotive neophytes without ruining the show for returning fans. Here to discuss the ins and outs is John Knowles, design director at Turn 10.
You're aiming for something a bit less demanding with Horizon. Is the handling closer to something like Burnout: Paradise, perhaps?
No, the handling model is Forza 4, it's exactly the same as that. The idea though is that we do want to keep you moving. In an open world game, you're really flying around corners at higher speeds generally, because you're not in that cadence of braking and turning. We needed to make sure that we greased the rails, so to speak, and just let you glide along. That keeps you on the road a little bit more.
There seems to be quite a range of vehicles in there. Was this an opportunity to bring in the sort of vehicles you haven't had before, rally cars and stuff like that?
We're not getting too specific about the types of cars we're having but you can bet you'll still have a wide range and diversity, a pretty large number. The main thing is that we wanted to pick the cars that felt natural for this environment.
You still have the ability to upgrade your cars, paint them however you want to just like Forza 4 so you can turn any one of these cars into a rally car or a hatchback into a 600 horsepower monster. We're pretty forgiving with it, we do let you take Lamborghinis and Ferraris, cars you would never take on a dirt road.
The surfaces feel right but the cars would probably be destroyed in real life, but we let you have fun with that. Realism doesn't always make fun - authenticity is important but so is fun.
Is there any crossover with all the car setups people have created in Forza 4?
Yes. In Forza 4 we gave you the ability to check if you had a Forza 3 save file and import all the vinyl groups you'd created and we'll be doing the same thing here, not only for Forza 4 but also for Forza 3. So anybody who's owned either or both of those games and has a save game can bring over any of the vinyl designs that they made. We'll also give you some other cool rewards too but we're still working out what those are.
How is your open world structured? Can you drive literally anywhere?
So for this demo we actually made it so if you drive off on another road you'll be turned around. In the full game we'll never do that. You're free to go wherever you want to go. There are some events, like the sanctioned festival events, that take place all over this world where it's just a free-roam world until you come across a little race sign.
You pull up and say "I want to join this race" and then we load up the race and the festival comes to that part of the world. You get all the barriers you need if it's a circuit race or if it's a point-to-point, mixed-surface race we'll put up walls to keep you on the track but outside of those festival events you're always free to race all of these guys that are driving around in the world anywhere you want to.
Just drive up behind them, you'll get a challenge and then the two of you go to a random destination with no barriers. There's also street race-offs where you go and meet some guys who are unsanctioned racing, outside of the festival. The festival wouldn't necessarily condone that sort of thing but it's fun so these guys do it. Those races take place through traffic on these highways, no barriers, no race dressing, just the open world.
And these roaming drivers - are they all NPCS? There's no way to integrate friends lists?
No. The reason is these guys are awesome, these AI drivers are really good. We addressed all that in the beginning, did we want other people driving around in the game, and we felt that for most people that would just ruin the game. But there is a free roam online mode where you can invite all your friends and you guys can just do a roadtrip together or whatever you want to do.
There's also online circuit racing, point-to-point, night racing, all that good stuff. Also the playground style games from Forza 3 and 4 - Tag, Cat and Mouse, Virus - we've done some new variants of those and they're even more fun in an open world because there's more room to play those games. It's really fun to play Infected in a golf course.
So if you're in free roam you can't do any of those incidental challenges?
No, the free roam is pretty much just making up your rules. It's undirected play.
Do you have screenshot or video sharing functionality?
Yeah, with Photo Mode, photographers are going to go crazy for this because we've got a 24-hour day and night cycle, we've got this incredibly huge environment from rocky mountains to deserts to the plains, there's so many places to take beautiful photographs.
And there are side missions in the game where we put you on photo missions, speed missions, where we give you the opportunity to drive some of the more exotic cars that you might not be able to afford for a while. Take them out for a ride, take a picture of them. The painting tool from Forza 4, we brought that over as well. The upgrades system, all those parts.
So even though it's a new developer it'll still have all those old functions?
Not all of them, only the ones that are right for the game.
Which ones weren't right?
To take the biggest freaking racing game ever, which was Forza 4, and make it open world? It's too much. It's too much for us to think about. So we had to be very selective about what we brought over. It's a very social game and we wanted to make sure we had Rivals, one of the best social features from 4.
Every single race you do in this game, hundreds of them, is also a Rivals event as soon as you're done with it. So you can challenge all of your friends to a Rivals Race. We've got car clubs, shared car garages, we've got the Paint Shop where you can sell your designs online.
Yeah, it makes sense to upgrade your cars, if you've fallen in love with a car you might want to upgrade it. Some things don't make sense, like hand tuning, that didn't make sense in this game. Some of the more hardcore Forza fans might be a little alarmed by that, "WHAT? NO TUNING?", but honestly you tuned for specific tracks - this game is always sending you somewhere different. It doesn't make sense.
Was it a bandwidth thing?
Well in that case it was a choice, we did not believe that tuning had a place in Horizon. Some other features, you know Forza 4 had a lot of Kinect features, and the only one that makes this game better wasn't in Forza 4, it's new - it's GPS Voice. That's actually a huge win for open world games in general - you never have to pause or look at a map, you just say "next race," or "festival," or "gas station" and the green line takes you there.
What do you say - "Xbox" and then the command?
No, "GPS" becomes the keyword. You can tell it a specific location, it also has smart listening systems so it knows when you're shortcutting. You could say "GPS, event, circuit race, blankety blank," like a four-step thing or you could just say "GPS, next circuit race."
