Our first look at Forza Motorsport 2 during Microsoft’s E3 2006 event had us wanting more facts about this next-gen sim. Sure, the trailer was nice, but we really didn’t learn much about where the team wanted to go with the follow-up SKU.
We had a chance to talk with the Forza franchise’s lead game designer Dan Greenawalt on the team’s focus for Forza Motorsport 2. Although no hard features were announced, we did get a pretty good idea of what to expect when the final game ships.
The first thing we picked up in our time with Dan was that his Turn 10 crew is passionate about motorsports. Like many of us, Greenawalt picked up his love for both videogames and cars from playing GT1, and hedged said love into a career in the industry.
With a love for cars and physics, Greenawalt makes the perfect person to discuss the vision of Forza Motorsport 2. Hearing Dan’s stories of street racing and wrenching on Mitsubishis interspersed with physics lessons on the nature aligning torque let us know right away that we we’re in good hands.
Greenawalt spoke for the entire RX crew when he hesitantly apologized for not having any kind of Forza Motorsport 2 demo. Dan’s apprehension for apologizing for zero footage is telling of the commitment to creating motorsports mastery under a strenuous Holiday 2006 release deadline. It takes over a month to prepare an E3-specific demo; valuable time that Turn 10 doesn’t have if they want to create the most authentic racing simulator on the planet.
The Forza Motorsport 2 team is committed to rivaling its predecessor in no less than three areas: content, performance, and online functionality. Content wise, there’s little officially announced, other than some promising data. Available vehicles will go up from 230 to 300, with new manufacturers McLaren and Lamborghini announced (this is GREAT news for a series trying to become the end-all of racing sims). Tracks will increase from forty-five to sixty, and we were delighted to hear that 12 Hour venue Sebring has made the cut. That’s about all the content announcements for now, but we expect a rush of PR materials to come as Forza Motorsport 2 nears completion.
Greenawalt got into the discussion of Forza Motorsport 2’s performance; he is a physics and code nut after all. It sounds as if the team will build upon the highly-advanced tire model developed for the original Forza, tweaking it to take better advantage of the 360’s powerful, tri-core architecture.
The original game ran at framerate of around 30fps, but Greenawalt was quick to point out that the industry-wise framerate numbers don’t tell accurately tell the whole performance story. A graphical framerate of 30fps is just dandy, but many times the physics rate is combined in with this number (which appears to be the case with the GT series of games). Turn 10 claims to have a dedicated graphical framerate of around 60fps for Forza Motorsport 2, without combining the physics frequency in with this figure. Expect a physics refresh in the several hundreds, which, when combined with a high graphical framerate, equates to a very complex and smooth running experience.
The stratospheric physics refresh rates that the 360 can support appear to mean the most when viewing the kinetics of two bodies colliding (car-to-car, car-to-wall). In most racing games, colliding cars, for example, have been buffered to help the physics engine make the contact look fairly believable. There’s little natural deflection, however, so contacting cars act as softer entities, appearing to meld like two buckwheat hull-filled pillows thrown at each other. Cars are far from Sobakawas, so we fully expecting the sheet metal beasts of Forza Motorsport 2 to clash with weight and rigidity, thus resulting in natural, timely deflections.
High refresh rates also help to show off how Forza Motorsport 2’s complex track surface models affect a car’s motion. Take the newly added Sebring for example. This airstrip turned GT car haven has extremely uneven tarmac due to some shoddy expansion joints; a veritable nightmare for physics engines. With accurate track data (the RX team spent a week in Southern Florida mapping the course) and a lightning physics sampling rate, the Forza Motorsport 2 team can allow racers to feel every nuance of the uneven concrete, while it affects things such as braking force (more of that advanced tire model at work), suspension geometry changes, and the application of an engine’s power to the ground.
It’s safe to say that areas such as graphics and audio will be thoroughly nailed, so Greenawalt didn’t even expound on these areas at this time. Hopefully the few screenshots and the trailer are harbingers to what Forza Motorsport 2 will look and sound like when it drops in late 06.
We received nary a tidbit of information relating to Turn 10’s plans for online functionality, but expect it to be grand. Greenawalt envisions universality, where, for instance, a non-gaming father that’s a car enthusiast can enjoy Forza Motorsport 2 with his Live-savvy son. We suspect Dan is alluding to some type of Live Anywhere functionality, even though it wasn’t mentioned in this behind-closed-doors meeting.
We wish we had more than thirty minutes to share our love for cars and what is soon to come; especially how the newly announced Wireless Racing Wheel was designed hand-in-hand with Forza Motorsport 2.
We’ll have much more on Forza Motorsport 2 and the Wireless Racing Wheel in the very near future.
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