Cars, Upgrades and Innovation with Forza 3's Dan Greenawalt

June 15, 2009

Cars, Upgrades and Innovation with Forza 3's Dan Greenawalt By Louis Bedigian

“I don't want people to throw away their Civic when we give them a Porsche in the game.”

Is it possible to turn car lovers into gamers and gamers into car lovers? Dan Greenawalt hopes so. He's the director of Forza Motorsport 3 and he's banking its success on that very idea. "Really our goal is to connect people together. For that reason, simulation, community, all the great features included in this game [were designed] to bring people together. I'll be going into a lot of things, but you're going to hear me say one thing over and over again – car lovers into gamers and gamers into car lovers – because it's what drives my team to make the game we're making."

The game they're making, Greenawalt says, is epic. "It's just an enormous game. We've got everything from classic muscle cars to SUVs to classic British sports cars to modern cars with very cool technology to cars that can be heavily tuned and modified, all the way up to Ferrari, Porsche and Lamborghini and high-end sports cars."

"It even goes beyond this," he insists. "We have LMP (Le Mans Prototype) cars. We have all sorts of classes of racecars. And it's a physics playground. The reason we have 400 cars and so much diversity is that different people are driven by different cars. This is all about car passion. I have to have the five cars that drive you. What was the first car you had in high school? That's the type of car I need to have in this game."

Regarding upgrades, Greenawalt loves the idea of taking a simple car and turning it into something beautiful. "The cool thing about this game is taking a car like the Honda Civic or GTI and doing upgrades on it. [The upgrades are] all real-world, things you could conceivably do on that car. Turn that car into a Ferrari killer. That's a cool moment, because the Ferraris elicit emotion in people as well. When you pull up to a light next to a Ferrari, you feel something. You're either gonna feel, 'Screw that guy. That's a lot of money,' or whatever. Some righteous indignation. Or maybe you feel, 'Wow. That's beautiful. That is an amazing piece of machinery.'

"I'll tell you one thing. You look back on your car for just a split second and go [turns head back and laughs]. Well, Forza allows you to turn that car into a Ferrari killer so you can not only look at your car, you can say yeah, 'Yeah, have some of this!' and give it back to the guy in the Ferrari. And that's a big deal to me. I don't want people to throw away their Civic when we give them a Porsche in the game. What I want them to do is hold onto that Civic and keep enjoying the car that they love so much."

Which is precisely why the developers wanted to make each automobile as realistic as possible. "All 400 cars in the game [were] lovingly crafted. Each car's got a cockpit. They can all be damaged, they can all be rolled over, they can all be upgraded, they can all be painted. The audio for each car has been made to sound just like [real] car[s]. What we've done with the new Forza graphics engine, we can push a lot more polys. That allows us to make the game look a lot better."

To put that into perspective, Greenawalt says that vehicles in Forza 3 have up to 10 times as many polygons and four times the texture resolution as the vehicles in Forza 2. "That allows us to capture what the designers were going for when they made [these cars]."

The Arcade Simulator

"I don't believe in the differentiation that there's sim games and there's arcade games," Greenawalt says firmly. "There are great simulation engines, and there are game developers that choose to dumb down their physics engines to make [the game] more approachable. Then there are truly cool arcade games that are about action, explosions, and I will agree that they're in a different class.

"But any game that has real-world licensed cars, there ain't no difference. There's just lazy developers. 'Cause you can have the best simulation engine out there and a layer of buffers on top of the controller, and a layer of assists on top of that so that a six-year-old can play. And that's exactly what auto-brake is. All you gotta do is hold the button – the go button. As you hold the trigger, you just steer with the thumbstick. We've been testing this with six-year-olds and 65-year-olds 'cause I've been trying desperately to get those people to play.

"Why I'm so confident in this game and why I've been coming out and making so many statements is because we've got a game kids can play. Now do I think that every kid and every guy who loves cars will jump up and buy a 360? No. Do I hope they will? Yes. Not only because it's good for me but because it gets closer to that vision, the one where we turn gamers into car lovers and car lovers into gamers."

User-Generated Leader

Greenawalt believes that Forza 3 will continue the tradition of pushing the boundaries of user-generated content. "Forza Motorsport 2, even one year after launch, had over one hundred thousand people per month downloading cars off the auction house," he boasts. But, he warns, there's a bit of a misunderstanding about user-generated content and how it works. "Frankly, it's propagated with people like me, and [the belief] that it's all about the editor. If I give you a great level editor I'm going to turn you into the best level designer in the world. And you're gonna wanna play your levels and all your friends will wanna play your levels. Bull****. I can't make you creative. I can give you the best editor in the world and you're still going to make the same **** that everyone else makes.

"Think about it like YouTube. I can give you the best camera in the world. I can give you a magic camera with magic film and it'll follow you at all times and film things from multiple angles. Is that going to make you the next YouTube phenomenon? No. 'Cause what's going to make you the YouTube phenomenon is what's in here [points to head]. It's your intelligence and your creativity. I say that even as myself. I'm not pointing at [anyone in particular], I'm saying it's a statistical thing. It's like why don't I buy lottery tickets? Because I will lose."

Perhaps the most important part of user-generated content is making sure that everyone gets what they want and what they need. "You need to build a symbiotic relationship between that tiny percentage of shockingly creative people and everybody else that tunes in and consumes. Those two groups need very different things. One group needs an editor that's very powerful but it does not have to be easy to use. The rest of us need a good way to find the hottest [stuff] all the time. We need to know what's hot, what's cool, what people like me like, what other people like, that's what it's all about – distributing. Those things feed back into the circle and make those painters, those rare, creative people, really famous.

"It really is a match made in Heaven to find them and they want to be found. We've put in scoreboards for all of our different creative types, and we created a lot more editors for all those creative types. [With the scoreboard] you can always find the best painters. You can flag them, you can follow them, and they become favorites. Same thing with tuners. The upgrade shop already had more upgrades than any other racing game, and they're all based on real-world physics. It's like a chemistry set – it allows people to try different things.

For the rest of us – the non-creative types Greenawalt speaks of – Forza 3 offers an auto-upgrade feature. "Because you gotta be able to get through the game and realize the true potential of your Civic. So the game will say put this here, put that there, and it'll be a good car and it'll race well. But to really make that car sing and optimize it for a certain class and a certain track, you're going to want these creators, these [players] that really know physics and really know cars. They're gonna make the cars fast in a way that no one else knows how to. And there are scoreboards for them, so you can find them as well."

Is the rewind race feature your way of doing what GRID did? What made you want to add that when Forza 3 is a simulator? You want it to be approachable, but that feature brings it back to the arcade realm.

Dan Greenawalt: I couldn't disagree with you more. I've been in the racing game industry for over 10 years. I was around back when nobody had [the] restart race [feature]. Why? Because restart race was too arcadey. It was too easy. You gotta earn it. If you came in last place at the end? Suck it. Deal with it. That's the nature of the beast. That was what everybody said back then.

Nowadays? Guess what: you can't make a racing game without restart. It's ridiculous. Well, rewind race is a fantastic feature. Ours is different [from] GRID's. Was it a good idea in GRID? Yes it was. But they only gave you three of 'em and they penalize you for using them. That's stupid. Frankly, that's like penalizing someone for restart race. That's just stupid. So mark my words: five years from now, just like racing games are now doing the green line [that originated with Forza], they're all going to be doing rewind race and they're all going to be doing it just like we do.

At E3 it seemed like you could rewind the race as far back as you wanted. Is that how it's going to be in the final game?

DG: Absolutely. That's what it comes down to. I've got the perspective having worked in racing games. I've heard people, and I know it's going to be the same thing that happened when restart race [was introduced]. I'm going to get people that say, "No, it's not hardcore enough, punish me more." Really what they're trying to say is, punish everyone else – not me, because I'm a really good racer, and I feel like if I don't have everyone else being punished, I'm not proving that I'm great.

Well guess what: great racers are still gonna win. Rewind race doesn't make you any better. It doesn't make you any faster. It doesn't make you any smarter. All it does is give you a proportional response to your mistake. You've been racing for 40 minutes, you have a mistake, all the AI pass you. [Normally], what do you do? You hit restart race, maybe. You turn off the console, probably. You go to bed for the night. You throw a controller, potentially. What is a proportional response to that five-second mistake you just made? I should take five seconds from you; you have to hit the [rewind button], it takes five seconds. That is a proportional response.

You've stressed the importance of being at 60fps. Will we ever reach the point of 90 or 120fps?

DG: Most TVs can't run at that. There are some that run at 120fps, but the reason they run at that is so the screen can wipe in between and have less ghosting. So when the hardware's doing that, sure, maybe [some developer] will do it, because will it make the game better? Sure, it will. [But] we're getting to the point of diminishing returns.

So you don't think it's even necessary?

DG: Well, it would be nice if we could get to the point of analog rendering rather than digital rendering.

What is the difference between the two?

DG: It would actually mean that it's not digital; so it's not updating. It's just like the real world. I'm analog, right? If I jumped at you, I wouldn't depend on your eyesight or the frame rate, I would just land on you, that's the nature of analog. I don't know how we'll get there, but that's where we want to be obviously.

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