“It’s almost exactly two years since I met Dan for the first time, here in LA,” says Forza Horizon design director Ralph Fulton of Playground Games. “We had dinner and we talked about games, about racing games, about car culture and Dan really talked to me about his vision for the Forza franchise.”
He’s talking about Dan Greenawalt, the big wheel down at the Turn 10 cracker factory and the man with the keys to the Forza franchise. We’re tucked away in a room deep in the bowels of Microsoft’s E3 stand. The deafening buzz from outside is still a persistent hum but Fulton doesn’t need to shout.
“It’s gone from strength to strength over the years, and as a developer and a gamer I’ve always been totally aware of it, but Dan just wants more,” he continues. “He wants to broaden what Forza means. He wants to turn car lovers into gamers and gamers into car lovers, and the ambition of that statement really resonated with us, because we set Playground Games up to make racing games that make a difference.”
It’s a statement Greenawalt himself uses regularly but it’s one that’s been a crucial pillar of the Forza franchise. Fulton goes on to explain Greenawalt challenged them to go away and think about what Playground Games could bring to Forza. Forza Motorsport has circuit racing stitched up, so Playground Games looked to the world outside the racetrack.
“We looked at car culture, and we looked at the point where car culture coincides with youth culture,” says Fulton. “We set out to make a place where cars belong, and that’s the Horizon festival. The Horizon festival is the conceptual starting point and the centrepiece of our game.”
“As soon as we created the Horizon festival a lot of things about our game just fell into place. We knew, for example, that we were making an open world game because if the Horizon festival was really this Mecca for car lovers then surely it would be surrounded by the world’s greatest driving roads.
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The Horizon festival is the conceptual starting point and the centrepiece of our game.
“We knew a lot about our world as well, from the Horizon festival; we knew the world needed to be vast, we knew it needed to be environmentally diverse. We knew it needed to be visually stunning with amazing vistas begging to be explored. So we set about finding a location for the Horizon festival; we researched 30 places around the world and ultimately we ended up in Colorado, in the United States, as a place that just ticked all of our boxes.”
On paper Colorado seems like a random place to settle on, particularly with the world at your fingertips. Even Greenawalt, who hails from Colorado, admitted to me earlier he was initially surprised. But when you begin to absorb the sort of driving variety a single environment like Colorado can encompass the decision makes a lot of sense.
“We learnt more about our game from the Horizon festival than just where it was to be set,” continues Fulton. “We knew we wanted to create a really authentic, vibrant festival atmosphere for the game so we went to a guy who has the inside track on festival culture, a guy from the UK named Rob da Bank. He’s a radio DJ, record label boss but most relevantly he’s founded and run two of the biggest summer music festivals in the UK and he’s been on board with Horizon right from the start advising the festival culture and also curating the soundtrack.”
The Horizon festival will basically be your hub for the game.
Fulton is quick to stress Horizon does not represent a sidestep in the fundamental feel of a Forza game. The handling has not been overhauled and simplified to suit the new open-world focus.
“Open-world games in the past have been characterised by arcade handling, which is fine,” he says. “But there’s a problem with those games: that all the cars start to feel the same, they start to handle the same. And that doesn’t work for Forza. In Forza, the car is the star. Every car is special.”
“We use exactly the same best-in-class physics and graphics systems that you’ve known and loved in Forza games previously. We have the same unrivalled handling model, which gives all those cars a sense of weight and heft, and believability. We prove, I think, that action racing doesn’t have to compromise on authenticity in order to achieve what we’ve achieved.”
The team also knew right from the start that they were going to be the ones who would bring off-road racing to Forza franchise for the very first time.
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We have some devs who’ve worked on the best off-road racing games; the DiRT franchise, the Colin McRae Rally franchise...
“Now at Playground Games we were excited by that because we have some devs who’ve worked on the best off-road racing games; the DiRT franchise, the Colin McRae Rally franchise,” says Fulton. “And if you marry that experience to Forza’s best-in-class physics system you get an unrivalled off road racing experience.”
There are 65 different surface types in Forza Horizon.
“It’s not as simple as asphalt and dirt; there are many nuanced combinations in between,” says Fulton.
The team also knew they would need a dynamic day/night cycle; in Fulton’s words, “that’s price of entry for open world game.”
“A road that you’ve travelled during the day could take on a completely different complexion during the night, with only your headlights to light the way,” he says.
Fulton is rehearsed yet earnest during his presentation; chatting further after the demo it’s clear his passion is sincere. Pressed on the accessibility of Horizon, which is promising to be as hard-nosed as its circuit-based brother, Fulton is relaxed.
“I think I would argue that Forza has always been about accessibility,” he says. “They’ve always been about offering an experience to people regardless of their ability level and catering for both ends of the spectrum, if you like. Horizon’s not different from that. We’ve designed it so if you pick up the pad and leave all the assists on it’s a fun experience to drive and navigate around this open-world.”
“Now that’s necessitated some changes to, not the physics, but the car set-ups – and also the assists themselves, because there are certain things you do when driving in an open-world that you would never do driving around Silverstone. But if you want to switch any or all of those assists off, even down to activating simulation steering, you can totally do that in Horizon and have a fantastic experience doing it, and be rewarded in festival races for having upped the difficulty level.”
The UK has traditionally had a very strong racing game culture, and also a very different car culture to the likes of North America and Australia. We ask Fulton what Playground can bring to the series now they’re part of the Forza umbrella.
“That’s a good question; I think you hit on the first part of my answer already,’ he says. “One of the reasons that the Turn 10 guys went out looking for a partner and eventually turned up with us in the United Kingdom is that the United Kingdom has a really strong heritage of making great racing games, and also motorsport culture as well.”
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The United Kingdom has a really strong heritage of making great racing games.
“I think we bring a different perspective on a lot of different things just because of who we are. When we first met the guys from Turn 10 we knew we had a lot of shared values, and we had shared goals as well. We set both of our teams up to be the best racing game developer in the world.
“But we think about things differently in some key ways; I think that brings us together a lot. Our skills and our attitudes complement each other, which is why I think the Turn 10 guys put so much faith in us to take Forza and take it in this entirely new direction.”
So with two teams now sharing the load and building up a shared stockpile of assets and experience where does Fulton see Forza going?
“As I said, right at the top, one of the things Dan always wants is more,” says Fulton. “To broaden. To bring more people in, and infuse them with not only a passion for racing games but a passion for cars as well. And he sees Forza, I think, as a real way to encourage, almost create car passion in people that maybe don’t have it.”
“I don’t want to speak too much for Dan, he can speak to the franchise goals much more articulately than I can, but certainly I know this is one part of his plan to increase what Forza means in both the videogame space and also in automotive culture in general.
“One of the things I’m really keen to stress whenever I can is that this doesn’t divert from the Turn 10 guys’ efforts with the Forza franchise; it doesn’t mean you’re not getting more track racing, although Dan will be the guy who will announce what’s next. I think there’s a huge amount to love for the hardcore Forza faithful in this game. It gives not just one, but a number of new experiences which they’ve never had before; you know, driving at night, driving off-road, driving on the open-road, away from a race track.”
You can't do this at Laguna Seca.
Forza Motorsport 4 has a well-integrated Top Gear partnership that utilises the show’s famous Test Track. If there’s any similar involvement with the BBC’s motoring juggernaut in Horizon no-one’s being overt about it but, that said, Horizon does seem to tap into a certain Top Gear-style fantasy; the joy of open-world driving in world-class driver’s cars. The idea of being able to tackle public roads in the kind of cars Clarkson, Hammond and May regularly test outside of the track is tantalising.
“That’s something we’ve always come back to; that freedom, sometimes just to drive aimlessly, almost purposelessly,” says Fulton. “It’s difficult to put that in the context of game design, which is always about setting objectives for players and goals for players.”
“I rarely have more than 10 minutes to sit down and lose myself in the game but, when I do, I get in a really fast car, I put on our second radio station, it’s our metal radio station, and I’ll set the time of day and just drive towards the Rockies as the sun rises behind them. Games are about magical moments, right? That is just one of Horizon’s.”
I’m able to chat further with Fulton after the first day of E3 draws to a close at an after-hours Microsoft event. We talk about our love of the original Test Drive: Unlimited and reflect upon the satisfaction you can glean from simply cruising through a vast, picturesque open-world.
We talk about the work Playground Games has done to the cars the team has inherited from Turn 10; for instance, with the addition of night racing Playground has needed to add functioning driving lights and illuminated dials for the cabin view, and some cars have required things like pop-up headlamps. Fulton also mentions they’ve added indicators.
Fulton talks about one of the non-traditional races they’ve added, a race between a Mustang and a Mustang. The catch is only one of them is a Ford; the other is a P-51 Mustang, a classic WWII fighter. He talks about how, after discovering how much fun it was to drive through a golf course they had designed, they decided to make the fence smashable and allow players to drive over it too.
We talk about the shift to 30 frames per second in order to free up headroom for the likes of night racing and the game’s stunning 20 kilometre draw distance; Forza Motorsport 4 was 60 fps. I mention I’m not actually able to notice the change and Fulton tells me they had a similar reaction from Turn 10. Horizon is absolutely locked at 30 fps, Fulton tells me, and it will not deviate. This is why it still looks incredibly smooth. Horizon’s physics still update at 360 fps.
We also talk about the pedigree of Playground Games, and this is a hugely important point for racing game fans. Playground Games is a veritable supergroup of UK racing developers. Fulton tells me how the team went from around 20 people to over 100; how over the space of a year they had new people starting every week.
Playground Games was co-founded by British games industry veterans Trevor Williams and Nick Wheelwright. Williams was formerly GM of Codemasters’ Southam and Birmingham development operations. Wheelwright was Codemasters CEO between 1996 and 2004.
Development Director at Playground Games Gavin Raeburn was executive producer at Codemasters for DiRT and GRID, and his involvement with Codemasters stretches back to 1988.
Fulton himself was formerly chief game designer at Codemasters.
Senior cinematic designer Matt Turner also hails from Codemasters, as does senior producer Adam Askew, technical director Alan Roberts, chief engineer Matt Craven and many more.
In fact, Playground Games has so many former Codemasters employees that, back in mid-2010, Codemasters actually accused Playground Games of poaching key employees and disrupting the development of its own racing games.
Former Bizarre Creations staff are also well-represented; lead environment artist Chris Downey, lead audio designer Mathias Grunwaldt, and senior environmental artist Gavin Bartlett all used to work for the house Project Gotham Racing built.
Lead game designer Martin Connor was lead multiplayer level designer at Rockstar North. Senior physics engineer Graham Daniell came to Playground Games from Criterion. Lead vehicle artist Simon Gibson has worked for Ubisoft Reflections, Evolution Studios and Eutechnyx.
Juice Games, Supersonic Software, Slightly Mad Studios, BlackRock Studios; the list of experienced racing games studios that members of Playground Games have worked for in the past goes on. Today Playground Games occupies three floors of its building in the centre of Leamington Spa, in the UK’s West Midlands.
Playground Games may be a brand new studio working on its first title, but experience is not something it lacks.
"Tonight, on Top Gear..."
"We are, as a group, actively worried about replacing ourselves," Greenawalt recently told Autoblog. "I love cars, but I'm 40. I want my kids to be into Camaros and Mustangs and Supras. I want cars like the Subaru BRZ to come out and ignite a new car lust among the younger generation."
With Forza Horizon Playground Games is aiming to do just that.
Luke is Games Editor at IGN AU. You can chat to him about games, cars and the GTHO Phase III on IGN here or find him and the rest of the Australian team by joining the IGN Australia Facebook community.
Source : ign[dot]com
