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