Compared to the amount of options that are available in Freeplay, very little of it is touched in Builders Cup. People have pointed out there's not really a lot of racing car content in Builders Cup at all, it's very much road car focused. In a way Builders Cup is a very limited look at what this platform can do. What was the thinking behind that?
CE:
I think that's a great question. When we were first envisioning how this game was actually gonna play out and the experiences that we really wanted to get right from day one, it was this production car experience and this race car experience. We were really intentional about making sure that while Builders Cup was focused on production cars from day one, it doesn't mean it can't include race cars in the future.
But to really nail that core experience of taking a production car, modifying it over time, getting to know it, falling in love with it and watching it grow and feeling its progression, that was core to what we wanted to do with Builders Cup. We wanted to make sure that was as good as we can make it for launch.
Then on the other side, which was race cars, spec racing, GT, touring, that sort of thing was really focused in multiplayer. So that experience was just dialled in for what we assumed was very competitive, skill based players looking for a lot of great balanced competition, fair competition, and that's the arena we had created for multiplayer.
Now that was just to get those areas right from the start. And as you see, even on the first day, we started adding additional career content into Builders Cup that started to bridge that gap between focusing on production cars and then race cars over in multiplayer.
So that first week we started unveiling our live content that actually did have race cars and race car content in the live content. And you'll see as we go forward, that will be a continued investment there to understand how we can bring more of the race car content into our career mode, and it may not even be Builders Cup at that point, right?
So to Dan's point that this is a platform and we can continue to invest in, we see how people are playing the game. We see how people are responding to things and asking for certain types of content and experiences. We know that players are asking for some more race car content within the actual career mode and you can see we've already started investing in some of that and we'll continue to respond and create that content over time. We just wanted to make sure that those experiences, the production car content, the race car content was just absolutely nailed in terms of its core from day one.
The game’s been available for a while now, what have been the big key bits of feedback you've been hearing from the audience?
DG:
From a high level the thing that's been great to see is multiplayer has been exceptionally well received. I think we took the time to iterate on that. There was a [development] team playing on that early on, so actually our Racers Cup loop has been largely in place for years. I mean, it's amazing in some ways, how long we've been playing that. And so it was nice to see the audience responding positively to the refinement that we put in.
Now the Builders Cup and actually building those cars up. As I mentioned we're trying to hark back to that Forza Motorsport 3, Forza Motorsport 2 time, where you start in a relatively slow car and you build it up and you build that real relationship with it as it grows over time and hopefully your skills as a driver and your understanding of physics grow.
Now someone who's played a lot of racing games is more of a sim racer. They already know that, but this really does on-board people and it never talks down to them. And that's the other thing I really like is that we're treating players like: you're smart. If you can play League of Legends, if you can play DOTA 2, if you can play these complex games of incredible strategy and dexterity, you should be able to kill it in a racing game.
But people sell themselves short, like ‘oh racing's too hard for me’ and I'm like, ‘wait a minute, you're on top of the Apex Legends forums and you think racing is too hard for you? You're selling yourself short'.
So this Builders Cup was built to really give that feeling. But the other piece of feedback we got is that I think there's a player in the middle where they're familiar with Motorsport and they wanna kind of jump in. They don't want as much of that building the car up over time.
And that's another piece of feedback we look at and say, well, that's something we can tune, but also as we add new mechanics and as we build this out, we can be building new modes in the live ops that we can try out and see if that's the sort of experience that kind of grabs that player that's inbetween the two as well as bleeding some of the race car in the career and bleeding some of the career and building into a multiplayer.
So I think we're set up well to respond to that, but that is the key piece of feedback: multiplayer is great and wow, some people feel a little bit Marmite about the actual building itself.
And you guys have released updates and started addressing some of those things including the way upgrades work in Builders Cup, right?
DG: We did. I wish I could say that was in response to the players. It actually wasn't. It was a response to our own playing as we were finishing the game. So that's why we had that ready: the whole idea that you finished a series and the car is now ‘graduated’. It's ready to go into live ops or it's ready to go do a class based [multiplayer] event. That was something we were thinking about a few months before we released. That's basically what this change was: aligning that graduation. It was a little bit too far out. You'd actually graduate from a series, and you're like, 'well, wait, I'm still in primary school. Give me all the stuff'.
CE:
Yeah, I always thought of it like in martial arts, you get your black belt. And that's basically like you’ve begun your mastery right? And the series is kind of like earning that black belt with that car and then you should be ready to go. You know you should be ready to go and master more stuff with that car. So that was one of the reasons why we made those changes.
We have to ask the obvious question: you set this up as a platform, it's called Forza Motorsport. Is this the last Forza Motorsport release? Will it just be a platform that goes on from now until eternity?
DG:
It's unfortunately an impossible question to really answer. We wanted to set ourselves up with the greatest chance of that being the case. As has been the case in all these answers, it starts with the ground up. We have to look at how we set up licenses and how things are managed on the box and the thing that enables this is in many ways [Microsoft’s subscription service] Game Pass. So having Game Pass and crossplay, so you can roam from one device to the other, that actually gives it a reason why we would not want to reset the community.
It's like no, let's build up your garage over time. Let's build up your skill over time and then really build this whole game and property. But there's so many pieces that could mean it can't be the last, so it's plan for rain and hope for sun. We're planning to be able to do all of this as if winds are against us, but I actually think it's feasible.
You've talked about the addition of cars and the addition of tracks and even the addition of modes, is that the limit or are you still looking at physics? Is it the whole shebang?
DG:
It's the whole shebang.
CE:
Yeah, our physics and AI people aren't going anywhere, you know? We're constantly investing in everything that makes the game tick.
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