Taking in questions for Forza 5 interview at Gamescom!

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My question got answered, happy to see unicorns gone!
RH: Are unicorn cars going to be making another appearance in Forza 5?
DG: No, there aren't any unicorn cars in the game, and yet every car is a unicorn car in a sense honestly there are cars that are very expensive in the game and to afford them you actually have to do a lot of racing

I love this way of thinking. I still saw those cars that weren't "unicorns" but still required hours and hours of credit saving just to get. It actually took less effort to get a Unicorn than something like the Shelby Daytona(if it weren't a level reward car).

 
Indeed. I still need the DBR1, the cheapest of the 250's, and the 33 Stradale, to say nothing of all the track-only >1000000 Ferraris, in FM4. Unicorns were relatively easy to grab provided you could tolerate visiting the sluggish official site, or were around to race online when there were Dev days. The new Rewards program also makes them easier to grab.
 
Good riddance to unicorns. If you can't earn it by playing offline on your own time, it shouldn't ship on the disc. Hell, a DLC pack would be cheaper than maintaining an XBL Gold subscription in the hopes of picking up a unicorn you may or may not already have. I imagine that was kind of the point.
 
DG: I'm Dan Greenawalt, and I'm the creative director at Turn 10. And I've been with Turn 10 since there was no Turn 10. So I've been involved with all the Forza Motorsports including Forza Horizon and, it's kind of funny; people tended to play our game in these 90 minute or 3 hour chunks. And so we've designed these careers to be about the length that people generally play. And so when you're done with one you start another. But we're not saying "oh you're done with hot hatch, now you need to go to faster cars" - no, we actually start you in great cars, we don't start you in the low-end cars in the game, your very first car is from the modern sport com[pact] so that means a BMW 1M Coupe, that means a Subaru BRZ; really good cars. And from there, you can go wherever you want, go straight to racing. Go straight to hot hatch. Wherever you go. But it's not just in the career itself. It's also in the other modes. So you earn the same amount of XP, you level up at the same rate, you earn the same amount of money, everywhere in the game. Even in split screen. So everywhere you go, you're playing basically the same game. And that's the hope; that you know who you are. If you want to paint, go paint. You can make a ton of money painting. You want to race, go race. You want to tune, you can go do that.

RH: Sorry, two questions about that. Split screen, does that mean split screen is going to be co-operative, is that what you're saying?

DG: Uh, split screen is its own mode, and in split screen you can setup races that you and your friend can do on your couch. It's more like multiplayer than it is like the career mode.

RH: Very quickly you said about the painting: is the painting customization going to go beyond the car [like the helmets], or...

DG: No, it's all on the car.

RH: If you have a favorite car how many championships can you complete with it?

DG: Generally if you have a favorite single car, there's about two that you can do with one car. There's 42 of these entirely. So that means if you were going to try and do all of them and again I know that people aren't going to try and do all of them, that's not how people play, they're going to find their sweet spot. If you're going to try and do all of them, you're going to need about, 36 cars I'd say? But the cool thing is you pick the cars you like. We're not going to gift you cars that you then have to use. We gift you money. And by having money you can buy the cars you want and you don't get a car when you're midway through racing; you buy the car right when you want to use it, right, so it's a more bite-sized experience where you jump in, you buy the car for the mini
career you're going to play, you use that car and then choose to go to another one.

RH: Are unicorn cars going to be making another appearance in Forza 5?

DG: No, there aren't any unicorn cars in the game, and yet every car is a unicorn car in a sense honestly there are cars that are very expensive in the game and to afford them you actually have to do a lot of racing

RH: So it's price based

DG: Yeah, it's a completely open game.

RH: Speaking of cars, are we still going to see 16 on track as the max?

DG: We're actually not announcing how many cars are on track, we are keeping some news as we go to the shows later this quarter

RH: Are we going to see multiple tire makes or are we still going to see one generic make of tire and also are we going to see logos on the tires themselves?

DG: Well basically what we did was we've got very many different tires that are going on the cars when they're stock so we actually model the stock make, you know what I mean, physically. But we don't but the sidewalls, or the names of the sidewalls on the side. Uh, it's basically about physics. The physics is what we stress there. And then when it comes to the upgrade levels, there's three upgrade levels and those three levels are based on tires but we've not been telling people which ones. Because we're not trying to-- we tested everything so what we're able to do is recreate a slick based on multiple slicks so we made the best type of slick that's representative of the type of racing in our game which is more sprint racing-based. We can create a DOT-R, we're just not going to tell people exactly which DOT-R it's based on, which is the same as the Y-rated. So basically when the car is in stock form, it's got tires very similar, well usually it's researched data to be the same tire it had.
DG: We laser-scanned Spa with a new type of laser scanning technology that's sub-centimeter level of accuracy, so it captures cracks, it captures weeds, it captures all sorts of things in a track which allows us to create an incredibly accurate Spa. But also we went and measured the actual like surface friction, and it's different, the aggregate, the actual asphalt of Spa is different than it is at Laguna Seca or at Praque where we also had a track. So we're recreating Spa with a level of accuracy, not only in the graphics engine and the physics engine, and with a level of diversity.

RH: Are we going to see that level of laser scanning on existing tracks that are coming from Forza 4 to Forza 5?

DG: It depends; some of our track, we had started prototyping the laser scanning even back on Forza 4 for a couple of the tracks, that was when we were deciding which rigging to go with; some of our old tracks are extremely accurate because of our old way of doing things, which was where we brought out levels and we had industrial-grade GPS and we had pro race drivers help us hone it, and some of the tracks we felt were a little bit, uhh, not as accurate as we liked so we went and recaptured a few as well. So it's a blend.

RH: Two very quick questions then, very much yes or no. Will we see Porsche cars in Forza 5 as Porsche cars?

DG: No Porsche. We have RUF.

RH: Fair enough. And then there's lots of questions going on about driving wheels, ie Fanatec

DG: Honestly yeah that's not a Forza question; I understand why people are asking, absolutely, so I'm not saying it's a bad question but we're on the software side, not the hardware side.

RH: What about Kinect support?

DG: Yeah we have Kinect head tracking and we have the Kinect voice and the head tracking is slightly different because it's a higher-fidelity camera so you don't have to sit front-and-center and then tune the little window; you can actually be off to the side and it actually uses a little bit more leaning than it does head movement so that's due to the new Kinect.
 
The GT5 Ring isn't laser scanned and it's pretty good. The pCARS Ring isn't laser scanned and it's pretty good. A perfectly acceptable model can be made without laser scanning.

Assuming that they put some effort into prettying up the graphics for it, which is not a terribly unreasonable assumption, there's no reason they wouldn't modify the track itself while they're at it. They must know that it's not right.

As far as prettying up the tracks is concerned, we all know tracks were somewhat toned down from FM3, in favor of a higher number of cars, better object detail, and a cleaner, sharper, more sterile look. And of course the updated lighting model.

I believe if they had had more time on their hands, they would have injected more life into some tracks. 2 years doesn't seem like enough to me, given the changes they bring to the table with each iteration. But it isn't half as bad as people make it out to be. Not accurate you say? How many of us are going to venture out to The Ring to run lap times, or compete in a motorsport event that requires the use of a 100% accurate-in-every-way simulator?

I've got high hopes for FM5. My main concern are the physics and how closely the cars behave next to their real life counterparts. Track accuracy...meh. If it's there, well and good. If not, no biggie. The suspension, brakes and steering reacting realistically to different tarmac surfaces, that's what I'm most interested in.

Furthermore, I'm also interested in getting to play fantasy tracks from Fm1, 2 and 3. I don't think they're bringing those back though. But I have a feeling, FM5 is going to set a new benchmark in terms of what racing simulators can do on a videogame console. :)
 
Do you know how much effort it takes to hit apple+c then apple+v? I'm lucky to be alive right now. Thanks for the transcript.👍

no probs. I used to have to do transcriptions through college, so I got pretty good at it. If there are other interviews that people need transcribed, feel free to message me.
 
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