It’s been almost three months since the launch of Forza Motorsport 5, Turn 10’s next-generation racing game for the Xbox One. It’s fair to say that it was not greeted with universal praise. Gaming can be highly tribal, and criticism poured into comment threads from all sides. Not realistic enough, said the PC racers. Not enough cars, said the PS3 racers. Why can’t I use my wheel, asked the Xbox 360 crew. We hate microtransactions, roared just about everyone. Back in November I felt that the pressure of being a launch title with a not-to-be-missed release date was evident, but it also seemed clear that the game was a work in progress. Even though Turn 10 has been busy in the intervening months with DLC and tweaks to the game’s rewards structure, Dan Greenawalt found time to answer some of our questions about the game, its development, and its reception.
Positive pressure
Being tied to the Xbox One launch was a huge opportunity, Dan told us. FM5 is the first installment of the franchise to launch alongside the console it runs on, putting the game in front of millions of new fans.
Disappointingly, the number of cars and available tracks has dropped drastically in this game from the previous release on the Xbox 360, Forza Motorsport 4.
His positive attitude continued when asked whether the mixed reaction to the game had been a surprise. 'The response… has been tremendous. Based on the telemetry coming out of the Forza Rewards program, many longtime Forza fans have moved over to the Xbox One and are deeply engaged with the game.' The sales figures bear out that optimism; earlier this week, Microsoft announced that a third of Xbox One owners have bought FM5, making it the fastest selling racing game in the Xbox’s 12-year history.
The sharpest Drivatar in the shed
Forza Motorsport's AI is particularly innovative, befitting the franchise’s roots in Microsoft’s Cambridge, UK, research unit. Drivatars—AI characters whose behavior is learned from human players—have been a feature of several Forza games, but this is the first time they’ve traveled beyond the local confines of each individual Xbox. As a result, the cars you’ll try and beat in single-player races behave much less predictably than many other racing games.
Because Drivatars are trained by the aggregate pool of Forza players, the Drivatar system was something I was keen to revisit once that pool had expanded beyond those with access to the game pre-release. According to Greenawalt, the data each Drivatar is based on is extensive, drawing on 'things like braking and acceleration usage when heading into and out of turns, the player’s line, as well as the player’s propensity for making contact with other cars, and so on.'
Less predictable AI can be a curse as well as a blessing, though. During the game’s first weeks I was witness to some pretty questionable driving. In particular, it was extremely difficult starting at the back and making it past the slower third of the grid without getting hit or having to rewind. I was curious about how much of a player’s driving style actually gets incorporated into their Drivatar, especially with respect to that rewind function. For example, if I hit another car, then rewind a few seconds and overtake them without contact, does my Drivatar learn to race clean or bump its way through?
Dan explains: 'when using rewind while driving, the first action is what is noted… So, in your example, if you hit a car ahead of you, then Rewind and successfully make it past the car, the Drivatar will note the fact that you hit your opponent on your first try. This is in order to prevent the player from gaming the Drivatar system and only using “perfect” laps in order to build their profile.'
The Drivatar system has attracted frequent Skynet jokes, evoking the self-aware AI from the Terminator films. Dan wasn’t able to tell me if this massive distributed machine-learning experiment had created any emergent behavior, but he was proud of how the technology is inspiring 'narrative' among players.
'I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard Forza 5 players tell me about something that happened to them as they were driving against Drivatars. Maybe they beat one of their friends’ Drivatars who is several skill levels above them, or they went three-wide into the final corner of a final lap, or they crashed out while attempting some epic overtake. People are trash-talking their friends’ AIs! That just doesn't happen with traditional racing opponents.'
New tracks, new cars
The lack of cars and tracks compared to previous installments and rival titles was probably the loudest complaint at launch. As expected, Dan refused to be drawn into specifics, so I can’t reveal the impending addition of the Nürburgring or Porsche. But the DLC has been flowing pretty steadily since November, some of it free.The return of Wisconsin's scenic Road America as a free download has been particularly welcome; the track has a particular place in my heart and I’ve raced there several times now. The FM5 version looks substantially improved over previous representations, and it now includes multiple configurations, including the track layout that ChumpCar uses. That’s enabled me to quite accurately simulate our race car, which I certainly think is cool, even if no one else will.
Mouse trap game instructions 2017. Three months on, my main FM5 irritation is the lack of steering wheel peripherals, which is something largely outside Turn 10’s control. I’ve not had a chance to try out the Thrustmaster wheel, but reports from our forums suggest it can be temperamental, and it doesn’t appear as if the MadCatz wheel has hit the stores yet. Until dawn walkthrough. I’ve largely adapted to using a controller again, but I am extremely eager to find out how immersive the game is with a wheel and some pedals.
Upping the Drivatar difficulty has taken care of some of the sketchy AI driving, and the game doesn’t feel particularly grindy, partly thanks to tweaks made to car prices and reward levels. If you’ve got an Xbox One and haven’t tried FM5, now is as good a time as any. Oh, it’s also the only way most of us will ever recreate Chris Harris’ excellent video of throwing a McLaren P1 around Yas Marina’s F1 track.
The Forza series may not be quite as synonymous with Microsoft as say Halo, but it has become an Xbox mainstay ever since the release of the first game in 2005 for the original Xbox. Since then, the series has seen a new release every two years and each entry have been well received. Forza has been Microsoft’s answer to Sony’s Gran Turismo for a while now and has had releases occur a lot more often, which has helped the series to become a household name in only eight years. Now, the Xbox One launch has arrived with Forza Motorsport 5 from Turn 10 Studios.
One thing to remember with the Forza series is that you can’t go in expecting it to be a Mario Kart like racer. Unlike arcade style racers, Forza is a lot more realistic in pretty much every aspect. You can’t make wide turns and expect not to spin out or run off the track. The controls are very touchy in that you barely need to move left and right or you will go off course. This leads to a bit of a steep learning curve, which can be extremely hard for newcomers at first who haven’t played a game like Forza before. However, once you get the hang on it, you really begin to feel like you have total control over the car as you drive.
The Xbox One controller greatly enhances the experience due to the new rumble triggers that react when braking or losing control of your vehicle. This addition helps you learn how to react and respond to your car much more quickly over time. Beyond the very useful rumble triggers, Forza also displays a path of arrows throughout each track that help to show when you need to slow down or brake by changing from blue arrows to yellow or even red on the sharper turns. Learning to follow these are the one of the biggest keys to mastering this game.
As you would expect from a game on the Xbox One, Forza Motorsport 5 is beautiful visually. At first glance, you could honestly mistake this game for the real thing as you race around the stunning locations. Due to the use of actual cars and tracks, the designers as always are able to perfectly craft each to look just like their real world counterparts, such as one of my personal favorites, the Bernese Alps.
While racing, you can choose between multiple different camera angles, including one from the eyes of the actual driver where you see the full inside of the car. It was a little more difficult to get used to racing from this angle, but the car looks gorgeous and extremely detailed inside. A nice little touch is the ability to see all the bumps and bruises that your car receives after each race. Honestly, my car looked terrible after most races, but that’s the price you pay to do well sometimes.
Beyond just the graphics, the game feels very smooth while maintaining 60 frames per second with a 1080p resolution. While playing, I never noticed any hiccups whatsoever, which is very impressive for a launch title running at 60 frames per second. Sometimes you may just get in the zone and forget about everything else around you due to the immersive experience you will feel in each race.
Disappointingly, the number of cars and available tracks has dropped drastically in this game from the previous release on the Xbox 360, Forza Motorsport 4. Forza Motorsport 5 includes 200 cars from over 50 different manufacturers, down from about 500 cars from over 80 manufacturers. The number of tracks has also been reduced from 27 to 14, which can often lead to some track fatigue when you keep playing on the same few tracks over and over again. The lesser number of cars could be due to needing more time to work on the game due to being on a next generation console, but it seems suspicious that they are planning on releasing a steady stream of DLC cars in the future that you can pay to download.
While there are less than 50% of the cars in the game, luckily there is a level of customization that somewhat helps to make up for it. After choosing the car you want to purchase with the credits you’ve earned in races, you can choose how you want to design it. If you want to, you can choose to look at pretty much every inch of the car in detail through the Forzavista mode before or after you get to designing it.
When choosing how to customize your car, you can choose from just straight paint jobs or more detailed patterns and decal designs. I personally went the easy route with just a normal color as I didn’t want it to be too loud, but I messed around with it quite a while before settling on my garnet colored Viper. Make sure your vehicle is exactly to your specifications as you will get close-ups shots of it before and after each race, granted it will look a little better before each race rather than after.
Forza Motorsport 5 (Xbox One) Review, 6.8 out of 10 based on 17 ratings- Author: admin
- Category: Category
It’s been almost three months since the launch of Forza Motorsport 5, Turn 10’s next-generation racing game for the Xbox One. It’s fair to say that it was not greeted with universal praise. Gaming can be highly tribal, and criticism poured into comment threads from all sides. Not realistic enough, said the PC racers. Not enough cars, said the PS3 racers. Why can’t I use my wheel, asked the Xbox 360 crew. We hate microtransactions, roared just about everyone. Back in November I felt that the pressure of being a launch title with a not-to-be-missed release date was evident, but it also seemed clear that the game was a work in progress. Even though Turn 10 has been busy in the intervening months with DLC and tweaks to the game’s rewards structure, Dan Greenawalt found time to answer some of our questions about the game, its development, and its reception.
Positive pressure
Being tied to the Xbox One launch was a huge opportunity, Dan told us. FM5 is the first installment of the franchise to launch alongside the console it runs on, putting the game in front of millions of new fans.
Disappointingly, the number of cars and available tracks has dropped drastically in this game from the previous release on the Xbox 360, Forza Motorsport 4.
His positive attitude continued when asked whether the mixed reaction to the game had been a surprise. 'The response… has been tremendous. Based on the telemetry coming out of the Forza Rewards program, many longtime Forza fans have moved over to the Xbox One and are deeply engaged with the game.' The sales figures bear out that optimism; earlier this week, Microsoft announced that a third of Xbox One owners have bought FM5, making it the fastest selling racing game in the Xbox’s 12-year history.
The sharpest Drivatar in the shed
Forza Motorsport's AI is particularly innovative, befitting the franchise’s roots in Microsoft’s Cambridge, UK, research unit. Drivatars—AI characters whose behavior is learned from human players—have been a feature of several Forza games, but this is the first time they’ve traveled beyond the local confines of each individual Xbox. As a result, the cars you’ll try and beat in single-player races behave much less predictably than many other racing games.
Because Drivatars are trained by the aggregate pool of Forza players, the Drivatar system was something I was keen to revisit once that pool had expanded beyond those with access to the game pre-release. According to Greenawalt, the data each Drivatar is based on is extensive, drawing on 'things like braking and acceleration usage when heading into and out of turns, the player’s line, as well as the player’s propensity for making contact with other cars, and so on.'
Less predictable AI can be a curse as well as a blessing, though. During the game’s first weeks I was witness to some pretty questionable driving. In particular, it was extremely difficult starting at the back and making it past the slower third of the grid without getting hit or having to rewind. I was curious about how much of a player’s driving style actually gets incorporated into their Drivatar, especially with respect to that rewind function. For example, if I hit another car, then rewind a few seconds and overtake them without contact, does my Drivatar learn to race clean or bump its way through?
Dan explains: 'when using rewind while driving, the first action is what is noted… So, in your example, if you hit a car ahead of you, then Rewind and successfully make it past the car, the Drivatar will note the fact that you hit your opponent on your first try. This is in order to prevent the player from gaming the Drivatar system and only using “perfect” laps in order to build their profile.'
The Drivatar system has attracted frequent Skynet jokes, evoking the self-aware AI from the Terminator films. Dan wasn’t able to tell me if this massive distributed machine-learning experiment had created any emergent behavior, but he was proud of how the technology is inspiring 'narrative' among players.
'I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard Forza 5 players tell me about something that happened to them as they were driving against Drivatars. Maybe they beat one of their friends’ Drivatars who is several skill levels above them, or they went three-wide into the final corner of a final lap, or they crashed out while attempting some epic overtake. People are trash-talking their friends’ AIs! That just doesn't happen with traditional racing opponents.'
New tracks, new cars
The lack of cars and tracks compared to previous installments and rival titles was probably the loudest complaint at launch. As expected, Dan refused to be drawn into specifics, so I can’t reveal the impending addition of the Nürburgring or Porsche. But the DLC has been flowing pretty steadily since November, some of it free.The return of Wisconsin's scenic Road America as a free download has been particularly welcome; the track has a particular place in my heart and I’ve raced there several times now. The FM5 version looks substantially improved over previous representations, and it now includes multiple configurations, including the track layout that ChumpCar uses. That’s enabled me to quite accurately simulate our race car, which I certainly think is cool, even if no one else will.
Mouse trap game instructions 2017. Three months on, my main FM5 irritation is the lack of steering wheel peripherals, which is something largely outside Turn 10’s control. I’ve not had a chance to try out the Thrustmaster wheel, but reports from our forums suggest it can be temperamental, and it doesn’t appear as if the MadCatz wheel has hit the stores yet. Until dawn walkthrough. I’ve largely adapted to using a controller again, but I am extremely eager to find out how immersive the game is with a wheel and some pedals.
Upping the Drivatar difficulty has taken care of some of the sketchy AI driving, and the game doesn’t feel particularly grindy, partly thanks to tweaks made to car prices and reward levels. If you’ve got an Xbox One and haven’t tried FM5, now is as good a time as any. Oh, it’s also the only way most of us will ever recreate Chris Harris’ excellent video of throwing a McLaren P1 around Yas Marina’s F1 track.
The Forza series may not be quite as synonymous with Microsoft as say Halo, but it has become an Xbox mainstay ever since the release of the first game in 2005 for the original Xbox. Since then, the series has seen a new release every two years and each entry have been well received. Forza has been Microsoft’s answer to Sony’s Gran Turismo for a while now and has had releases occur a lot more often, which has helped the series to become a household name in only eight years. Now, the Xbox One launch has arrived with Forza Motorsport 5 from Turn 10 Studios.
One thing to remember with the Forza series is that you can’t go in expecting it to be a Mario Kart like racer. Unlike arcade style racers, Forza is a lot more realistic in pretty much every aspect. You can’t make wide turns and expect not to spin out or run off the track. The controls are very touchy in that you barely need to move left and right or you will go off course. This leads to a bit of a steep learning curve, which can be extremely hard for newcomers at first who haven’t played a game like Forza before. However, once you get the hang on it, you really begin to feel like you have total control over the car as you drive.
The Xbox One controller greatly enhances the experience due to the new rumble triggers that react when braking or losing control of your vehicle. This addition helps you learn how to react and respond to your car much more quickly over time. Beyond the very useful rumble triggers, Forza also displays a path of arrows throughout each track that help to show when you need to slow down or brake by changing from blue arrows to yellow or even red on the sharper turns. Learning to follow these are the one of the biggest keys to mastering this game.
As you would expect from a game on the Xbox One, Forza Motorsport 5 is beautiful visually. At first glance, you could honestly mistake this game for the real thing as you race around the stunning locations. Due to the use of actual cars and tracks, the designers as always are able to perfectly craft each to look just like their real world counterparts, such as one of my personal favorites, the Bernese Alps.
While racing, you can choose between multiple different camera angles, including one from the eyes of the actual driver where you see the full inside of the car. It was a little more difficult to get used to racing from this angle, but the car looks gorgeous and extremely detailed inside. A nice little touch is the ability to see all the bumps and bruises that your car receives after each race. Honestly, my car looked terrible after most races, but that’s the price you pay to do well sometimes.
Beyond just the graphics, the game feels very smooth while maintaining 60 frames per second with a 1080p resolution. While playing, I never noticed any hiccups whatsoever, which is very impressive for a launch title running at 60 frames per second. Sometimes you may just get in the zone and forget about everything else around you due to the immersive experience you will feel in each race.
Disappointingly, the number of cars and available tracks has dropped drastically in this game from the previous release on the Xbox 360, Forza Motorsport 4. Forza Motorsport 5 includes 200 cars from over 50 different manufacturers, down from about 500 cars from over 80 manufacturers. The number of tracks has also been reduced from 27 to 14, which can often lead to some track fatigue when you keep playing on the same few tracks over and over again. The lesser number of cars could be due to needing more time to work on the game due to being on a next generation console, but it seems suspicious that they are planning on releasing a steady stream of DLC cars in the future that you can pay to download.
While there are less than 50% of the cars in the game, luckily there is a level of customization that somewhat helps to make up for it. After choosing the car you want to purchase with the credits you’ve earned in races, you can choose how you want to design it. If you want to, you can choose to look at pretty much every inch of the car in detail through the Forzavista mode before or after you get to designing it.
When choosing how to customize your car, you can choose from just straight paint jobs or more detailed patterns and decal designs. I personally went the easy route with just a normal color as I didn’t want it to be too loud, but I messed around with it quite a while before settling on my garnet colored Viper. Make sure your vehicle is exactly to your specifications as you will get close-ups shots of it before and after each race, granted it will look a little better before each race rather than after.
Forza Motorsport 5 (Xbox One) Review, 6.8 out of 10 based on 17 ratings