#FORZAMONTHLY LIVESTREAM - JULY 2019
Replay: Forza Monthly | July 2019 - YouTube
In the July edition of #ForzaMonthly, Turn 10’s Chris Esaki presented the next step in Forza Race Regulations coming to FM7 with the July 2nd content update. At the end of the show he addressed questions from the community. The common theme in the answers was trade-offs between work on the current game and the next project.
Topics and Timestamps:
FORZA RACE REGULATIONS - 13:00 and 1:06:30
Chris Esaki presents FM7’s July content update for FRR which introduces “Avoidable Contact” penalties for collisions. Example gameplay shown. Addressing brake-checking griefing and false positives. Discussion on the difficulty of judging intent: “Any game trying to actually get an intent-based penalty system online will understand that this is super difficult. This is a super complex problem. There are probably a hundred or so - more than that - different scenarios that have to be solved for in time. And even then like in real life, sometimes it’s a coin toss of where’s going to go and it’s hard to really know true intent. For the future, we’re looking at things like machine learning - I’ve talked about it before - where we’re going to be investing heavily into that to really help us solve a lot of these issues, to make the system much more complex and nuanced. And it’s going to be a long time for us to get this thing right. But once again this is the first step.”
SHIFTING FROM FM7 TO THE NEXT FORZA PROJECT - 23:00
“One of the biggest things we’ve been running into on all sides - car production, track production, and of course gameplay - is the core problem around shipping a real current live game and making sure it is ready for the public, and investing in things that will help us for the next product. It’s all about speed for us, for a lot of purposes, to get to the next game. Something that I don’t think most people appreciate about the production for games that are in a live environment, that are actually in release to the public is that there is a massive overhead to getting it to the public. We can’t just code something and fire it out, we go through a ton of process for release. Basically it adds an overhead of from anywhere between 30-60% of our time, just goes to shipping this stuff. So when we’re looking at any of this development right now - shipping a track or shipping a car or even nuances to FRR - all of that work which is normally there - and we’re using all of this stuff for the next game - there’s a good 30-60% of time shipping it to FM7 which could be used to help develop a better game in the future. So we’re looking across all the studio and thinking, well, we could either continue this with FM7 and have 30-60% less of a game when we come out next time or we can start pushing all of that effort diirectly to the next product. … So we’re really going to go all in for the next product at this point.” and FM7 will have its final major content update in August.
COMMUNITY Q&A SESSION
Although the questions here were about FM7, they were addressed with the future in mind.
IMSA PARTNERSHIP, TRACK CONTENT - 59:00
Is there news on the IMSA partnership? “This is really about track content. So the IMSA partnership. we’re definitely looking at this for the future as something we want to go pretty deeply into. With track content, and specifically the licensed tracks for a full IMSA series, that’s a lot of work. Our tracks take a long time to build and it’s a lot of money. While that’s no excuse to not do them, once again this is a trade-off. Everything has to be looked at as a trade-off at this point. Does it go into FM7 or do we invest in the future? So we’ve had the track team for a long time now investing in the tools and technology that would help us ship more tracks, newer tracks, newer types of tracks for the future with a lot of new technology in them. The call was made: are we going to have IMSA tracks, or are we going to have a whole wildly new way of building tracks that are better for our players for the future so the next product will be all that we hope it can be? It was a hard call. We chose to invest in our future and make sure the next product has some of these truly authentic motorsport experiences either from a licensed series [IMSA, WEC, etc, or other]. These are things we absolutely want to bring in a much more authentic way, with the actual cars and tracks so we can actually bring series to Motorsport, and bring a more motorsport experience to Motorsport is certainly what we’re looking at for the future.”
DRAFTING AND PHYSICS IMPROVEMENTS - 1:01:30
Will drafting be fixed? “For the next game for sure. This is one of those things that’s on our list. So, we have actually have a racing fundamentals team. They’re building out our core A.I. and our physics. We have a lot of new physics stuff: we have a new tire model up and running, we have a ton of new suspension changes coming in - that is actually running right now and it solves a lot of the weight transfer issues - we have some new heat modeling going in, new tire wear and weather effects going in to the tire model. … I would think we would probably have a number of drafting settings so players can tune in the actual kind of racing they want, and something we’ll be playing with in terms of the different championship series. Just to spice up the racing we’ll probably have a number of different settings.”
PREVIOUS FORZA FANTASY TRACKS - 1:03:00
Will we see the return of old fantasy tracks? “One of the things that have come up - and Scott [Lee] is really passionate about this - is reclassifying all of these fantasy tracks as Forza Lore tracks, and Forza Lore experiences. We also count all of the Horizon series in that as well. All of the things [Horizon’s] done, they’re a part of the Forza universe. So we’re kind of classifying these things all in the Forza universe. There are so many benefits of that versus real-world tracks. There are things that we can do with those tracks that we can really be specific about the type of experience that we want, the type of racing, the type of passion, the type of things that we want to be experiencing on a track-to-track basis through these Forza Lore tracks. So you better bet we’ll be investing a lot in that in the future, because it allows us to craft a better experience we know the players are going to love. … The number one fantasy track that we always get asked for is Fujimi Kaido. We hear you guys loud and clear. We’re working on a lot of stuff right now.”
You can do something with a Lore track that you can’t do with a real track. “Most people don’t expect fantasy versions of Laguna Seca or the Nurburgring. Why would you? You’re there to race the real thing. You wouldn’t change it. Now with something like Nurburgring it’s a good example of something you might do like a historical version of it. It would be amazing to bring those experiences back, but that’s about as far as you’d want to go with a real track. We’ve even discussed things about bringing the alternate versions of those tracks, and we’re looking at those as well, but you’re there to race the real version. With our fantasy tracks the great thing there is you have so much more freedom about the types of experiences you can build in there. But more importantly there are things around how to learn in the game - how to teach players better race craft, how to control the car - that we really think fantasy tracks, or the Forza Lore tracks, can really help us there, and help our players get better at driving and understand how to control the car.”
EXPERIMENTAL DRAG - 1:08:00
Experimental Drag was one of the first steps in collecting feedback about a new feature. “For the next version it’ll be part of the overall experience.”
SEARCHABLE CUSTOM PUBLIC LOBBIES - 1:09:00
“Searchable custom public lobbies is one of the often requested features from the community. Same with A.I. and multiplayer, and build your own careers. We hear you loud and clear. I just want to caveat this with: we are completely looking at everything about how we organize online racing all up in the next version. And I think everyone will be pretty happy with some of these massive changes we’re looking at. But yeah, this is kind of core to the experience, I think - searchable custom public lobbies - and how that’s expressed, and making sure that portion of player creativity and social engagement and a lot of fun racing happens. So, yeah, we hear you loud and clear. More details on that to come.”
AUGUST Q&A - 1:10:00
Bing will have a new thread where users can submit questions for the August Forza Monthly Q&A.
