Forza Motorsport’s Dan Greenawalt Interview

[Steve_OS]

VG247 has posted an interview with Dan Greenawalt, Game Director of the Forza Motorsport series, as they discuss the Forza, IP’s future, Gran Turismo 5 and plenty more.

Quote:

VG247: "Finally, how do you see the future of racing sims panning out? We have photo-realistic cars, online racing, full customization; where’s left to go?" Dan: "Do I think the racing game genre is played out? No, I think graphics fidelity and immersion will continue to improve in a predictable fashion. But if you want to evolve the core racing genre and reach players who may not typically race in a competitive fashion, you need the flexibility to be able to design the game for an audience outside of your comfort zone. We’ve touched on a lot of these diversifying pillars in Forza Motorsport 3: the game is easy to pick up for casual gamers, yet deep enough for hardcore gearheads; we’ve elaborated on the areas of the game that de-emphasize competitive racing to focus more on inciting the car passions that lie within all of us, such as collecting, customizing, photographing, and simply admiring cars in your home space. Now the question is, how do we take all of that to the next level? How do we go from being a “Racing Game” to being a “Car Game” to being a way of life? These are just some of the tenants we’ve taken to heart for our next project."

[Kruza]

Oh, so now Turn 10 will make it a priority to improve the overall racing experience when developing the next Forza game. Better late than never, I guess.

Kruza

[Steve_OS]

LOL.

[lnin0]

I don't see where he says the are going to focus on the racing? At least not in that snippet above (which is all the Dan Greenwalt I can handle). I come away with exactly the opposite.

Basically he is saying, we have a big following of race fans and we are not trying to make them happy - we want to turn the game into something for everyone even it that means stripping out anything and everything that the competitive racing enthusiast originally look to our title for.

He calls this evolution when it is clearly devlolution that he is referring to.

If you have to turn a game inside out to get a million more people to like it then it sounds to me like you don't know what you are doing. Sure, you might have some new buyers but you don't have the same game or the fans that originally loved the series and what it stood for. Dan loves to pat himself on the back but the real pat on the back would be for keeping the game true to itself - keeping it about competitive racing - and yet still drawing new players into that experience somehow.

[Kruza]

Well, I took Dan Greenwalt's comments in the way that he's looking in retrospect as to what was Turn 10's mind state back when they were developing Forza 3, which was to focus on including every car-related feature and option outside of racing stuff in order to draw in as many casual fans to this series as possible. Now for Forza 4 they'll be more tuned to looking for ways to improve the actual racing experience. This is what I interpret from his "way of life" phrase and his last comment. I thought this should've been the mind state back when Forza 2 was being developed, but oh well.

I totally agree your last statement though. I also didn't like the way they went about developing the Forza series, as it seems they went the completely backwards route toward drawing in people to their games.

Kruza