It’s been a while since we heard anything about the next Forza Motorsport game. Formally announced in July 2020 for PC and Xbox Series S|X, it is in development at Turn 10 Studios as always.
As part of a recent official livestream, creative director Chris Esaki shared some juicy details on the work that’s been done. To begin with, the official title will indeed be just Forza Motorsport, moving away from numbered entries to signal a soft reboot for the racing franchise.
Esaki went on to say that the very first playtest with select community members went better than anticipated. According to the creative director, this new Forza Motorsport already packs more changes to its simulation engine than there were between Forza Motorsport 4 and 7.
It’s a big deal. We held our first play test for just a part of the game on May 8th and I think it really went better than expected, especially since we kicked off this first of many open conversations between us and our community. It was really special for the team and myself, we got to actually talk directly with our players and we got a ton of great feedback. Judging by all that feedback, I’m pretty sure everyone was super hyped and energized by it. These conversations will be ongoing and we’ll be continuing to test parts of the game as time goes on.
We had sessions running in multiplayer and players were able to experience the work that we’ve done in revamping and deepening the game’s physics and our core gameplay. I’m a core mechanics guy and i really think about all the things that we do when the rubber meets the road, that sort of thing, as core of our gameplay feel that our players know and love and just making it that much better. I’ve been kind of trying to think about how to how to quantify this for for everyone here without actually getting your hands on it, so to put the physics work into perspective, the changes we’ve made from Forza Motorsport 7 till now are more than the changes that we’ve made from Forza Motorsport 4 through 7. It’s basically a huge generational leap coming to the game.
Later in the livestream, Esaki singled out one specific figure regarding the tire collision model. The upcoming game will have eight times the points of contacts with the track surface, and the data will be refreshed six times faster, leading to a massive 48x fidelity jump in the tire collision model. This translates in a better feeling of the track surface while playing.
From the very first Forza Motorsport till Forza Motorsport 7, our tire collision model itself had a single point of contact with the track surface and moved at about and refreshed at 60 cycles a second or 60 hertz. Our new model, this hopefully will give you an idea of how much has changed, has eight points of contact with the track surface and is running at 360 cycles a second or 360 hertz. If you’re doing the math there, eight points of contact versus one, 360 hertz versus 60, it’s a 48x fidelity jump in a single tire collision itself. There’s just a huge amount of work that has really paid off for us. All the feedback that we got from this last play test is that you can really feel the track surface a lot more and how the cars handle, there’s just a lot more communication to the player and the feeling of the tires on the track is really insane, it makes you more informed.
The next Forza Motorsport game, which will be powered by the latest version of the ForzaTech engine upgraded to support ray tracing, won’t ship this year. Rumors indicate that Playground’s Forza Horizon 5 will be unveiled at Microsoft’s E3 2021 Xbox/Bethesda conference (scheduled for June 13th at 10:00 AM PT), though. It should be set in Mexico.
