It’s been a month since Forza Horizon hit shelves around the world and Playground Games design director Ralph Fulton says the team has been buzzing with the feedback they’ve been receiving.
“It was great to get really positive review feedback,” says Fulton. “It was great to see people playing the game [and] start to get their feedback, not just on the forums and from Twitter but in the game itself. We’re all really pleased. Everybody worked really hard on the game here; everybody poured a lot of passion into it”
“It’s brilliant when it works out like this and people really respond to what you’ve done.”
One of the things Fulton’s been most gratified by, however, is the fact gamers seem to be grasping Horizon’s take on the simple satisfaction of free, open-world driving; something the team found difficult to communicate when talking about the game.
“It’s something we always wanted to incorporate in there but it’s difficult to message that to people without them really getting their hands on a controller and the experience of taking these cars out into the open-world,” says Fulton. “It’s been great to see feedback on just that core gameplay, you know? Almost disregarding all the other stuff there is to do. Just that feeling of freedom and exploration and joy of cars out on the open road is something we always wanted to capture and it’s great to see people actually really responding to that.”
Gamers are incredibly resourceful and experimental.
“When you design a game you always have in mind different people, different playstyles, different ways people are likely to tackle the game, but I’ve been surprised by the breadth of ways I’ve seen people or heard about people tackling the game. I hear about some people who just start the game and just go exploring right away; they almost ignore that initial progression through the races just to take one of their cars out and drive and explore the world.
“You try and anticipate all those different ways people may play the game but people always surprise you. Gamers are incredibly resourceful and experimental and it always surprises you the different ways people go about your game.”
Horizon retains a lot of what defines the Forza Motorsport series, including its respect for the machines themselves, but the spin-off does represent a significant side-step. We ask Fulton whether he or the team expected the animosity towards Horizon, animosity that was evident even amongst faithful Forza fans on the series’ own forums and Facebook page. It seems to have splintered a fraction of the audience.
“Yes, we always knew that it would happen to an extent,” says Fulton. “[W]e’ve always been very conscious of the fact that we’re building a really new experience into something which is established and loved and has been for many years and many iterations. We always knew there was just gonna be people who just love Forza Motorsport; who love what those titles offer, particularly around cars and track-based racing and that real sort of simulation motorsport feel. We knew there were going to be people who didn’t want new things, who just want more Forza Motorsport and that’s totally fine.
We knew there were going to be people who didn’t want new things, who just want more Forza Motorsport and that’s totally fine.
“I think the animosity thing, people love Forza Motorsport and people often don’t want to see things they love change – even in terms of Forza Horizon, which is never meant to replace Forza Motorsport but is really meant to just be a new way of enjoying it. There were always going to be people, I think, who didn’t buy into that. We kind of expected that.”
After working on the game for a few years Fulton explains he feels it was the world of Forza Horizon itself that clicked best.
“Something that was really new for us, almost throughout the studio, was moving from making traditional, track-based, what you might call linear racing games, to making an open-world game,” says Fulton. “Design-wise there are lots of challenges there; the creation of the world, I think, was probably the biggest.”
“We poured a lot of time and effort and research into building this open-world but really it was always gonna be putting the thing together and when we actually got to drive the finished version of it that we were gonna tell how successful we’d been there.
“I think the decisions we’ve made not to slavishly recreate Colorado but to make the best version of Colorado we could basically make for a videogame, I think that’s the right decision. Both in terms of design, you know, the way the roads work, and also in terms of visuals. I think lots of different things came together there to make that feeling of exploration work.”
The key was always striking a balance between size and visual quality.
“We could’ve gone much, much bigger, but there would’ve been compromises in lots and lots of different areas,” explains Fulton. “There would’ve been things which we just couldn’t do. The visual quality wouldn’t have been there.”
“I kind of liken it to, if you’re making a peanut butter sandwich and you’ve got a finite amount of peanut butter, you could do it on one slice of bread and really layer it on and make a really generous sandwich. Or you could maybe have two slices of bread and really spread it pretty thinly, and maybe neither of the sandwiches are particularly appealing."
So, did anything go wrong?
[W]hen you make a game like this you know there are going to some things which people aren’t going respond to.
“Obviously we get all the feedback from reviews, from forums, from Twitter, and when you make a game like this you know there are going to some things which people aren’t going respond to and are going to be disappointed with,” says Fulton. “So a lot of the things we’ve had back were probably to be expected; decisions we knew wouldn’t please everybody.”
“But then there are always things which come up as surprising. I’ll give you an example, actually, from your review, the barn finds thing. You were like, ‘I was disappointed that they weren’t completely new to Forza cars that I find in barns’ and honestly we didn’t see that coming. I’m not saying it not a valid point, I think it totally is; as we look at it I think that’s probably something that we would look to do better next time. But that was one of the things that came from left field and we like, ‘Oh, right. Yeah, okay, we see that.’”
On the topic of repeated cars, some fans have voiced concern over the fact some of the DLC to date for Forza Horizon is content Forza fans may have already downloaded for Forza Motorsport 4. We ask Fulton if the team expects players to be understandably sceptical on that front.
“I think as a really general point with DLC, what we try and do is put out a range of offerings that gets everybody some interesting choices,” says Fulton. “No two people are the same; everybody has different tastes and preferences. What we try and do is put out a platter – I’m going through a lot of food analogies this morning – that gives everyone the opportunity to pick and choose as they wish.”
“You’re right, some of the cars have been in Forza 4, or Forza 4 DLC before, but the big thing we’re offering above lights and illuminated dials and all the sort of technical changes we had to make to the cars, was the way you use the car in Horizon. I guess what we’re saying is, ‘Hey, if this is a car that you love and you want to experience it in Horizon, then we’re giving you that opportunity.’
“And like any situation like this, the buyer has absolutely the right not to buy the thing. We kind of put this stuff out there that we think people are going to really love in Horizon, and from there the decision is yours.”
The 1957 Chevy Bel Air, for instance, was already sold as DLC for FM4.
The big news around DLC for Forza Horizon, however, remains the rally expansion.
“Yeah, everybody here now is totally heads down on rally,” says Fulton. “And they have been for maybe about a month or so, maybe six weeks, because obviously work finishes on Horizon in advance of it coming out. And that work really continues right the way up until December when we put the pack the pack together and release it on Xbox Live.”
“We’re trying to put together a really enthralling rally package. I think there’s an opportunity to go much deeper into that pure rally experience; that’s maybe something we didn’t have the chance to do in the broader context of Horizon itself but we identified that pure, one-car-on-a-rally-route, really intense rally experience that you can get if you go deep into rally is something that I think a lot of people are going to respond to and really look forward to.”
“Now I’m not sure of figures, right off the bat, but I know there are, I think, seven individual rallies within the pack. Each event is broken up into multiple stages so you get that stage by stage experience in each rally, and that’s really what we’re trying to do there. We’re just trying to go a little bit deeper [into that] rally experience that you get from just having one car on a really narrow, intense, undulating route.
“It’s not going to be part of the open world, because obviously we’re changing quite a lot of the world and that’s going to make synching up between people who have and don’t have the pack difficult. So instead you’re going to choose to enter the Horizon Rally Championship. That’s going to take you off into a separate mode in which you get to experience the new routes and the new terrain that we’ve built.”
To persist with the food metaphors, with a great deal of the team at Playground originally coming from Codemasters we put it to Fulton that this is the crew’s bread and butter.
“Yeah, it’s something lots of the team have done before,” laughs Fulton. “I think that’s probably why we were quite passionate about it to be this first expansion pack that we’re talking about. And also I think that rally has that quite evocative feel; there are lots of people out there who are rally fans and we felt that we could offer them something within the Horizon would that would really be worth them spending their time on.”
Fulton explains that coming at the Forza franchise from the other side of the Atlantic doesn’t mean they can radically alter the way the series approaches cars. We spotted the awesome Eagle Speedster, for instance, but Playground must be disciplined in its how it assembles its garage.
We have to fit everything we’re doing onto one disc, so right away there’s gonna be a hard limit on the stuff that we can stick on that disc.
“We’re all massive car fans here so from that point of view you get a kid in a sweet shop mentality, like, ‘I’ll have that one, I’ll have that one, I’ll have that one!’,” says Fulton. “Obviously though, we knew there are lots of constraints on what we do.”
“We have to fit everything we’re doing onto one disc, so right away there’s gonna be a hard limit on the stuff that we can stick on that disc. And as far as just the cars that we want, from a British perspective, we tried to be disciplined, and certainly Turn 10 have been great at keeping us honest, about exactly what cars we include. Because the cars which to us Brits might really resonate, might be something we’re really passionate about, we have to take a step back and look at it from a more global point of view because we’re making a global game.
“The Eagle Speedster, we were absolutely psyched to get that in. The guys went and researched that in the UK and the Eagle guys were fantastic in giving us access to their car but we always have to look at it from the perspective of, ‘We’re not just making this game for British people; we’re making it for a global audience.’ Therefore there are a number of lenses we need to apply to our car choices."
The result of more than 4500 photographs of the real thing.
Again it’s all about balance.
“If you know the Eagle Speedster and you know about its Jaguar heritage then you think, ‘Wow, that’s a really cool car!’," says Fulton. "But you have to balance that with the fact that people might not be aware of it at all and don’t get anything out of its inclusion. You can’t go crazy on boutique cars; you can’t go crazy on JDM cars. You need to make sure that there’s a balance because the feedback that we’re getting on cars is that everybody has a favourite car, and if it’s not in there they’re outraged and if it is, they’re over the moon. You know? It’s that binary!”
Luke is Games Editor at IGN AU. You can chat to him about games, cars and all of the latter he desperately wants in the former on IGN here or find him and the rest of the Australian team by joining the IGN Australia Facebook community.
Source : ign[dot]com
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