|
 Interview
with Dan Greenawalt
-
Game Director, Forza Motorsport 2 -
X06 Barcelona,
September 28th 2006
XCN
(Xbox Community Network), with which Xbox Gazette is affiliated, has been able
to ask some questions to Dan Greenawalt, game director on Forza Motorsport 2,
at the X06 event in Barcelona.
XCN
: Give us an introduction to Forza 2.
Dan Greenawalt : Forza Motorsport
2 is all about passion. It's about car passion, it's built by a team that's got
a ton of passion. I upgrade my car, I take it to the track, we've got former pro
racers on the team, we've got amateur racers, to guys who do motorcycle racing.
The people on the team just love cars. What's really cool about Forza is we've
got so many cars and there's such diversity. You can really do anything you want.
We've got over 300 cars - and that's actually on the disc! And that's everything
from an Audi R8 - a purpose built race car, won Le Mans five years in a row -
all the way to classic American muscle like the Plymouth Hemi 'Cuda, hot hatches
like the Civic Type-R and exotic sports cars like this Ferrari F430. We've also
got new cars; the newest models that are coming out this year like the 2007 911
GT3, so this is the 997 model that everyone's all excited about - the round headlights
are back, the classic style is back, I'm pretty excited about it.
XCN
: What new cars have you added to Forza 2 that weren't in the first game?
Dan Greenawalt : New to Forza Motorsport is the Lamborghini. An example
is the Lamborghini Gallardo - this is a 500 horse-power all wheel drive car. I
got to drive one at E3, it's a kick in the pants, it's really fun. They're really
loud actually, it's kind of funny. I told this story at E3: I was showing up to
the E3 and there were people all crossing the street, jaywalking and usually you'd
use the horn, but this car is loud enough that I could just step on the accelerator
and it would just go RRRRNNNNH and everybody just got out of the way…
Cars
like that really show car passion because you get a car like that and you drive
by people and they all stop. And they look at it. You get this emotional response
out of them. Whether they look at it and go, 'That's a really expensive car. He's
spent too much money on that.' Or whether they look at it and go, 'What an amazing
piece of technology.' There's just something about cars, and it's global. It's
not just racers that like 'em, it's people all over the world that respond to
different types of cars. And that's what Forza's all about. XCN
: How deep is the customisation in Forza 2?
Dan Greenawalt : Forza's
got all kinds of customisation that you can do - with all these cars. Remember
the Gallardo, 911, F430, BMW M3, Z06, all these cars are fully upgradeable, fully
tuneable, and fully customizable. You can put body kits on 'em, so, for example,
the Corvette Z06… this actually is an incredibly fast car, for its price
especially, it has been just putting other cars to shame. But we allow you to
put a wing on this car, you can put a racing wing unit even on a Lamborghini Gallardo,
so you can really make these cars truly incredible. But more than anything, our
paint scheme editor, or livery editor, was a huge hit in Forza Motorsport 1, and
we're making it even more powerful for Forza Motorsport 2. XCN
: Give us some examples of what you can do with the livery editor.
Dan
Greenawalt : I don't know if you guys have seen the classic Steve McQueen
movie, "Le Mans"? I love that movie, I watched it when I was a kid.
Whenever I get chance to paint a car, and when I go online, this is the type of
paint scheme I want because it really represents me and my passion, my love of
racing. This shows how powerful this livery editor is. None of this is pre-canned,
you don't just go in there and say: 'I want striped livery Number One and make
it blue and orange'. This is really something to empower the player. We know include
text, even, as well as a lot more shapes, and we have a lot more decals as well.
Your imagination is the only thing that's going to limit you. In Forza Motorsport
1 we had somewhere between 600-1000 layers you could put on your car. Now we've
got 4000 now that you can put on your car so you're not limited by how many layers
you can put on. XCN : How much
of an impact do you think the livery editor have in the community?
Dan
Greenawalt : In Forza Motorsport 1 this livery editor became a huge success
and we got this grass roots community that built up around it. People were trading
liveries, and they were creating these works of art, and it was people who were
not necessarily that into racing, what they wanted to do was express themselves
as artists. And cars elicit so much passion in people that it's a perfect canvas
for them to paint on. What people would do is, they'd make this great paint job,
and then they'd take their camera phone and they'd take a picture of it, off their
TV, and they'd put it on the Web, and there were scan lines, and it doesn't look
very good. That's not the experience we want to give people. We want to allow
them to share this, so we've got a photo mode in the livery editor itself. Of
course there's a photo mode on the track, but there's one in the livery editor
so when you take this picture, it'll get rid of all these bars and there's just
a pristine environment in the white light - very, very beautiful. And then you
can upload it to the Web, download it onto your phone, or put it on your PC, or…
once it's on the Web, you know, you can do whatever you want with it. Put it on
the forums! So, I'm pretty excited about that cuz last time, I'd go on the forums
and I'd see, like, some PT Cruiser with a Mona Lisa written on the side or Halo
or anything on the side, and I got to see these incredible works of art. XCN
: Do you need to pay to change the design of your car?
Dan Greenawalt
: No, no. As the game director on this project, I'll tell you, I want people
to paint cars. I don't want to unlock decals to you. I don't want to unlock anything.
If you're an artist and you want to paint your car, paint it! As soon as you buy
it, go into the livery editor and do whatever you want. Now the upgrades, those
cost money, but they also have performance impacts so it makes sense that you
have to pay for those. But, man, if you want to paint your car, do it. More power
to you. Take pictures of it, do whatever you want. XCN
: Is it easy to store and select your designs?
Dan Greenawalt :
We've added a catalogue. This is sort of like a wardrobe for clothing for your
car. Every single livery you've got for, like, your 911 GT3, all those different
liveries show up in this catalogue. Whether you got 'em through trading, or got
'em from your friends online, or painted them yourself. An example is one painted
by one of the guys at home. I got it off his box so, we're trading things up.
This is one celebrating X06 here in Barcelona - we've got the Barca football club
logo here. This one I think is really stunning, I didn't draw this one actually,
I wish I could claim I'm this good but I'm not. One of the artists on the team
- still using the livery editor though - he didn't import it or anything, he actually
did a livery editor, he put these beautiful gradients, and built the logo…
it's just a stunning car. 
XCN : Is the FC Barcelona logo a standard
design that is available in the livery editor?
Dan Greenawalt : No,
you still have to make it in the livery editor. We are making a lot of improvements
that make the livery editor easier to use and more powerful, however we're not
putting in some sort of importer - it's really a security thing more than anything
else. XCN : But it's up to you how you put
it on the car - how big, or…?
Dan Greenawalt : Yes. Oh yes. And
I just love this because, again, it's all about passion. So if your blend of passion
is between Porsche and racing and football, well there you go, and you can express
yourself online. What's really powerful about this is that no two cars look the
same. So when you go into Forza Motorsport TV, similar to what you see in PGR3,
none of the cars are gonna look the same, and you can start recognising racers. XCN
: Will you see the driver too, and his helmet?
Dan Greenawalt :
The car is the star in Forza Motorsport, so there is a driver, he's fully modelled,
he does have a suit and helmet and all of that. But really, we're trying to say
it's not about the driver it's about the car because that's where the passion
is. XCN : What can you tell us about the graphical
improvements?
Dan Greenawalt : The final game will be at 60 frames
per second with the same sorts of bells and whistles you're seeing right now.
You can see the bloom on the car in its metallic paint. This is full-screen anti-aliasing.
You'll also see HDR lighting - see the shadow roll over the top of the car - it's
real-time shading, you don't see that in a lot of other games, you might think
you do but it's not actually there. And the High Dynamic Range lighting just gives
the whole environment a feeling of life. XCN :
How accurate are your real-life tracks?
Dan Greenawalt : One of
the things you struggle with making racing games, and I've worked on a few - Rally
Sport, Project Gotham, I worked on Midtown, I've worked on a lot of the racing
games out of MGS - one of the things that's really hard to do is to make a track
environment like this, Tsukuba, a real track, look very exciting. If you get a
fantasy area it's a lot easier. But when you're in a track like this it really
is all about the details because we can't add fake stuff. It's really the details
it comes down to, to make a track like this look beautiful. We've got 3D grass
and bump-maping on the sand. These are very detailed textures; you can see the
different skid marks going on and off. These are also our new view modes, you
can see reflections going across the top of the car, this is one of the views
available - it's a HUD view to give players a better context. XCN
: Will there be a cockpit view for hardcore racing fans?
Dan Greenawalt
: We are not featuring a cockpit view; we've got that HUD view. For the most
part, and this is just all honesty, we've got 300 cars on the disc. Not only that,
it's 300 upgradeable cars. It's one of the things that most people don't think
about but we allow you to do full weight reduction on your car, and when you do
weight reduction on your car you strip out the interiors, you know, all the stuff
so we wouldn't be making 300 interiors, we'd be making more like 600 interiors.
It's always something we're gonna look at - we're developers, we're always pushing
the genre, we're going to continue to push the genre forever, but in all honesty,
when you get these really dynamic shadows and you can see the car travelling through.
It really is more immersive. XCN : What's your
approach to damage?
Dan Greenawalt : First and foremost Forza's a
simulator. And you really can't be a simulator without damage. Damage is a key
part of racing - it's actually what keeps you honest, because if you don't have
damage you just run into walls, and scrape along walls, and run into the AI, and
run into the other players, there's no reason not to do it. But in Forza we've
got damage, and it's very dynamic, it's very exciting. So you'll see bumpers flying
off here. What we've found in just testing the game, what's been a lot of fun
is, in every racing game online, at the first corner everyone piles into each
other, it becomes this big explosion of, you know nothing, because nothing ever
happens, they just go flying off the track. Well, we didn't necessarily plan it
this way - we just wanted to make more dynamic damage by having bumpers fall off
and particle effects and glass breaking out and all of that. But what we found
while playing it back at work is we still do the same thing, right, so we all
run into each other at that first corner and it turns into this just mayhem of
parts and dust and dirt and everything like that. And then when we come around
the second lap and everyone's kind of found their groove, there's parts all over
the road because they stay. They don't disappear or anything like that. So when
you come around on the second lap there's all these other parts to hit and it's
actually… it just becomes a fun little mini game to play while you're racing
around the track. 
XCN : How does damage to your car influence how it
drives?
Dan Greenawalt : We're making damage more dynamic and more
exciting. On of my goals was to make the different assists that you have in the
game really mean something. So in Forza Motorsport 1 we had all these assists.
We didn't want to dumb down the game, but I wanted to help users. So there's still
that incredible depth to the simulator but players who are not as dextrous can
have the green line that helps people drive, traction control and stability manager
and all of that, and you can also set your damage level, either Cosmetic Damage,
or Limited Damage, or Simulation Damage. But we didn't go as hardcore in simulation
damage as we could. We made it so that it cuts your horse power by a bunch, it
made your shift times a lot longer and it made the suspension damping not as good.
When I watched people playing online, I kind of felt like people weren't taking
it as seriously as I wanted them to. When you've got limited damage on it's fun,
you're having a good time - yeah, it hurts the performance of the car but you
can still have a good time with your friends. My goal for the hardcore was, when
you put that simulation damage on and you run into a wall at 150 miles per hour,
you're done. You're out. That's it. XCN : So
you can totally wreck your car?
Dan Greenawalt : Yeah. What that also
helps is that it keeps people honest online. If you want to get in and have a
good time with your buddies, put it on Limited. But if you're on there and you
don't want some guy just running into everyone on the track, he'll be disabled
after the first lap so there's not much you've got to worry about from him. XCN
: Is there variable weather in the game?
Dan Greenawalt : There's
no plan of dynamic weather. Again, we're trying to make a simulator and some people
will argue, 'Well it's a simulator so it should try and simulate everything'.
To me, I take my car to the track and I don't like rainy days. The game is a simulator,
and it's not easy when you add the variable of rain. XCN
: What can you tell us about Forza Motorsport TV, will it be anything like
Project Gotham Racing TV?
Dan Greenawalt : Yeah, this is the hidden
strength of this entire franchise - the hidden strength of MGS. First off we've
got Xbox Live so as a developer I don't have to worry about a whole bunch of stuff.
We don't have to write all our custom servers, we don't have to take care of friends
requests, we don't have to do all that crap. And that's a huge liberation for
us on Xbox Live. On Xbox 360 we've got that same thing and also the really cool
thing is… I worked on Project Gotham 1 with Bizarre Creations, the producer
on our team also worked with them. We go way back as a team and we share different
pieces of technology that are written to go into both games. So, what's incredible
is, a game that's released every two to three years, they worked on their system
and then they release it in one big batch and it's done. XCN
: So the PGR team and the Forza team work very closely together?
Dan
Greenawalt : What we do is, Project Gotham Racing 2 came out and we had Leaderboards,
Quickmatch, Optimatch, it had a lot of great features. Forza Motorsport came out,
we had seamless single player and multiplayer competitions, we had ranked matches.
We had even more scoreboards. We had car clubs, so we pushed the bar even higher.
And then Project Gotham Racing 3 comes out and they've got seamless single player
and multiplayer for credit. So we just keep stacking. They've got Project Gotham
Racing TV and they've got photo mode and now Leaderboard qualified tournaments…
we're not taking anybody's code, we just keep working. We worked on that code,
they worked on this code. The thing is that nobody can keep up because every other
company is working every two years or three years, but we have a whole dev team
working on new features, not the old features, we're not trying to reinvent the
wheel and here's another dev team just working on new features. XCN
: What will be on the soundtrack for Forza 2?
Dan Greenawalt :
You always have custom soundtracks, just like in Forza Motorsport 1 and the Xbox
360… we don't have to write any of that either, right. That's a nice thing
about being on the 360 is we don't have to write that. But, the for the 360 we
went back to the drawing board and licensed three hours of music, it's all real
licensed tracks from around the world. It's actually centred a little bit more
towards Europe. So, three hours of music. You're going to have to play a long
time before you hear anything repeat. XCN : Will
you be able to race online for pink slips and win your opponent's car?
Dan
Greenawalt : Forza Motorsport is all about that car passion and people may
disagree with me on this but everybody liked the idea of winning somebody else's
car, but I just want to say that 50 per cent of people lose their car. So, if
you've painted your car, you've upgraded it, you've tuned it, you've put all this
work into it - yeah it's really cool to win your car, and I can go 'Yay I win
your car' but, you know, not everyone wins. So, I don't think that's as great
an experience as trading for money, you know. If I want your car, I give you money,
you give me your car. And when we're racing together online we're racing for money,
so if I win I get money, and if you lose you get no money and you have to pay
for your damage but it's not like you're out of this incredibly important thing
to you. What pink slips encourages people to do, and I've seen this in like Motor
City Online and other games, is like it encourages people to shut off their box.
And why would they shut off their box? Because they're not having fun. XCN
: How much will downloads cost from the Marketplace?
Dan Greenawalt
: Some are free. Some are pay. What I can say is that there's 300 cars and
70 tracks on the disc. You're getting a giant game. It's just an incredible package.
The thing I like about DLC is that we can freshen the game up. The Paris Auto
Show is right now, and there's going to be new cars coming out from the Paris
Auto Show, and it takes a long time to build a car so it's not like we can say,
'Oh, we just saw it today, let's get it in!' right? We have to get it, license
it, build it, make it, and then we can say DLC. So by the time the car hits the
streets it's available for DLC, and you can play it in the game. XCN
: Will there be a demo on Marketplace?
Dan Greenawalt : Not until
we're ready. XCN : When will that be?
Dan
Greenawalt : When it's ready! This is our baby, and we're going to make sure
it's ready before we put it out there. XCN : Many
thanks for your time Dan!
Related links : -
Forza
Motorsport 2 videos - Forza
Motorsport 2 official site -
Other Xbox 360 interviews
Max73, Xbox Gazette,
October 23rd 2006 Thanks to : Dan Greenawalt, Graeme
Boyd, XCN
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