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5 super nerdy facts about Forza Motorsport 7
We get the inside line on one of the world’s hottest racing games from Creative Director Dan Greenawalt.
2 min
Forza Motorsport 7
With 700 cars and 32 tracks, it's incredible that Turn 10 Studios managed to get the little details just right on Forza Motorsports 7. The racer was released in October and has been enhanced for Xbox One X, Microsoft's super-powered console that's out on November 7 2017.
So how do the team go about modelling 700 cars? How did they make those cars feel and sound so realistic? And what's their vision for the future of racing eSports?
One man who knows Forza Motorsports 7 better than almost anyone else is the series’ Creative Director Dan Greenawalt. We asked Dan – a Shelby Mustang GT350 driver, by the way – to peel back the skin on Forza Motorsports 7 and reveal the game’s hidden secrets.
1. There are over 700 cars… and none of them got driven on track during the game’s development
Forza Motorsport 7 features a huge number of cars, all the way from an AMC Pacer (you know, the Wayne’s World car) to a 1962 Ferrari 250 GTO to a Rolls-Royce Dawn. But thanks to the strength of Forza’s sim technology, the cars didn’t need to turn a wheel on track to be modelled for the game.
“There are 700 cars; more Porsches, Ferraris and Lamborghinis than have ever been in a racing game before,” says Greenawalt. “But the unique approach that we have here is that we don’t need to test the cars to get them accurate, because we test the parts. It’s the parts that actually make the car perform the way it does.… [and] we actually measure those not on track.
Formula E cars in the game
© Microsoft Studios
When you do your research, you find that the rear suspension on a Ferrari 250 GTO is the same as on the Ferrari 250 Lusso
“Now, not all of those [parts] we can get either, because… a 19 million quid Ferrari 250 GTO is not something you’ll necessarily get access to. But when you do your research, you find that the rear suspension is the same as on the Lusso, the driveline is the same as this, the engine is the same as that. We’re actually able to find cars we can take apart and do the measurements. So sometimes we’re able to put a race car together from other race cars that have been made by that manufacturer, and sometimes it’s the same way with vintage cars.
When it’s prohibitively expensive or the car is nowhere to be found, we’re able to piece the car together with incredible accuracy
“We’ve had over 1,000 cars on the dyno to get engine noises – and they’re not always the cars that are in the game. We put the microphones on the engine, on the exhaust and on the underside of the engine, and it allows us to piece together the sounds. So as many cars as we can, we measure the actual car, but when it’s prohibitively expensive or the car is nowhere to be found, we’re able to piece it together with incredible accuracy.”
2. The game's creators are so anal, they even simulate tyre springiness
You only to need to watch an F1 race to see how critical tyre performance is in motorsports. And because of that, the team from Turn 10 Studios took it upon themselves to come up with a new way of simulating tyre performance.
“One [key] thing we’ve found to our success is to [simulate] the springiness of tyres,” says Greenawalt. “One way of simulating tyres is to use a Pacejka Curve – it’s a formula that creates a curve and it’s used by tyre manufacturers. It’s an accurate curve, there’s nothing wrong with it at all, but it doesn’t inherently take into account the springiness of the tyre. The springiness is important because it makes the tyre more forgiving.
There are games where you try to catch the car, and if you don’t nail it perfectly, it’s going to keep going around. That’s not how cars really are
“When you’re trying to catch the back end [of a car]… you can feel the car come into its slot… What you’re primarily feeling is the tyre springiness and chassis springiness. We simulate both of those things, and it actually makes the cars more forgiving and easier to catch, but also more real. There are other games where you try to catch the car and where, once it’s straight, if you don’t nail it perfectly, it’s going to keep going around. That’s not how cars really are.”
Renault's F1 car features in the game
© Microsoft Studios
3. Turn 10 built the game to accommodate disabled players
Forza Motorsport has always been a broad church for racing fans, and part of that philosophy has been making sure that disabled gamers can also enjoy the simple pleasures of, say, hanging the arse of Pagani Huayra out around Silverstone.
“The simulation [on Forza Motorsport 7] is fantastic, but it’s also very accessible,” says Greenawalt. “We have assists and modes when you drive, and we’ve really worked on accessibility for gamers who are younger, older and disabled.
“On PC, you can use multiple USB support, so it supports custom controllers. With these different assists, you can drive the game with one hand. These were things that we decided as a team were important to us on Forza Motorsport 4, and with every version, we’ve improved how we bring more people in.”
The game is built to accommodate disabled players
© Microsoft Studios
4. Forza’s simulations are so accurate that apparently even racing teams want to use them
Because Turn 10 have necessarily run some pretty bizarre calculations when making Forza Motorsport 7 – how much lateral load does a 1963 Volkswagen Beetle generate through the Follow-Through corner at the Top Gear Test Track, for example – the team have found that manufacturers have been coming to them to discover their simulation secrets.
“We’ve worked with McLaren and their F1 simulator,” says Greenawalt. “It’s a vertical simulator, which means they’re simulating one car, a small number of tracks, a very small number of conditions… It means their simulation doesn’t have to cover seven decades of race technology and have hundreds of car combinations and all the stuff we have in our game.
“Because we had to do that, we had to solve some problems that they never had to. When [McLaren] found out how we were doing things, with tyres chief among them, they were really interested. ‘Why are you doing it that way, how are you doing that, oh wow, you can do that in real time, we have to run that on our server’.
“We actually worked with [the company] who invented all the tyre tests to develop new styles of testing to get us data beyond the norm. And that was a breakthrough; we don’t have to be looking to other groups – we can do research projects.”
Behold, a pale blue Polaris…
© Microsoft Studios
5. They want pro drivers to come and race on Forza Motorsport
Felipe Massa announced that he was retiring from Formula One in November 2017, and race fans were curious to see which series the Brazilian would go into next. But Turn 10 are hoping that, in the future, one option for retiring drivers will be to come and race professionally in the Forza Racing Championship at the end of their on-track careers.
This could be a place for Tony Kanaan to go when he's done with IndyCar
“I see a world,” says Greenawalt, “where, if we’re able to build a new form of motorsport, a form of motorsport that’s entertaining but different from traditional forms of motorsports; [if] we’ve got sponsorships and manufacturers and partners and all of that, I can easily see a world where, if a driver like Tony Kanaan feels like, ‘Well, maybe I’m done with IndyCar but I’m not done with racing’, this could be a place for him to go.”
