To a lot of gamers, the ultimate gaming experience hinges on the ability of the game to recreate reality. To that end, every year development teams work toward building the tech that'll allow them to simulate the real world as closely as possible, usually with limited success. If the Holy Grail of gaming is to create a digital world convincing enough to totally immerse the gamer in the experience, then from what I saw at this year's E3, Forza Motorsport3 may be one of the first titles to have actually done it.
Aside from it's absurdly high level of realism, the best thing about the Forza demo at this year's show was its “come one, come all” attitude. Racing sims are generally pretty exclusive due to the high degree of skill required to play them, but the watchword for this year's Forza title is “accessibility”. Expert players can choose the true sim mode, while less experienced players can go for the non-sim mode which offers them a range of useful assists. With auto-brake, auto-tuning and colored lines on the road that indicate when to accelerate and when to brake, anyone can pick the game up and have fun with it. My favorite assist, rewind, allows you to stop the action and rewind it five seconds. You can do this repeatedly, which is really useful if you want to avoid a crash or create even bigger ones. Also in non-sim mode, cars take cosmetic damage but continue running, making it easier for novices to complete the tracks.
It wouldn't be a driving game if there wasn't a smorgasbord of beautiful cars to choose from and Forza Motorsport3 offers players 400 different cars from 50 different manufacturers. The first thing that hit me in the face when the demo started was the incredible detail of the HD graphics. The car selection UI is designed like a luxury car brochure whose white background and clean layout makes the cars look so good, even non-car lovers are likely to drool over them. (“Car porn” is what I think the demoer called it.) When looking at them, it's incredible to think that the extremely detailed, high-poly models (the models in Forza 3 have over ten times the polys of the ones in Forza 2) are the same ones you'll drive in the game.
The game offers over 100 tracks, including some old favorites like Suzuka, Nürburgring and Nordschleife but the demo I saw featured a mountainous, sunlit track near Montserrat, Spain. Thanks to a new game engine, the detail of the environment is impressive and the draw distance is ridiculous. I imagine it'll be easy to run off the road when surrounded by a landscape as distractingly gorgeous as that. While the graphic improvements are fairly obvious, just as significant are the changes to the AI and physics systems. One of my big peeves about racing games is that the AI is well, inhuman. Nothing seems to shake it up. With the new AI system, Forza 3's “drive-atars” have been given a bit of that human touch, making them respond to pressure. That means if you're right up on their bumpers, they're just as likely to freak out and lose control as a human competitor might.
The physics overhaul owes its success mainly to developer Turn 10's visit to the McLaren's Technology Center where they were able to learn new things about aerodynamics by using the same simulator used for the McLaren F1. Tire physics have also been changed by modeling tire and sidewall flexing, both of which have a significant effect on driving dynamics. Other changes designed to up the realism include making the sounds of the various engines at top speed as close to reality as possible and sharpening the effects different upgrades and tires have on performance. As usual, you can customize your car to your heart's content but this go-round, the focus of customization goes beyond the single and multi-player games to involve the community even more than before.
People always notice custom paint jobs so it's easy to become a rockstar painter, but in Forza Motorsport3, the expert tuners finally get their day in the sun. By using the Livery Editor, Auction House and deep tuning garage, players can paint and tune their ultimate race cars, share them with the Xbox Live community and dominate the Xbox Live leaderboards. Speaking of leaderboards, in addition to a new single-player season mode where the game creates a personalized racing calendar out of events like Circuit, Oval, Drag, and Drift, the new online game rules editor offers a variety of new multi-player ways to challenge your friends.
By the end of the demo, the tri-fold message of Forza Motorsport3 was clear: to provide the most realistic, compelling driving experience out there; to make the game accessible so that anyone, from a six year old to a grandfather can play it; and most importantly, to bring the gaming and car enthusiast communities together. As lead developer Dan Greenwalt said, it's his goal to “make gamers out of car lovers and to make car lovers out of gamers”. From what I saw in the E3 demo, if any game can do it, this one can. Forza Motorsport3 comes out this Fall, exclusively on the Xbox 360.
