IGN AU/IGN Readers: Lets talk about the storefront. One of our readers wanted to know whether you'll enable garages to upload a car for sale which includes the parts, the tune and the paint as an entire package.
John Wendl: Yeah, that all comes along with the car.
IGN AU/IGN Readers: And will it be associated with a single gamertag or will there be an in-game system where gamertags are associated with the garage name?
John Wendl: It'll go through as your gamertag, but because of the storefront and the ratings system, people will naturally rise to the top, and there'll be the 'heroes' of our community who will be famous for their tuning set-ups or paint jobs or photos and they're going to be easily accessible. We also have the ability now where if you don't want to add somebody as a friend, you can put them on your 'watch list' for the store front. Say there's a really cool painter – you don't even know who they are, but you want to see what they're up to, you add them to your watch list, and you'll be able to check them out constantly to see what new stuff they've added recently… it's a way to keep tabs on the people who are doing the coolest stuff.
IGN AU/IGN Readers: Next one. How many tuning options do you have and how many upgrade options, specifically turbo timing and pressure adjustments, different stages of high lift cams and different fuel rail/pumps?
John Wendl: I don't know to what level or degree we can upgrade each of those things in the game. They all can be upgraded, but some of it depends on the car; what parts it has available to it, how it can be upgraded, but you can do full engine swaps in the game as well, so you can take a car that's a front wheel drive, four cylinder and make it a rear wheel drive six cylinder, which means you can tune it almost in any way possible. And then within each of those there are all these parameters you can adjust.
IGN AU/IGN Readers: Let's talk replay videos. One reader was saying that in Forza 2 there wasn't really a camera that accurately reflected what would be seen in a broadcast of an actual race, and so he's keen for a camera view that mimics race style photography – most importantly, overhead camera shots.
John Wendl: Honestly, the replay cameras on Forza 2 – we were not happy with those at all. We did them, in the end, because we had some limitations in the technology that, if we did anything more with them showed bad things in the world happening. We really tried to improve that this time around, so you'll find this time… since we redesigned the graphics engine, we have cameras that are capable of really long draw distances and wide fields of view, so we do have much more broadcast-style cameras now.
We also have a set of user-controlled cameras because we have this ability to output wmv video from the replays now, and what we're trying to do is empower these cinematographers to create these cool video edits. One of the ways we do that is – they can choose from the replay cameras that we've crafted, that look more or less like broadcast cameras, or they can go through and pick various user cameras as well. You can cycle through. There's stationary on the car, pointing at it in different ways, they even have animation to it, so you can basically take the same racing action, film it twenty different ways, then you'll have all this footage that you can edit together in a really cool, creative way, without having to try to recreate that action over and over again.
So I think people that were upset with the replay stuff in Forza 2 are going to see huge improvements there because, it wasn't very good, honestly, but like I said, we made a big investment there this time, really trying to empower those people to make great stuff…
When we saw what people did with V2 without that capability [of outputting video] – like, the Blackjack videos and stuff with drifting, they were able to do such cool stuff and they had to jump through incredible hoops to get that kind of footage. Now we're actually supporting it officially, and I think we're going to see crazy stuff, because it's going to be so much easier to get it.
IGN AU/IGN Readers: Are the wmvs the game outputs 60 frames a second?
John Wendl: Yep.
IGN AU/IGN Readers: In Forza 2 it was often a requirement to win every race to progress through the career mode. Since this is not how real motor racing works, will Forza 3 be more authentic?
John Wendl: It is actually. You get XP just by completing races, so you can actually finish the career without wining a single race; it'll take longer, is all, because you won't get as much money and as much XP.
IGN AU/IGN Readers: Drift events and downhill races?
John Wendl: We have this mechanic now, it's called 'Always Drifting', so they're not specific drift events, but at any point you can bring up the drift hud, which is a little drift score – it's kinda like the Kudos from Project Gotham, and it's always on – you're always getting points for it whether you have the hud on or not, and there'll be drift leaderboards. We've got all kinds of new leaderboards as well, so the top painters will go to their leaderboard, the top drifters, the top tuners, the top videographers… so yeah, drifting is on all the time.
IGN AU/IGN Readers: But will there be specific drift events?
John Wendl: There could be in multiplayer… we've created a rules editor in multiplayer that allows you to establish guidelines of how to compete online against each other and what kind of race mode you want to create, so I think we're going to see emergent gameplay come out of that as people find new game types. And what will happen is, the most popular ones – we'll be watching, and then we'll probably make those more official and supported, or start to develop features specifically [for them], or even tracks. If we find people playing a certain way. Like, some of the DLC tracks we're looking at, we're trying to design to be playgrounds for this sort of emergent gameplay, and as we see people doing certain kinds of things; we're going to react to that and try to better support that and embrace it.
IGN AU/IGN Readers: I think what this reader was specifically referring to was Japanese-style winding mountain runs and that kind of stuff.
John Wendl: Pay attention at TGS is what I would tell him.
IGN AU/IGN Readers: With the new in-car viewpoints, will all the dials work, including the temperature gauge and fuel gauge?
John Wendl: Not every dial will work in every scenario, but all the big ones that you care about will, so tach, speed, fuel on most cars, boost gauges, digital gauges as well as analogue, like the Lamborghini Reventon has this crazy Star Wars looking 'stay on target' kind of thing, and it all animates and does all cool stuff, so each car we had to get in, start it up, see how all this stuff actually works and reacts. The Bugatti's got its horsepower gauge and all that kind of stuff. We basically went through each car, and some cars – especially race cars – have a million gauges, they look like an aeroplane, and not every one's going to be important to the player, so we picked the ones that we felt were the most useful.
IGN AU/IGN Readers: When you change gears, will the driver actually change gears with his hand?
John Wendl: He doesn't, right now. We just couldn't get that feature in in time, unfortunately. It was something we looked at, we had it close, but it was a little too buggy for us to put in… what we couldn't reconcile was that it was a very detailed hand with fingers and it actually grips the wheel, and it was difficult to get him to let go of the wheel and do this (moves hand off wheel) without his fingers passing through the wheel, because you don't actually do real collision detection on the wheel, and depending on how it was turned, there's a lot to work out there to get it [right], and we just felt like the visual trade-off there was too great. We'd rather have it not do it than look bad. And a lot of cars these days have paddle shifters so you're not going to be doing that anyway, so that's how I've rationalised it at least. (Laughs)
IGN AU/IGN Readers: Is it possible to roll your car or launch it into the air?
John Wendl: Yeah, you're able to roll the car now, so we've modelled under-carriages and suspension for every car in the game. Every car can be damaged, every car can be rolled, and already we're starting to see some spectacular results of that as you get multiple cars together…
IGN AU: Thanks so much for your time!
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Very good questions and answers in this thread for anybody buying Forza Motorsport 3 or still sitting on the fence. The physics sound more impressive then the graphics! Forza Motorsport 3 will most definitely be a game of the year contender alongside GT5 (if it comes out this year) Uncharted 2, Modern Warfare 2 and some other games.
TL;DR
Forza Motorsport 3 is going to be brilliant. Hardly any racing game developers have the privilege of working with Michelin and Mclaren or actually aquiring dream cars such as the Bugatti Veyron and Ford GT and being allowed to run them on the Dyno test to record real sounds and generate real performance figures.
