Turn 10, the developer responsible for the Forza Motorsport series, has discussed the rivalry between their Xbox 360 exclusive racing franchise and Polyphony Digital’s Gran Turismo franchise.
Turn 10 chief Dan Greenawalt told Eurogamer about both of the franchise’s fierce rivalry:
It makes for great stories for people. It’s not what drives our team. Our team is driven towards that vision of car passion and car culture. And that’s what gets us to accelerate. Now, obviously in my job it’s important I play all the competition. I play everything. I play Grid, Need for Speed, Dirt, F1, everything. I play a lot of games in general. Part of it is just understanding what’s going on. But that’s not where our innovation, our ideas come from. That’s just knowing where the landscape is. You can’t navigate without knowing the landscape.
The other thing that’s interesting is, with any of these giant franchises – we have over 350 people working on our team across the globe – when you think about that many people over two years, that’s a lot of man hours. You can’t maintain incredible agility at that size. We’ve restructured our team over and over again to give autonomy and freedom to leaders within the team to innovate within different areas. They can innovate in Kinect. We can hire specialists. We can innovate in graphics and hire specialists. We can innovate in physics.
Greenawalt further explained that long term innovation is the only thing which will help them improve and be better than the competition:
But even so, even with the agility we get from that, we have to fire this artillery way in advance of trying to hit the hillside. So when a game comes out a year, six months, before we launch, we can’t do anything about that. There’s no reaction we can do at all. I can play it. I can appreciate what they do. We can’t react. Which is why our stress is on innovation long term. If we don’t innovate long term, we can’t accomplish it.
He concluded by saying that although some features might turn out to be the same in two or more different games in the same genre, that doesn’t always mean that one team copied from the other, and it can be infact a co-incidence:
Sometimes games come out with features at the same time. First-person shooters do and you go, oh, those guys copied that guy. I know that, just with the size of teams today, no they didn’t. They came up with the same idea around the same time about a year ago and one game beat the other one to market. The ability to copy other games is extremely limited, honestly.
The next installment in the Forza franchise, Forza Motorsport 4, launches on October 11th in North America and three days later in European territories exclusive to Xbox 360. Do you think it’ll be a better title than Gran Turismo 5? Let us know below.
http://www.gamersmint.com/gran-turismoforza-rivalry-discussed-by-turn-10
