OXMUK
Being a Microsoft-owned studio isn't about jumping through the manufacturer's hoops, Turn 10's studio manager Alan Hartman and creative director Dan Greenawalt have told OXM. Forza Motorsport 5 may be designed to showcase Xbox One's capabilities, but Microsoft hasn't forced the developer to make use of the new console's features.
"First party is not just about making great games, first party is about supporting our services, supporting our platforms," Hartman explained to us. "And that's a challenge that requires endless iteration, endless innovation. Relentless innovation. And that innovation is not just in the product, it's across everything we do. And at the end of the day, I go home and to bed mentally exhausted. And I love that and I share that with a lot of the people at the studio.
"We love being first-party, we love the challenges that it brings," he continued. "So when we're looking at a service like Live, Turn 10 has been best in class on Live for years - we were there pioneering user-generated content, multiplayer, massive leaderboards, continuous content - since Forza 4 we have delivered at least one monthly pack of content to Live every month.
"We were the first team internally to embrace Kinect and start working with their early technology there. We took a team and gave them a little 'fishbowl', as we called it, put them in there and they just cranked away for - how long? Six months? Six months on Kinect. That's what it means to be first party."
Turn 10 isn't being worked to death, however - the studio is free to pick and choose which platform features it exploits. "We're never mandated and I think that's the secret, I think most people think teams are mandated," said Greenawalt. "We aren't told, we're asked. [People say to us] 'Please, please no-one is going to showcase this stuff like first-party will - figure it out because we don't know how we're going to showcase it'.
"We're the creative body, we're the creative organisation. So we're not mandated to support Kinect, for example. We were one of the first games to support Kinect for the core, we were asked: 'Hey, here's this hardware, nobody's seen it yet, we're going to show it to you guys first, what would you do, how would you use it?' And we break off creative teams to start thinking about it. So that's really the process behind this."
Known internally as "Flagship", Forza 5 features a new Drivatars AI system that's reliant on the console's cloud computing support, an expanded (and currently undivulged) Autovista-style Kinect showroom mode that can be used to view each and every vehicle, and exhilarating procedural audio.
http://www.oxm.co.uk/59451/were-asked-not-told-turn-10-on-what-it-means-to-be-a-microsoft-studio/
