OXMUK
Forza 5's biggest strength - well, aside from some quite unnecessarily magnificent visuals - could be its online Drivatars system, which creates an AI persona based on your playstyle and shares it with other users. The game's "computer-controlled" cars are all, in fact, modelled on the behaviour of other human beings, and evolve over time as those human beings improve.
Does this mean you'll have to be online to actually find any opponents? Are we truly approaching "the end of single player"? The answer, I'm thankful to confirm, is no, though you'll miss out on a lot of "intricacy" if you remain resolutely offline.
"Drivatar is the same word we used for Forza 1, 2, 3 and 4, but it's all-new, it's cloud-based, it's more like Big Data - it's a big, learning system," Turn 10's Dan Greenawalt told OXM in a Gamescom presentation. "Where the rubber meets the road is that basically the way those racers behave, it's much more human.
"Your friends, your family are in those races, and whenever you log in you get money based on what your Drivatar did. But the biggest thing is seeing these opponents weaving and faking and counter-faking, sometimes they're dirty, sometimes they're not - it's just much more engaging than anything you'll see in another racing game."
These Drivatars aren't required to play, however - there will be a set of AIs on the disc. "You can still play even without downloading those," Turn 10's Dan Greenawalt reassured OXM, when we asked whether the internet-deficient risked having a lonely time of things on the course. "You'll just get basically the equivalent of those Drivatars we were racing [during development].
"They were trained by us in the studio, and they are well-trained, but the difference is that this system becomes more intricate - not more difficult - but more intricate and more nuanced, the more people you add in," he continued. "That's what Big Data is. So if you get millions of people - two million, three million, four million - it will get even more nuanced, it will get even more character.
"So that's why it's worthwhile to log in all the time, to just get the benefit of millions of people putting millions of hours in. It won't get harder, because again there are difficulty settings. If you choose easy difficulty, it looks at the population of Drivatars and grabs the ones that are not very fast. And those guys don't really get any faster, because that's just statistics - the bottom 10 per cent is the bottom 10 per cent."
http://www.oxm.co.uk/62293/forza-5s-ai-is-much-more-engaging-than-anything-youll-see-in-another-racing-game/
