NowGamer
You have to feel a little for the guys at Turn 10. Despite Microsoft’s disastrous Xbox One reveal and the bumpy road that has followed, Turn 10 has made what’s almost certain to be the undisputed best racer of all time.
Hardly surprising. After all, what business is it of Turn 10’s if the mothership is beaming up its customers en masse for deep probing? Well, in a way, it’s some of its business. Because, just as it was called upon to do in Forza Motorsport 4 when Kinect was the thing Microsoft wished thrust to the forefront of the public consciousness, Forza Motorsport 5 has to arrive singing from the cloud. For better or for worse, it arrives with some heavy-duty cloud features because Microsoft needs stuff out there to justify its stance.
So we have Drivatar; a system that learns on a minute, behavioural level exactly the way you drive, then goes off and races for you when you’re offline, winning you in-game money and online kudos. Basically, your profile never stops racing.
The benefit to you is that there is no such thing as AI in Forza Motorsport 5. When you begin a new race, you’ll be racing against Drivatars: driver analogues from the cloud prioritised by your friends list. We’re not sure it sells us on Microsoft’s ludicrous online policy, but we all agree it’s a nice feature.
Being Forza there’s a list of physics improvements long enough to warrant their own book. New suspension models, tyre physics, laser-refined road surface mapping. Real world tracks are in fact now recreated to hundredths of a millimetre.
The upshot is cars that feel alive on the track, each a sort of automotive formula that filters input through the personality of the car, then outputs joy. Nobody does it better. Nobody’s even close.
We tried the demo track – a route through the streets of Prague that’s an actual series of real streets, but not an actual race track – both on Thrustmaster’s prototype steering wheel and on the new Xbox One pad.
On the wheel, everything is exactly as it should be. The force feedback provides all the information you need about brake strength (lock-up) and traction in and out of the corners. Par for the car. But it’s the Xbox One controller that’s the real revelation here.
To hardened Forza veterans like ourselves, the pad has never been an option. The handling is too simplified on the pad, the control lacking precision.
That’s not a criticism of Forza Motorsport’s approach to pad control per se. It has to feel right, and Forza always has. More, we’ve never been able to feel when we’re losing traction, and so playing with a pad has always been, to us, a bit like tasting wine with no sense of smell. It’s delicious and it’ll make you giddy all the same, but you’re missing out on full sensory feedback. Not any more.
The Xbox One pad has discrete rumble in each of its triggers. You can feel when you’re braking too hard, you can feel when you’re poking the gas with too much gusto, and you can tell these things before you lock up and hit a wall. You can tell these things before you fishtail her ass-backwards. It works.
Enjoy the eye-candy and rest assured, everything you see here is in-game.
http://www.nowgamer.com/xboxone/xbox-one-previews/2022632/forza_motorsport_5_the_xbox_one_controller_is_the_real_revelation.html
