“We’re going to be having 10 cars a month,” says Greenawalt. “This is a cadence we did before; some of the cars will be a la carte. We’re also offering in this version a Season Pass where you can get six 10–car packs for 30 per cent off and, if you do that, you get the American Muscle Car pack, the first pack, for free. So it’s a total of 70 cars for a reduced price.”
“So we’re really just experimenting with trying to find out how people want to consume this content. We’re gonna make it because we want to keep the game fresh, we want to keep the game hot, we always want to have that car passion being stoked – it’s one of the reasons we’re an evergreen title – but we’re still experimenting. Do they want to buy cars individually? Do they want to buy the Season Pass? We’re gonna figure that out this version.
“As far as it comes with other DLC we might do like tracks, Autovista, modes, things like that, we’re still evaluating that part. The team’s done shipping; we’re taking a bit of a holiday. Those things take more people, they take more planning. So we have to evaluate that one. The car DLC is something we’re so good at we can just keep that conveyor belt going all the time.”
We mention to Greenawalt it’s surprising more developers don’t fully embrace this kind of pipeline, extending the life of one game by offering content players want to buy (which, in turn, benefits the studio financially and builds a base of content for a new game down the track).
“It’s hard to do,” says Greenawalt. “It took a lot of process on our part to be able to have a conveyor belt that could be always looking for new cars, always capturing new cars and then being able to deliver them. And, obviously for us, we have to fire that artillery a long time in advance. It takes us almost six months to deliver a car to market so we have to plan that shot.”
“Now that means actually starting our DLC before the game ships and yet that DLC couldn’t have gone on disc because, again, we’ve got these shots so well-timed that we get the game into certification and the cars are not yet done, the ones that go on the web. And then they hit and meanwhile we already have three more packs in production at all times. All this artillery’s in the air; that takes a lot of coordination, it takes a lot of work. So I think it’s one thing to want to do it as a studio, it’s another thing to actually rearrange your resources to be able to deliver it. It’s a huge team, actually, that’s delivering it. We’ve tried to perfect the art of having nine women make one baby in one month and we’ve gotten better at it, but we haven’t quite gotten there yet.”
We mention to Greenawalt that it was particularly exciting for us to see an antipodean icon like the XB Falcon GT make the cut in Forza 4. We ask how the team come to settle on it and where they found an example. His explanation shone a considerable amount of light on how seriously the team takes car selection.“I think we actually found that car overseas,” says Greenawalt. “The process of actually coming up with which cars we add to the car is multi-lensed. I mean, we’re very passionate on the team, we love cars, but that means there’s always a risk of being blinded by our own passion. So we’ve worked very hard to have multiple lenses that we apply to the list.”
“We’ve got a car list that’s thousands and thousands and thousands of cars long. We’re always adding to it based on all the magazines we read and well as what people say on the forums, we pull in magazines internationally so we do get magazines from all over the world. But the way we actually make a decision of what car gets added is based is on how it’s hitting in pop culture, how it’s hitting in the news, what our community is asking for, what cars people are driving in Forza Motorsport 3. We pull all of things together and weight them and you see which cars rise up to the top, and that’s how we decide which cars go in.
“So obviously the Falcon got a huge boost in pop culture based on Eric Bana’s movie that he put out and that moved the needle on that car significantly globally, not just in Australia obviously but all around the world. So that car became a bit of a no brainer because it wasn’t only helping with our Australian car culture, it was actually helping around the whole globe. Now in the past we had added the Australian V8 race cars and that’s something, again, that not only helps in Australia, the truth is that Australian V8s are one of those things that has moved outside of Australian and is actually popular in other parts of Europe and North America as well.”Based on that then, we ask what we need to do get an equivalent classic Holden into the mix, for some genuine local rivalry. Asking for cars is something the Forza community is especially fond of; it’s why the car request thread is at a staggering 5,368 replies and counting.
“Part of it is looking at just the way it moves the needle,” says Greenawalt. “Looking at what types of car passions, excitement there is, not only globally but in regions. Obviously we’ve looked at Holdens, that’s something that we’ll continue to evaluate, but we try to keep our own passion out of it in a sense and let the numbers and the weighting speak for themselves. That has meant that some surprising cars pop up. You know, there might be a car from France that very few people in the United States have heard of but rises up because it’s big enough in France to start infesting a bit of Spain of Germany or the United Kingdom.”
So where to beyond Forza 4? What’s the first step a developer like Turn 10 takes once you have more power to play with? “Honestly, hardware generations come and they go,” says Greenawalt. “Moore’s Law is a reality. Moore’s Law is happening on the PCs and the consoles take a snapshot in time, so it’s more of a stair step than a ramp that you get with Moore’s Law. But that just kind of comes and goes; our vision is about making a difference in car culture, making a difference in gaming culture and bringing those two together.”
“It’s a very lofty vision, and so the hardware serves those purposes, the hardware does not create the new features, the hardware is just something that’s part of the factors, it’s part of the playground, it’s part of the backyard we have to run around in. So the first thing we’re doing is looking at our vision and looking at a long list of features we’ve developed over the last 10 years and decide is now the right time to deliver them. Now obviously I play the competition, I play other racing games, but that’s not what really inspires us as a team. What inspires us is car culture, it is that diversity, it is that respect for car culture and gaming culture. So we play lots of games, we watch lots of movies, you know, the new documentary about Senna, Love the Beast from Bana, these are movies we watch that inspire us. We’ve had ideas that are delivered in Forza 4 that honestly we had back on Forza 1 because a good idea at the wrong time, is the wrong idea, and you gotta wait for the right time to come along. The right time is based on car culture, gaming culture, the awareness of the franchise, the momentum of the franchise and, of course, hardware as well, but all those are factors, rather than the actual driving force behind the innovation. The driving force behind the innovation is our passion.
So what part of Forza 4 does Greenawalt find most satisfying?
“As a Creative Director the thing I’m most excited about is Autovista,” he says. “First thing I did when I had my actual retail copy on my retail box is I went through and unlocked all the Autovista cars. I just think it’s impressive, it’s fun to do, you know, the Kinect integration just makes it so much more immersive and it was something that actually got my wife interested. She was watching me and I’d play the Jeremy Clarkson bit and that would bring her out… she was very interested in seeing
that.”
“So I’m really interested to see, as a Creative Director, how that takes off. Some people are gonna love it, some people are gonna hate, some people are gonna think this way or that way but it’s so new, so radically new, that it’s gonna have a life of its own, I just don’t know what that life’s gonna be.
“Now as a player, when I’m just playing by myself, I’ve been addicted to Rivals mode because I’ve got a lot of friends on my friends list, I’m in a car club at work, we’re constantly beating each other, earning money, it’s like a completely different way of playing the career and it’s so addictive, so that’s how I play when I’m by myself. But then the other thing that happened two nights ago, I’ve got two young sons and I was playing through the career because they get to pick what car I’m in so they had me driving Bumblebee, you know, a yellow Camaro, and it’s not the car I would choose but they’re laughing and having fun and we got to the Top Gear Bowling events. Now my kids are pretty young and I’m smashing through these bowling pins with car and I’m having fun because it’s real physics and I can drift around, but they were laughing hysterically, having so much fun. The sound of the pins and all that, it was a lot of fun. I think, depending on the type of player you are, and I happen to be in a place where I kind of occupy a few different spaces, being a hardcore gamer and a car lover, you find different areas that are fun and exciting.”
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