In a recent interview with Examiner, Turn 10’s creative director Dan Greenawalt spoke about the development cycle of Forza 5, which began before the previous title in the series, Forza 4, had even shipped.
“We have a brand new graphics engine in Forza Motorsport 5, built from the ground up to take advantage of the power of the Xbox One. It also runs at a native 1080p and solid 60 frames per second. As a first party development studio, we were in the privileged position of working closely with the Xbox platform team; we began discussing the console that would become the Xbox One as early as four years ago, even before we shipped Forza Motorsport 4 on Xbox 360.”
“For Forza Motorsport 5 we knew we would have a more complex and powerful console able to render cars with millions of polygons. Our visual ambition for the game went beyond mere polygon count, however. We wanted to push ourselves to explore how light and atmosphere interact in order to create a true next generation look and feel for the game.”
“This lead us to the development of a system we refer to as physically based materials, where we precisely model thousands of materials that are used in the game to build the interior and exteriors of the cars, as well as the environments themselves.”
“We’ve also laser scanned the tracks in Forza Motorsport 5, which allows us to render them with sub-centimeter accuracy – from track-side buildings to the surface of the asphalt itself, every curve and bump is precisely recreated,”
Forza is one of the flagship franchises for the Xbox brand, and Forza 5 is set to be one of Microsoft’s key launch exclusives when the Xbox One launches later this month. Whilst Forza 5 certainly looks the part and runs at that magical 1080p/60fps everyone is cracking on about, it remains to be seen how it will compare to its competition on the PlayStation 4; the recently delayed Driveclub.
What do you think? Will Forza keep it’s crown or will it be overtaken on by Driveclub? Let us know what you think in the comments below.