Así lo han comentado en una entrevista en C&V
http://www.computerandvideogames.com/
Aunque ahora lógicamente están terminando el juego y preparando el contenido descargable.
THE FORZA IS STRONG
We get behind the wheel with Forza Motorsport's high octane art director
17:50 "I started track driving around 15 years ago, then got into amateur racing, then endurance racing. One of our environment artists rallies his Mini. The art lead races motorcycles and the online programmer races."
So says Kiki Wolfkill, art director on Microsoft's Xbox race simulator Forza Motorsport - and owner of the greatest name in game development.
Make no mistake, the guys working on Forza know their stuff. In fact, they don't just know it, they race it.
And yes, Kiki is a woman, although any notion of cracking open our extensive female driver joke book went out the window when we heard about her motor racing past and watched her chuck a Mitsubishi Evolution VII around the corkscrew at Laguna Seca. It was enough to fuel inject even the most hardcore petrolhead's heart.
Mind you, the game itself does a pretty good job of that. While Microsoft has been keen to play down tags applied to Forza like 'Xbox's Gran Turismo killer', the comparisons are there for all to see: a showroom stacked with licensed motors; a list of real world afterparts that reads like the classified ads section of Max Power; and a driving engine that concentrates on exhilarating accuracy rather than arcade excess.
But Forza's got a few major advantages over Kazunori's oft-delayed franchise. While GT has stalled on the online grid until at least the end of the year, an established Xbox Live infrastructure and the lessons learnt from Gotham 2's impressive online modes mean Forza is ready to set a new lap record for multiplayer racing.
Add in one of the most extensive visual and performance personalisation components out there with an awesome, totally customisable 100-layer decal feature and you've got the makings of a videogame grand prix champion.
We caught up with Kiki recently to discuss how Forza is tuning up the console racing simulation, both online and off. Fasten your seatbelts...
Judging by your background in motorsports and the enthusiasm we've seen from some of the other guys involved with Forza's development, there seems to be a real sense of excitement and involvement amongst the team. How much fun are you all having making Forza?
Kiki Wolfkill: It really is a labour of love for the team. It's the game we've always wanted to build and play, so it's come together very naturally. Our aim is to create the first fully customisable driving simulator on Xbox. There are three pillars of design we're concentrating on.
First is the idea of car ownership and personalisation, with more customisation than in any other driving sim. Then there's the driving itself - we're setting a new standard in terms depths of physics, AI and damage, which we think is a really important part of a driving game. Finally there's the online side. We're really evolving the racing genre by blending the online and offline modes into a much bigger worldwide simulation.
A lot has been made of Forza being Xbox's Gran Turismo-beater. How does the team react to that?
Kiki Wolfkill: Everyone on the team is a huge Gran Turismo fan. It's actually a game many of us carry in our hearts because it was one of the first racing games that a lot of us really respected and believed in, so that's definitely the franchise that we're targeting with Forza. Gran Turismo has been the high watermark for driving simulators for so long now that it's natural for us to aim to better it. They have a very strong franchise built up and an established team with lots of experience.
We don't necessarily have that, but we do have a team made up of people who worked on Gotham, Rallisport Challenge, Need For Speed and a lot of other racing game-specific projects. We also have a lot of experience in real driving and track racing, and I think that passion and respect for cars and motorsports really drives the team to make Forza as authentic an experience as it can be.
We're very well placed to go up against GT in terms of depth of simulation, and we've also got the online modes and the damage model which we're very proud of.
GT4 recently dropped its online mode. How did you feel about that?
Kiki Wolfkill: We'd also assumed that GT4 would come out with online play from the beginning, but we were confident that our online modes would be deeper and a little more mature. So we were very surprised when we heard it'd been canned in GT4. We definitely think it's a huge differentiator between Forza and GT4.
If you look at the first Gotham and compare it to what Live added to the experience in the sequel it's pretty clear how important it is. What we don't want is just to have online there as part of the price for entry: we feel that we're taking things a step further so that the online stuff is a part of the whole game design.
In Forza, credits that you earn in offline play can be used in the online mode and vice versa. You're not making a decision about whether to rack up money and buy new cars to race against real people online - you're just making a decision as to whether you want to race against real people or AI opponents.
What else are you implementing on the online side?
Kiki Wolfkill: We've nailed all the usual stuff - everything you do while you're signed in will be reflected in a leaderboard somewhere and your stats will be constantly tracked. On top of that we're really keen to focus on the idea of a racing community. We have Car Clubs, which are effectively clans of up to 100 drivers. You can think of it almost as a race team.
Anything you can do in single-player you'll be able to do within your Car Club, so you'll have guys who are really skilled with upgrades and tuning, guys who are really skilled at customising cars with our decals and liveries, and the guys who are great at racing all working together within the team. Then there's the online economy feeding into that, with people trading upgrades, mechanical setups, decals and cars.
Gotham 2 was fantastic online but there was never a real feeling of connection between you and your car. How does Forza address this?
Kiki Wolfkill: Yeah, you knew you were racing against a real person but they didn't look any different to anyone else driving that kind of car. With our visual customisation options like the livery editor you can really give your car that personal touch. It really helps the sense of competition, because your car becomes this thing you've created on a personal and emotional level.
That's what really drives Forza. I think there's a certain lack of emotion in Gran Turismo, but in Forza we're giving you something and you're taking it and making it your own.
The sense of community is really important to car culture. How has this influenced the design of Forza?
Kiki Wolfkill: We looked at how people like to experience racing games and how people like to experience motorsports. It's a very community-based thing. The tuner culture [boy racers] like particular types of cars and particularly flamboyant types of modifications, while other people might want to concentrate on their tuning under the hood without worrying too much about the exterior of their cars.
There are so many different ways of expressing your skills on the track so we really tried to provide everyone with enough variety to reflect their own approach to motorsport, while still offering everyone an authentic racing game experience.
The street racing culture is making a big noise in racing games these days. How are you planning to appeal to this part of motorsport culture?
Kiki Wolfkill: The street racing culture's definitely an aspect of motorsport that's gaining a lot more legitimacy these days. It used to be just street-dragging and a fancy paint job, but it's evolved into something that relies far more on sophisticated tuning techniques and a very uniquely skilled style of driving.
So that fits really well with Forza, because it just seems to be another natural branch of established motor racing. We've put in drift racing through cone tracks for the street racers, just like we have time trial racing and endurance racing for people who like a different type of driving. We're confident we've got something for almost every motorsport fan.
Did you want to avoid targeting one specific aspect of the car community too heavily since, for instance, Need For Speed Underground is heavy into the boy racer culture and Midnight Club 3 is going for the DUB culture?
Kiki Wolfkill: I think it's more that we've built a very robust physics model, we've got a very strong collection of over 200 cars with all the modifications that go with them. That's what performance driving is about. Forza's not just about making your car look fancy and getting around the track.
Modification and customisation is universal - individual aspects of car community like street racing are not. What we've done is given everyone the tools to indulge their motorsport passion and display their personality in whichever way they choose, and we've made it a very enjoyable driving experience.
Primarily we want people to go in and have fun racing. They don't ever need to touch the modification if you don't want to. You can keep racing, earning credits, and upgrading to better cars without getting your hands dirty. If you do want to get deep into the simulation there's plenty to keep you busy. We have 150 aftermarket brands offering parts specific to each make and model of car.
We've got so many options that people can really choose where to enhance their performance, be it in the engine, the suspension, the aerodynamics and so on. If you add to that the tyre tuning and camber tuning you can tune every single aspect of your car - springs, compounds, pressure, gear ratios, alignment, rollbars, downforce. And everything affects performance. A big wing will give you extra downforce but it'll add drag, hurting your acceleration and top speed. Of course, you can always have someone else do it for you and download it...
The modification and tuning interface in a lot of racing games can be quite intimidating for people who don't know a lot about cars. How have you presented it in Forza?
Kiki Wolfkill: We've kept it pretty simple. When you go into the modification screen your car's stats are displayed in bars along the top of the screen that change as you tune it or add modifications. As you spend money on your car you're told how the weight is changing and if a mod will push you up into the next of the six classes in the game. You can either continue modifying a car to push it through the classes, or just go out and buy something that comes with more power as standard - it's up to you and what kind of car you care about.
With the tuning itself, everything's pretty much simplified to adjustments on a slide bar that gives immediate and simple visual feedback while still offering a lot of depth. Then you can hit the track instantly to try out your adjustments, tweak them a little more, and head straight back out. The online side is a real help too - if you're not sure how to do something you can ask for help from others or even get them to do it for you.
The important thing is that you can race and be successful without using the tuning options, but if you want to get in deep with the modification
The same goes for the actual racing - how are you ensuring that more casual driving game fans won't be put off by the realistic physics and handling?
Kiki Wolfkill: There are a bunch of driving assists you can turn on or off, you can set damage to be entirely cosmetic or affect your performance, and you can switch tyre damage on and off. You can totally tailor the racing experience to be as realistic or forgiving as you want.
Can you tell us a little more about the six different classes in Forza?
Kiki Wolfkill: You start off with fairly low-powered production cars and as you move up the cars become more powerful. Each class has four sub-classes, and as you increase horsepower or buy a new car you'll begin to move up through them. When you hit classes 4 and 5 you'll start to see production race cars that we've licensed from real race teams. If you get your hands on them you'll be able to tune them, but obviously there's less scope for modification. Then the final class is mostly high-powered GT cars and prototype models.
In each class about 80-percent of the cars are available by default, so we're not locking players into a situation where they have to get a certain car to progress.
GT4's promising over 700 cars. How do you feel about your total of over 200?
Kiki Wolfkill: We're very comfortable with our number of cars. From a personal standpoint, I'll never even look at 700 cars, but that's just me. We've tried to pick a set of cars that people who love automobiles and motorsports will be excited about, and then arrange them in such a way that you'll appreciate them all but gravitate towards the ones you care about. I think very few people are interested in collecting every car and far more interested in showing what kind of cars they appreciate.
Racing games all seem to be featuring the same race tracks these days. Does it frustrate you that you're creating yet another reproduction of, say, Laguna Seca or Tsukuba?
Kiki Wolfkill: It's hard because these are really good tracks and really valuable driving experiences, so it's difficult just to ditch them because someone else has done it before. The thing is, you can always do them better. Take our Laguna Seca, for instance, which is a much more accurate representation of the real track than ever before in a game, and certainly feels much more accurate than ever before.
You can really sense every dip and camber change. The same is true of our versions of the Nurburgring and Tsukuba, and we've got more that we haven't announced yet. When you combine that with Forza's level of car physics giving you a lot more feedback than ever before, it becomes a completely new experience.
We've also got a number of specially created tracks in real life cities designed to exploit a particular racing style, and a number of fictitious tracks just because it lets us be a little more creative with what we're offering.
With such a realistic physics and handling engine a force feedback wheel would be great for Forza. Any plans?
Kiki Wolfkill: There's definitely things in the works that we haven't solidified yet. We appreciate that a force feedback wheel is the best way to experience a game like Forza and it's certainly something we're working on from a partnership standpoint.
You've talked about Forza as the first instalment in a major franchise for Xbox. What plans do you have for the future?
Kiki Wolfkill: We're already thinking about Forza 2, but we're still extremely focused on getting Forza finished and starting production on downloadable content. The vision for this Forza was a lot grander than we could implement and by the time Forza 2 comes around it'll most likely be on new hardware, so it's hard to say exactly what we'll be doing - and even if I knew I wouldn't be allowed to say anyway.
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