Whenever there is a new sports game, especially a new racing game, there has to be the traditional Granular Technical Advancements™ list as well. For the next game in the Forza Motorsport series (Forza Horizon’s older, more serious brother), that moment came during Wednesday’s Xbox and Bethesda “Developer Direct” showcase, and it was a doozy.
Here’s a recap of everything the developers of Forza Motorsport promised in the video above:
- Over 500 cars at launch, including 100 new to the series: “Most modern race cars ever” on a Forza Motorsport selection
- 800 unique car upgrades
- 20 race locations, including five new locations in the series
- “Physically Based Lighting and Volumetric Fog Effects”
- “A Complete Procedural Cloud System” (Very Important!)
- “Tens of thousands of fully animated 3D spectators”
- “Fully dynamic time of day and weather” with “dynamic track temperatures, wet driving surfaces and run-in” (which is when tires rub off on the track)
- New higher resolution materials and shaders “optimized” for ray tracing, at least on Xbox (no details about PC ray tracing support were mentioned)
- Automotive paints “obtained using a spectrophotometer” which “produces a paint model that has a “much more realistic light response across color, metal flakes and gloss” (Science paint, understood (opens in new tab))
- Each car has a unique “damage and dirt build-up” model
- Simulated paint chipping responsible for paint thickness and directivity
- This is the first Forza Motorsport to be “mixed natively for immersive audio formats like Windows Sonic and Dolby Atmos”
- The car parts you choose change the sound of your car, and there’s a new “regional track public address system” and “enhanced tire and suspension audio”
There’s one more audio-related detail I’ve brushed aside because I think it deserves special recognition. The award for most jargon in one sentence goes to:
- 🏆 “Hardware-accelerated convolution reverb accurately reproduces how sounds in Forza interact in an acoustic space, dynamically adapting to the environment and creating a realistic and detailed soundscape.”
(Here’s one explanation of convolutional reverberation (opens in new tab) from B&H. In short, the A/V retailer is saying more or less the same thing, namely that the intention is to “capture and process the reverb”. behaviour unique for a real acoustic space.”)
Some of these details were covered a blog post (opens in new tab) last year, and there’s more inside a new message (opens in new tab)which Forza Motorsport calls a “generational leap in immersion”.
Of course, all these big technical claims about Forza Motorsport are meant to sell us the idea that the current generation of Xboxes is majestically powerful and that the game will fulfill an unrealized desire in us for more accurate reflections. Those ray-traced reflections demonstrated at the end of the video look pretty sweet though. Maybe I want more accurate reflections. Maybe it’s all I’ve ever wanted. Hopefully we’ll get some PC-focused information sooner or later.
Forza Motorsport, which is simply called Forza Motorsport despite being the eighth in the series, doesn’t have a concrete release date yet, but Microsoft says it will be out this year. On PC, it’s available through Game Pass and Steam.