How Turn 10 sabotaged Forza 3 by running its mouth

Turn 10 Studios, developer of the highly anticipated Forza Motorsport 3, has begun to foster quite an interesting reputation for themselves as time and time again the developer calls out rival racing studios with ludicrously absurd comments at demo showings and interviews. While it’s certainly somewhat admirable that the studio is confident in the quality of its upcoming racer, the remarks being spewed from game director Dan Greenawalt’s mouth are nothing short of pure and utter hyperbolic garbage. A recent interview with Xbox360Achievements.org highlights this fact all too well, and the consistency with which the studio lashes out indirectly (and sometimes very directly) against other racing developers is just laughable. Here’s a sampling of the truly ridiculous (and hilariously ignorant) quotes from the aforementioned interview to get us started.

I play a lot of racing games, including PC racing games and I have not seen anything that is even within years of what we’re delivering here.

Really? That’s so weird, because I could’ve sworn I’ve heard of this Gran Turismo game somewhere. And what about that GTR2 racer? Supposedly it’s pretty advanced too. Must be just a rumor.

We have lift, bump stops that can create a hell of an unbalance in the car, we even simulate the chassis stiffness that I’ve never seen in another game... where, like a Fox Body Mustang just twists under its own torque and it means that the tires can’t stay evenly attached to the road. We even simulate that.

Wow, that’s really deep. Strange then, that you can’t manage to simulate something as simple as a car hitting a concrete slab? It seems like that would be a more immediate concern than the way a Mustang reacts according to its own power.

I could go on and on with this material, and that’s from just a single interview. While I definitely respect that Turn 10 is trying to reignite the Forza flame so to speak, the fact that it’s effectively ignoring competitors like Gran Turismo 5 and even DiRT 2 is unbelievably bad practice. It’s not like Bungie presents a demo at E3 while ranting and raving about how there’s no other shooter on the market that handles the way Halo does. As a developer, you need to have a certain kind of reverence and respect for your competitors, even if they consistently outsell and outperform you. If anything, this should serve as inspiration to make your next project a labor of love that people can put up with the other guys side-to-side and say something along the lines of: “Wow, they really outdid themselves this time.”

With Forza 3, that is not the case. The hype over the much-improved graphics engine has led to a general feeling of disappointment as gamers finally got their hands on the recently released demo. The lighting model looks strangely “off”, illuminating the cars in a slightly cartoonish fashion that makes colors pop far too much and jaggies far too evident. Leading up to the release of the demo, trailers and gameplay videos never really made this fact apparent, but once I managed to get behind the poorly-rendered cockpit of the demo’s Mini Cooper (I’ve actually driven a Mini a few times in my life, and let me tell you, Forza does NOT represent the interior well) my hopes for a graphical competitor to Gran Turismo were dashed. Gran Turismo 5: Prologue, which released a little over a year ago, still manages to outpace Forza 3, all the while Forza is being heralded by the big wigs at Microsoft and many outspoken members of Turn 10 as the best-looking racer on the market. If the “market” doesn’t consist of DiRT 2 or any of the PS3-exclusive Gran Turismos, then yea, this statement would be 100% correct, but for those of us living in the real world, it’s complete and utter bullshit.

But wait, you say. Forza is all about the under-the-hood performance calculations and rarely seen physics flourishes! While normally I’d be inclined to agree with you, these have little to no effect on roughly 90% of the driving experience. When you’re racing on the road, your car will handle pretty much like every other racing game out there with asphalt tracks (albeit less exciting because of the poor sense of speed, a recurring problem with the Forza franchise). The only time all these supposed “advanced calculations” come into play is in very, very rare situations, and even then, you likely won’t think to yourself: “OMG! That’s totally what the car would have done in real life!” What’s most disappointing about these physics, however, is the fact that crashing your car in Forza is painfully underwhelming. Even in a game like Need for Speed: Shift, which has comparable damage modeling (meaning it’s terribly lacking) makes crashes interesting by blurring the screen and violently shaking the camera while your car smashing the center divide creates a nasty crunch of bending metal and shattering glass. In Forza, there is nothing exciting or remotely thrilling about smashing your very expensive car into a wall. In fact, there’s nothing to marvel at in any way when your Audi R8 side swipes a reckless driver as he speeds past you, because the damage modeling is almost IDENTICAL to Forza 2’s. A scrape here, some paint removed there. The whole ordeal is so unspectacular it makes one wonder what the hell the team at Turn 10 has been doing for the last couple years. Granted, Gran Turismo 5’s damage modeling isn’t anything to write home about either, but at least bits and pieces fall off after impacts and doors swing off their hinges so that it’s apparent from even the cockpit view that your car has been affected by that 50 MPH head-on collision.

I could go on and on about Forza 3’s shortcomings, namely the absolutely dreadful cockpit view and pitiful sense of speed, but really I’m just going to let Turn 10 embarrass itself further and laugh my ass off when Gran Turismo 5 eventually comes out and Forza is left in the dust. It’s not often that I want a game to fail, and even more uncommon for me to want a developer to get humiliated, but the fact that Polyphony is speaking with gorgeous trailers and screenshots, while Turn 10 retorts with childish remarks and not so subtle insults makes me wonder just how hard the developer is trying to sabotage its upcoming release. Turn 10, you should be ashamed. Well played, Polyphony. Actions really are louder than words.