In the latest Forza Monthly stream, a regular series highlighting everything happening with Microsoft’s racing simulator franchise, Creative Director on the upcoming franchise reboot Chris Esaki gave an update on the development.
He says that Turn 10 wrapped up all post-launch work on Forza Motorsport 7 last August, and since then they’ve been working with the team developing the Xbox Series X, and then doing pre-production on the new title in the series. In the last year, they’ve done a lot of work on the fundamentals of the game, the “technology, tools, physics, and AI”, and evolving their process to set them up for the next entry in the series.
A lot of the work they’ve done has been to let them produce cars and tracks much more quickly, and with higher levels of detail. Esaki says:
“All of our tools and tech really helps us scale upwards to high-end PCs and things like Xbox Series X, but also help us to support lower-end PCs.”
Talking about the goals of this reboot, it’s said to be a reboot of the series, getting back to its roots whilst still appealing to new players.
“It’s been 15 years since the original Forza Motorsport came out, the beginning of that franchise brought some incredible new life to the genre of Motorsports, and similarly in reimagining Forza Motorsport, we’re going back to the roots of what made Forza Motorsport great, and pairing it with a bunch of new game concepts built to welcome a new generation of Motorsports fans into our community.”
Final details on the exact visuals the game will offer will have to wait for closer to release, but we did hear that they are going to be implementing ray-tracing in the game.
“Ray-tracing is coming to ForzaTech, the engine that powers Forza Motorsport and Forza Horizon. One of the things that we discovered when we turned ray-tracing on: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly came out in our technology. As an example, with the cars, you turn on ray-tracing, and there are a lot of real sharp edges and things around occlusion that didn’t work well. The ray-tracing technology really exposed some of the issues that we had in how we were either building the content or rendering the content. It’s not just that ray tracing is coming to ForzaTech, it’s actually that a whole host of other technology around how we’re improving the car models, how we’re improving the track visuals, environment visuals and character visuals, just to make everything beautiful and really pop in the scene.”
Sounds like Turn 10 are betting big on this reboot of the series. On PC, Turn 10 have released both the demo version of Forza Motorsport 6, dubbed “Apex Edition”, and then the full version of Forza Motorsport 7. Both we’re technically sound ports that did an admirable job bringing the console experience over to gaming PCs. This time around, they’re going to be pushing graphics and other technology forward as they transition into a new console generation, and high-end gaming PCs should benefit from these advancements too. PC users with high-end rigs, with top-end GPUs, can look forward to a graphical showcase when this game comes out at some point in the future. They haven’t set a release date yet, but we’ll let you know when we hear.
Check out the entire stream for more details here: