Whenever you have a new sports game, especially a new racing game, you also want the traditional list of Granular Technical Advancements™. The next game in the Forza Motorsport series (Forza Horizon’s older, more serious sibling) had its moment during Wednesday’s Xbox and Bethesda ‘Developer Direct’ showcases.
Here’s a recap of everything the Forza Motorsport developers promised in the video embedded above.
- Over 500 cars at launch, 100 of which are new to the series: “Most modern race car ever to appear” on the Forza Motorsport roster
- 800 unique car upgrades
- 20 racing sites including 5 new locations for the series
- “Physically Based Lighting and Volumetric Fog Effects”
- “A fully procedural cloud system” (very important!)
- “Tens of thousands of fully animated 3D spectators”
- With “fully dynamic time of day and weather”, “dynamic road temperature, wet road, rubber in” (when tires rub on the road)
- New high-res materials and shaders “optimized” for ray tracing, at least on Xbox (no details mentioned about PC ray tracing support)
- Car paint, “sourced using a spectrophotometer,” “results in paint models with much more realistic light responses across color, metallic flakes, and gloss” (Science Paint, Get It I put (opens in new tab))
- Each car has its own “damage and dirt accumulation” model
- Paint chipping simulation considering paint thickness and orientation
- This is Forza Motorsport’s first product “natively mixed for immersive audio formats such as Windows Sonic and Dolby Atmos.”
- The car parts you choose will change the sound of your car, and there’s a new “Regional Truck Announcer System” and “Improved Tire and Suspension Audio.”
There’s one more audio-related detail I’ve set aside because I think it deserves special recognition.
- 🏆 “Hardware-accelerated convolution reverb accurately reproduces how sounds in Forza interact within an acoustic space, dynamically adapting to their surroundings to create realistic and detailed soundscapes. .”
(See here for an explanation of convolution reverb.) (opens in new tab) From B&H. In short, A/V retailers are more or less saying the same thing. action Only in a real acoustic space. ”)
Some of these details are explained in the blog post (opens in new tab) Last year, there is a continuation in the new post (opens in new tab)This is what they call Forza Motorsport, “a generational immersion.”
All of these big technical claims about Forza Motorsport, of course, sell us the idea that the current generation of Xbox is majestic and that the game satisfies our unrealized desire for a more accurate reflection. These ray-traced reflections shown near the end of the video look pretty nice. Maybe I want more accurate reflections. Maybe it’s all I ever wanted. Hopefully sooner or later we’ll get some PC-centric information.
Forza Motorsport, which is just called Forza Motorsport despite being the eighth in the series, doesn’t have a specific release date yet, but Microsoft says it will be out sometime this year. On PC, it’s available on Game Pass and Steam.
