Haven't you heard the news? Racing games are in trouble. If you didn't get the hint when Activision shut down Blur and Project Gotham developer Bizarre Creations in 2011, citing "fundamental" changes in the genre, perhaps the absence of a Need for Speed this Christmas (the first time for over a decade) will convince you that something is wrong.
Then again, despite what the naysayers might claim, we're about to see the launch of four huge racing games within the space of just a few weeks: Driveclub, Project Cars, The Crew and Forza Horizon 2. Driveclub alone will more than cater for the tastes of the true motoring aficionados, but it's Horizon 2 that could be just the shot in the arm that this genre needs right now.
Because, unlike Driveclub, which prides itself on the granular details, Horizon wants to cater for the car enthusiasts and the casual sunday drivers alike. While it holds many of the ideals of Forza 5 close to heart, it wants to make racing, well, fun again.
To do that it's tearing out the boundaries to let players race across open world environments and just indulge themselves in the pleasure of driving once again. But you can't launch your first game on a new console without wax and polish, no matter how many fun features you throw into the bag.
And what's interesting is that, while Playground Games and Turn 10 have carried over Forza 5's rendering engine and core systems on the Xbox One to make sure the cars feel as real as possible (with the option of various driving assists should you desire them), it found that it's the eyes, not the hands, that are always the final judge. You can have a car that handles identically to its real-world counterpart, but if it looks jaggy or the spoiler doesn't reflect light in just the right way, people won't buy into it.
"I'll let you in on a little secret," Turn 10 Studios Content Director John Wendl tells TechRadar. "We did some testing and evaluation, and we found that visuals more than the handling of the car influence how real something is. We came to the conclusion in many cases that if it looks real, it is real. And if it doesn't look real, it doesn't matter how accurate your physics are, people won't believe that it's real. Because at the end of the day you're driving a car in a video game, you're not getting seat-of-the-pants feedback, the world is not zipping by you."
Real Racing
But the team were faced with an interesting dilemma early on: the cars until now had looked too good. For a car to look truly real it needs imperfections, so the developers decided that this time they needed to tease out the flaws.
"With Horizon one and Forza 4, we would often get feedback saying 'your cars look perfect, how are you ever going to make them any better?'" says Wendl. "And we looked at them and we realised they were perfect, in fact they were too perfect, they were so pristine they almost looked fake"
"We'd sort of stumbled into this uncanny valley with cars. And when we went to the Xbox One we had this new horsepower and this new resolution, and we were thinking, how can we leverage this to really bring that visual realism to the next level?
"When we looked at cars up close we found all these minor imperfections. When you paint a car, no matter how many times you sand it, as you paint and put clear coat on it, there are these slight imperfections in the paint. When you look into the reflection it's slightly warbly, and that's called orange peel.
"It's one of those kind of things where we recreated that in the game but it wasn't until we had the Xbox One that we could do it right because at lower resolution it looks like visual artifacts, it looks like bugs. But at 1080p it looks like the real thing, and it's cool because car guys see it and theyre like 'oh wow man, they even recreated orange peel'.
"The cool thing is that the people who don't know what orange peel is or don't know cars, they see it and they just say 'man that looks real, I don't know what it is but theres something very real about it and it's because that's how they're used to seeing things in the real world with these slight imperfections. Machine marks on the brake rotors, the orange peel in the pain, these little micro scratches in the headlight covers and things like that, those are the things that, whether they consciously process it or not, they're used to seeing. And when they see it in the game there's something very comforting and real about it."
Blame it on the rain
Forza Horizon 2 runs at 1080p on Xbox One but sticks to 30fps, which ruffled a few feathers among gamers when it was confirmed. But Wendl says it's all part of the "balancing act", telling us that the game's weather system was the main culprit.
"Honestly a lot of it was the open world, but also the dynamic night and day lifecycle. Along with rain. Rain is a very heavy effect, with particles and drops and reflective surfaces and things like that. It's a very expensive environment to render, and you combine that with an open world and dynamic time of day, and Playground felt like, and we agreed, in order to get the level of visual fidelity with those features they would go to 30. And we agreed for that game in particular, because it's more of an open world and not such a serious simulation racer, they could afford to give up our framerate a little bit to get that over the top visual spectacle."
So what of the state of the racing genre then? Is it in need of a shakeup, or is it a case of just waiting for some fresh meat on the new consoles?
"I don't believe there's anything drying up," Wendl tells us. "I think racing is bigger and better than ever. I think the response to Forza 5 has been great, the response to Driveclub will be great, and when a new Gran Turismo ships on the next gen as well I'm sure that will be great and people will love it.
"I think the situation with Need for Speed is just that it's a development challenge. They went through some turmoil with different developers and they had some turnover, and hitting an annual cadence is a hard thing to do. We've been doing it for the last four years now and it's not easy so it doesn't take much to go wrong to miss that window.
"So for them to stand back and say 'you know what, we're actually going to hurt our franchise if we try to ship something this holiday, lets regroup, let's try to figure out the right thing to do'... I'd be very surprised if they don't come out swinging next holiday with a great product as well. I haven't seen any indication that that space is waning or that customers aren't very passionate about it. In fact, there are better efforts being put into it. and I know we haven't seen the last of Need for Speed."
But until then we have Horizon 2, Driveclub, The Crew and Project Cars to look forward to. Don't call it a comeback.
- The devil's in the details for Driveclub
from Techradar - All the latest technology news http://ift.tt/1rUlIo0
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