Forza 5 developers fail to use player data meaningfully, fail next-gen
In Forza 5 you can win an achievement: 10 people used a design that you created.
That means that some custom car you made, people saw it, liked it, and used your design. You’ve got fans, as it were. This provides incentive to you as an artist.
You wonder: what car did I make that people liked so much? Was it that white Celica with the perfect red half-stripe? Or was it that ridiculous ‘rebel’ Scirocco?
The game doesn’t tell you.
You won an achievement saying that 10 people liked your car. Only the game won’t tell you what car it is.
It knows what car it is, because you got the achievement: it had to track that 10 people liked and used your design. Yet it fails to tell you which of your hundreds of cars it was.
The game doesn’t really care, and the developers don’t really care because they don’t get the big picture. Turn 10, the makers of Forza 5, are still making demos. The game is a series of flashpoints, with no persistence of meaningful data, so that the user can develop their own narrative.
Another example of Forza 5’s failure to use or keep meaningful data and thus contribute to meaningful, un-imposed and un-predicted gameplay (player narrative):
In Forza 5, any time you race a lap by yourself, your lap time is not saved in any meaningful way. It is saved to a roster of other players, and these number in the thousands. To search, you step through tens and then hundreds of names trying to pinpoint comparative data. The display is slow. If you drove a 74 Toyota on a lap and got a certain time, and you wanted to see how your 72 Mazda did on that same lap, you better hope their lap times are within seconds, or you’re stepping through data that is slower and more dense than microfiche.
Player narrative: take 3 cars from the 70’s out on the same track at the same time of day with the same tires and see how they perform. Compare each of the three laps, and save a replay of each.
Forza 5: get a pen and paper and write down your own lap times. This is 1985. We don’t handle data in a meaningful way and we certainly don’t care about lap times. This is not a… driving or racing… simulation. People who drive cars do not care about lap times. If there’s one thing that people who drive cars do not care about, it’s lap times. Especially not in racing.
The only way your lap time is presented to you in Forza 5 is as a comparison to another player. And if you play rivals, the player that beat you is always up there, no other choice. You can’t reset it. You go to the lap and again and again, you see the same player.
You never go to laps clean, with Forza. You never go thinking, “I’ll save a replay of my ghost in the Mazda and then compare it in the Toyota. Then I’ll save the ghost of the Toyota and compare that to a Chevy. Then I’ll save those three, and bring out the Ford. I’ll have a ghost of each best lap time, they’ll be saved in my data for each track, and whenever I go to that track I’ll know that my last 10 best lap times will be posted and saved. Like if I had a personal coach at the track, keeping track of all my lap times. Something we could have computers do.
Only Turn 10 refuses to implement anything like this, as if this data doesn’t matter to the gaming experience. That kind of failure is what makes this game end up being a string of demos. Because most of the player’s data does not exist in any usable form, the player has entered a chain of mini-games that are not tied to the one piece of data that all racing and all judgement of cars is tied to: lap times. If a “next-gen” game can’t even be bothered to save the players’ lap times? It’s not only NOT next-gen, but it fails the last generation and the one before it.
This reticence to handle data is typical in these times, where everything is cloud, cloud, and developers would rather tie data down than allow it to breathe, because they’re afraid of cloud interactions and the like. But every xbox one has a hard drive, and player’s data could be stored locally.
The further illustration of Turn 10’s poor decisions to lock data to the cloud (and thereby severely restrict which data is used, and how) is to see how they handle replays. You can only save 10 replays. 10. Replays are not saved as image data, so they’re very small. We could save hundreds of replays on last gen games, indeed even in the ps2 era. But Turn 10 only allows 10. No explanation. It’s your money, but it’s our code and you only get 10. But the real reason is just as cynical: they want to force players to use the “xbox record that” feature of the Kinect. Which takes WAY more data. But who cares. They deemed it cooler, and that’s that.
Turn 10 is a perfect example of a developer who has completely lost sight of what a game is. They have become these pandering wimps with their rumps stuck up in the air to take it one more time: we’ll do all the 1080p 60fps you want, also orange peel but gaming, No. We’re not doing that. We’re here to be a poster boy for Microsoft, a company which is failing.
Next-gen is not about the sun being in exactly the same spot at exactly the same time every time I around the track at that corner. Suns move. Weather happens. Turn 10 fails.
Next-gen is not about watching a replay show the exact same camera angle every single time. Yet Forza 5 does this, just like Forza 4 did in the last generation. Are these games not art? Do we not give a fuck about art, here? Who the hell wants to see your stupid camera angle the same, every effing time? What is wrong with you people? There is something wrong with you. The thing that is wrong with you is that you are morons.
Sorry, I started talking directly to Turn 10.
Dan, got a question. Two questions. Like racing, right? You watch racing, right? So fix your fucking replays you goddamn moron. Other question. When I go to the track I always arrive at the same time, right? Exactly the same time. I know, because the sun is always in the same spot and time never moves. Never. Nothing ever changes. That’s real, right Dan? Like all the times you’ve driven your car. It’s always been day. It’s never been night. And there’s never been any rain. That’s realistic. That’s why you made your piece-of-shit game not have any time or weather, right? Because that’s next-gen.
Look. Here is how you play a racing/driving simulator. You go out to a certain track at a certain time of day and you take some cars. You choose the time of day, just like in real life. Sometimes it’s raining, that’s okay. Rain is atmospheric, poetic. (I’m not talking about your game, Dan). You do some laps in your first car, and you save the best time, just like you would write it down if you were there. Only the computer does this for you. Like in 1985. Then you take the 2nd car. The sun is proceeding in the sky, the rain let up, and it’s afternoon now. Save your best lap, take a 3rd car. The sun is setting. You’re racing the ghost of your 1st car and wondering how you in that first car are beating yourself in this third car, which is higher performance. Or maybe it’s just that you’re noticing how beautiful the setting sun looks.
The next day you come back to the track and your lap times are all there, and you decide: I wonder what would happen if I drove all these cars with better tires. Or I brought an old crappy car but fixed it up, could it keep up with these? etc.
And how did we pull that off? Persistence of data. Remember when the player makes meaningful data and store it in a meaningful way. Give the player the ability to control their own data and player narrative can emerge. Turn 10 is not some studio capable of developing narrative. Nor should games like this try. Games like this should allow narrative to emerge by storing and quantifying data in such a way that the player can draw a story from the data.
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