The Xbox Live friend list has evolved over time, starting as a pretty barebones affair on the original Xbox, and eventually becoming the standard to which its competitors are compared. With the impending release of the Xbox One, Microsoft is making some changes seemingly inspired by social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.
In the video above, Larry Hryb takes us through some of the new features. Users will be able to follow other users without necessarily being friends, so Internet celebrities and content creators can more easily reach fans. In place of the old list that showed only a snapshot of current activity, there is now a feed, which updates in real time, showing not only what followees are doing, but when they started doing it. Neat.
Turn 10 Studio’s creative director Dan Greenawalt will talk about the brutal, complicated maths that underlie Forza’s handling model for days, if that’s what it takes to prove the necessity of next-generation hardware for making Forza Motorsport 5 work. “The things we’re doing in physics now are simply impossible on last-generation hardware,” he says. “The amount of power to do the calculations we’re doing was just not available, and we didn’t have the knowhow as an industry to do some of the things we’re now doing.”
Greenawalt offers an example: “We did good suspension in Forza 4, but there was more to be done. We’re adding open-wheel [cars] in Forza 5, like the 1976 Ferrari and McLaren from the movie Rush, so we wanted to reinvestigate what it takes to do a race suspension model, and that benefits all our cars. Now we have more accurate movement as we’re doing a reverse-kinematic model. Basically we’ve measured all movement – the length of the swingarm, the length of the A-arm – we have all that modelled.”
“Tyres,” Greenawalt says, with a full stop. Forza 4 simulated tyre flex using variables ported directly into the game from Pirelli’s own test data, but Greenawalt wanted more.
“I was asking Pirelli, ‘These tyre curves you have, this data… how are you isolating camber from wear from pressure and so on?’” he says. “Pirelli’s take was, ‘We don’t and [you can’t]’. So we found a new partner for Forza 5: Calspan. Calspan is not a name that anybody knows, unless you’re an engineer. The testing that Pirelli was doing on their tyres is called Calspan testing; that’s what all the tyre manufacturers use. [Calspan’s] take was different to Pirelli. It said, ‘We’ll need palettes of tyres,’ so we bought palettes of tyres and sent them to Calspan and [it] did two weeks of testing – morning, noon and night – isolating these variables. We now know things about Pirelli tyres that Pirelli doesn’t know about Pirelli tyres. We know things about Toyo and Yokohama that are going to help write the textbooks in two or three years.”
Greenawalt only mentions Forza’s most conspicuous competitor when he doesn’t mention it – Gran Turismo 6 uses Yokohama tyres and physics powered by a current-generation processor.
“I don’t know about their physics engine,” he says. “But this is a new physics model that wouldn’t have been possible in the last generation, and not just on Xbox 360. We just didn’t have the power to run all of these isolated variables. We made changes to the aerodynamics, we made changes to the mass block – there are a lot of changes that came in – but it’s the tyres where we’re not just on the cutting edge of racing simulation, we’re on the cutting edge of tyre science.”
But for all the millions invested in handling models and tyre flex, it’s not maths that separates Microsoft’s Gran Turismo from Sony’s Gran Turismo; it’s the push to change, to let players play their way and to exploit new ideas as much as new technology. Polyphony Digital’s Gamescom panel showcased a game of escalating complexity worn as a badge of honour, while Turn 10’s Forza 5 demonstration was about explaining a game that’s playable by anyone, any way.
The massive multidiscipline Forza 4 career has been replaced with 42 90-minute mini-careers, each built around a specific class. The Sport Compact category opens up into a series of campaigns – Modern Hot Hatch, Early Sport Compact, Modern Sport Compact – and lets players take them on in any order, as long as they have the car for it.
You’ll start in a mid-range sports car rather than a Ford Focus, but you can step up or down the classes at will so long as you have the cash for it. Every car is fully articulated and those million-polygon models can be explored in firstperson with an intro from Top Gear’s presenters, detailing the differences between an STi and a GTi or framing it in the history of motorsport, movies or automotive design.
“No matter where you go in the game, you get money and XP and level up,” Greenawalt says. “Whether you’re a five-year-old or a 35-year-old race car mechanic, whether in splitscreen or Free Play, multiplayer, singleplayer… we value everyone’s time equally. I don’t ever want to try to fit someone into a cookie-cutter mould, to say, ‘Oh, you’re not into simulation – get out of here’. I believe that’s poor design. Are there arcade games and sim games? No, there are just poor designers. I believe a good designer can come in and we can have excellent physics and we can have that depth, but if you don’t get it, don’t even worry about it.”
But what about being on the cutting edge of physics? What about a once-impossible degree of variable handling? What about writing the textbook on tyres? What does it mean for the player in a racing game made unique by the chance to play how you like?
“It means a car comes to life,” Greenawalt says. “It’s just more alive. And that’s what Forza is about. We want to bring physics that a race car driver can appreciate and put it in the hands of a five-year-old.”
The post Turn 10 on why Forza Motorsport 5′s physics are ‘impossible on last-generation hardware’ appeared first on Edge Online.
When we consider the advancement of games and the maturation of their storytelling, we always assume that more tech, more tools and more space will be what lets us refine the experience into something more mature, complex and sophisticated. Something more affecting.
Whether or not the videogame is a good medium in which to tell stories is one of the discipline’s most common debates. There seems to be some acknowledgment that play can create feelings, and that those feelings can be meaningful. We see that games can provide scores of fans with the opportunity to enter fantastical worlds and meet new characters.
Meanwhile, it’s generally agreed that as a basic principle this needs to happen through game design, and not in conflict with or at the expense of game design. Not all games need stories, and trying to imitate the conventions of cinema or pushing the abstract values of ‘realism’ or ‘immersion’ hasn’t borne fruit.
Still, while the particulars continue to make excellent fodder for fan debate and developer forum discussions, let’s agree that games can be a good medium for telling some kinds of stories. And that under some circumstances, they can tell those stories in ways other media can’t, by letting players inhabit events, control worlds or even touch elements from some peculiar distance mediated by a designer.
Recently, though, we’ve seen some games that have things to teach us about how games can tell stories, while still using the familiar language of game design. And contrary to some widely held ideas, these games achieved their impact, their sense of maturity and grace, through restraint and constraint. In other words, maybe games benefit most from taking things out, rather than piling more things in.
The Fullbright Company’s Gone Home is a lovely example of what can be achieved by reduction within constraint, rather than the conventional ideal of bigger-better-more. A small team, comprised mainly of 2K Marin veterans with experience in environmental design, gave itself an interesting task: to find out what happens when you don’t have the resources, the combat, the triple-A values.
The result is an eloquent, spare story about teenage love in a complicated time, told simply through player exploration. On one hand, the four-person development team didn’t have the scope or budget to render realistic faces with extensive dialogue and extensive game system. On the other, the constraints – partly necessary, partly intentional – let them focus on innovating with minimal resources. The delicate human story at the game’s core was able to come to the fore because of the things they didn’t add.
A reductive approach to design seems to lead to better storytelling. Many of the games with a place in the canon of videogames’ most affecting experiences focus on a simple system, or a single mechanic: consider Portal, whose witty humour and character was delicately whittled out of a puzzle-solving game.
Ico and Shadow Of The Colossus are both beloved for having illuminated touching fantasy and provoked thought by not fully explicating their universes, and by keeping the player focused on a single task or ruleset. The less stimulation and information you provide to the player up front, the more opportunity you have to surprise them and subvert their expectations.
Papers, Please is a recent game that is alternately funny, political, thought-provoking and chilling – rooted in a concept that sounds so mundane you might assume it’s boring. Yet through the simple concept of processing documents at border control, the game creates one of the most nuanced and complex narrative experiences I’ve played this year.
In Papers, Please the player experiences an incredible range of emotion and decision-making opportunities, because the systems are elaborate while the narrative is restrained. One might presume that a game about immigration policy would benefit from details about the world in which it’s set, extensive context or pathos-heavy character stories, or explicit real-world references, but the reverse is actually true.
Because the game’s engaging element involves making quick mechanical (and ethical) decisions with minimal information, the fact that so many elements go unexplained makes the experience stronger.
Many game designers know well that constraints make for more creative games – groups of designers doing one-button game design challenges a few years ago came out prepared to better understand the touchscreen age that followed, and weekend game jams often spawn incredible ideas from the combination of a single concept and limited time.
Perhaps, as a general approach, restraint and reduction better serve storytelling in games as well. It’s certainly something to consider as the next generation of hardware promises more lifelike facial animations, real-world actors and more emphasis on the ever-nebulous concept of ‘immersion’. Rather than think about what else we can pour into a game, let’s think about how we might enhance the experience by taking things out.
The post When it comes to storytelling and getting emotional responses from games, sometimes less is more appeared first on Edge Online.