As a general rule, I don’t play racing sims. The learning curve is usually a little too steep for me to become adjusted to driving a realistically recreated, high-performance automobile using a tiny analog stick and buttons to replace a wheel and pedals. What usually winds up happening is a painful struggle to make it around the track in a good position, only to lose my lead to a stupid mistake and I give up
I thought I was fairly ill-suited to attend a meeting with Microsoft on the subject of Forza Motorsport 3 as a result of this. Nevertheless, they managed to surprise me with a beautiful game containing features that could help take some of the frustration out of the genre.
Cars in Forza Motorsport 3 look fantastic, as you would expect. What pleasantly surprised me was the look of the menu system. Taking cues from magazine layout, the menus look clean and crisp with a very minimalist approach that allows you to focus on the beauty of the vehicle you’re about to drive without a lot of noise and clutter.
Turn 10 Studios is packing a ton of content into this release. There will be roughly 400 cars from fifty manufacturers and a hundred tracks for you to race them on. All of the cars will have a damage model and any car that could physically be rolled over in reality will be able to do that in the game.
The things that make me really interested to give Forza 3 a spin are some gameplay changes shown in the meeting. The goal of the designers was to make a racing simulation that would appeal to people of all ages and experience levels. AI racers make more natural mistakes when driving. If you can get right up behind them, for example, there’s a greater chance that they’ll misjudge a turn due to your intimidation of them. These errors are more frequent in lower difficulty settings.
The really interesting feature I was shown is the ability to rewind play at any time you wish. By pressing the “back” button on the controller, you are pulled five seconds back in time and you can perform this as many times as you like to correct an error or just to have an opportunity to do something a little differently than you did the first time. This takes some of the pressure off of less skilled players while remaining completely optional for the hardcore racing fans.
I’m impressed with what I saw. Some players who take their racing games extremely seriously may be put off by the changes. I really liked them and they seemed inobtrusive enough that it should expand the audience of people who enjoy racing games without really alienating anyone. I can’t say for certain whether or not I’m pushed over the edge into buying a more serious racing title when it releases this October, although these details are a step closer to that happening.
