‘I’m more disappointed in myself that I’ve elicited this reaction in people’
Dale dug Forza 5, but the Xbox One launch title has been met with the most varied reviews in franchise history. However, creative director Dan Greenawalt, in an interview with Eurogamer, said he is “not really driven by Metascore.” Rather, he cites concern over negative player perception of how the game handles things like microtransactions. Its economy has already come under scrutiny and is seeing changes.
“The biggest experiment was the acceleration – but that wasn’t meant to be a paywall. The grind was not designed to be arduous, but I understand people perceiving it that way and that’s why we’re making the patch to change the grind,” Greenawalt said. “We’re changing it because that’s how people perceived it, and perception is reality.”
Responding to criticism of the track list and relative size of the game, Greenawalt noted that the fastest track rebuild took the team nine months. “It was sad when I saw people’s responses that this game seemed small to them. … I was looking at how much work it took to make the tracks we made and all the cars we made, and the level of fidelity and immersion in the cockpit view, the physics. I wasn’t looking at it relative to Forza 4, I was looking at it relative to every other racing game that’s been launched alongside a console.”
Greenawalt also explained that things like microtransactions were in-studio ideas, not a Microsoft mandate from on high and claimed the team, having been built around a two year cycle, couldn’t have used an extra 12 months development time to avoid console launch pressure. The latter seems wacky, given that they didn’t even have time to press completed discs.
Fixing Forza 5: How Turn 10 wants to win fans back [Eurogamer]
