Forza Motorsport promises ray traced reflections, ‘fully procedural’ clouds, and loads of other technical doodads
Forza #Forza
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Whenever there’s a new sports game, especially a new racing game, there must also be the traditional listing of the Granular Technical Advancements™. For the next game in the Forza Motorsport series (Forza Horizon’s older, more serious sibling), that moment came during Wednesday’s Xbox and Bethesda “Developer Direct” showcase, and it was a doozy.
Here’s a summary of everything promised by Forza Motorsport’s developers in the video embedded above:
There’s one more audio-related detail that I’ve set aside, because I think it deserves special recognition. The award for the most jargon in one sentence goes to:
(Here’s an explanation of convolution reverb (opens in new tab) from B&H. In short, the A/V retailer more or less says the same thing, that the idea is to “record and process the reverberant behavior unique to a real acoustic space.”)
Some of these details were covered in a blog post (opens in new tab) last year, and there’s more in a new post (opens in new tab)which calls Forza Motorsport a “generational leap in immersion.”
All these big technical claims about Forza Motorsport are of course intended to sell us on the idea that the current generation of Xboxes are majestically powerful, and that the game will fulfill an unrealized desire in us for more accurate reflections. Those ray traced reflections demonstrated near the end of the video do look pretty sweet though. Maybe I do want more accurate reflections. Maybe it’s all I’ve ever wanted. Hopefully we’ll get some PC-centric info sooner or later.
Forza Motorsport, which is just called Forza Motorsport despite being the eighth in the series, doesn’t have a concrete release date yet, but Microsoft says it’ll be out this year. On PC, it’ll be available on Game Pass and Steam.