Chris Esaki was just on Forza Monthly:
- Started production last year as FM7 support was winding down
- Team is doubling down on Motorsport. Logo showing “Motorsport” in as big of a font as “Forza” is a reflection of that (compared to recent FM titles which only had Forza in big).
- Talked a lot about going back to FM roots
- He sees this new FM as a love letter to long time fans as well as a welcoming platform for a new generation of Motorsport fans
- Most diverse development team, bringing loads of new concepts and ideas
- Continued focus on accessibility
- Briefly touched on the stuff they had mentioned last year, that they’re revamping what they call the Forza fundamentals like AI, physics, race regulations, etc...
- The livery we see in the trailer is a teaser of how we can expect our in-game team to show up on and out of the track (I think that’s probably around the fact that all cars in the Laguna Seca section have the same placement for numbers for example)
- Ray-tracing highlighted modelling issues which made them rethink how they’re building/improving content (hopefully that means the few outstanding modelling errors get fixed in the process...)
- Confirmed they have used laser scanning and photogrammetry to reach the level of details we saw in the quick Laguna Seca glimpse. He said that’s what to expect for the next generation tracks (not inspiring confidence in retaining the full FM7 track list... :/)
- Mentioned that the tools they‘ve built make content creation much faster (didn’t give specifics) and also allows the team to react much faster to community feedback without necessarily needing to wait for a content update (gives example of track limits or penalty systems being too lenient or too harsh).
- More to share “soon”