XBOX
Developer/publisher Xbox Game Studios (Turn10 Studios) Format PC, Xbox Series Release October 10
With the Horizon series putting a more approachable, welcoming face on the sim racer, Gran Turismo 7 becoming a wonderfully earnest and idiosyncratic celebration of car culture, and the likes of iRacing and Project CARS burrowing deeper into their hardcore niche, where does that leave Forza Motorsport? This is a series that has effectively been usurped by its brighter, brasher offshoot – in the six years since FM7, we’ve seen two very different Horizons, after all. The answer lies in doubling down on everything it has always done well: this is effectively the videogame equivalent of a V8 engine and diamond piston set, with advances in machine learning powering the new dawn of an 18-year-old racing series.
”We’ve taken machine learning and applied it to build time and not run time or load time,” Forza general manager Dan Greenawalt tells us. “So not while it’s running or loading – actually, we’re able to do it before the game launches.” And what does that mean in practice? “Instead of having machine learning power the moment-to-moment decisions of the Drivatar, we’re having it train the Drivatar to control the car, and then we’re using an optimiser to make the lines that Drivatar follows.”
What that has allowed Turn 10 to do, he continues, is to “train massive amounts of data so that we can take every car, with every upgrade and all the tuning options through the wet, through the dry, and train that controller so that the AI can make the car do every
