Eurogamer: Gran Turismo has weather effects and night racing. Why doesn't Forza 4? Have you explored the possibility?
Dan Greenawalt: Every version we explore night and weather. We whittle down thousands of ideas, and we have these autonomous teams. We hire specialists. We build the game like an onion. At its core is a drop-dead amazing simulation engine. But we always assume we're wrong, and then find the best way to make it better. It's that commitment that makes me confident we have the strongest simulation, because we build partnerships other companies just can't, and we have a commitment to getting it right at our core.
We then build assists and fun gameplay and things on top of it without ever sacrificing that. Well, part of that is a solid 60 frames per second. And I mean solid. When you start doing multiple projected shadows off of the front of the car... we have 16 players, so 16 cars times two, so 32 projected shadows. That is a very graphically intense thing.
Now, that's totally possible on the Xbox 360, but it means the specialists we have in graphics would need to work on that problem, and it would be a hard problem. The hard problem we chose to take on with our graphics this version was Image Based Lighting, and working with Hollywood. Every version, we look at this long list of features we would do, and they are divided into these different autonomous groups that have the specialists that could actually do it. We just can't take a network developer and say, hey, why don't you do a new particle system. It's not that they're smart guys, but we hired them because they are so good at delivering network code.
Graphically, doing huge particle effects, we would have to have that group that was developing IBL, and that took a long time for us to get it right. We had to implement a whole new way of thinking through the partnership with Hollywood. We'd have to have them working on that from the ground up. So that's the type of thing where we could do it. We could do it on this hardware. But it didn't prioritise higher than IBL, because the IBL and the way the game looks now is stunning, and it's universal. It helps everybody, no matter what type of player you are, having a beautiful looking game that runs at 60 frames per second is awesome.
The things I've read on forums, people saying, well, I wish they didn't do this feature - first, that shows a lack of respect for the people who are going to love that feature, which is fine. I don't expect gamers to respect people the way I do. But, the assumption in that statement is, we have 350 people, why don't you just move them all on to this other thing I want?
It's like, I can't move artists onto it. That's not going to help. I can't move networking devs. I can't move my physics developers. I can't move my AI developers. To hire the best in the industry takes years. Years. To hire the type of guys we get, you have to take people from Hollywood and other game companies. It's the only way you get senior talent. So you can't just decide, we want to do more, let's just staff up.