STACK #168 Oct 2018

GAMES FEATURE

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Driving It Home

Alright? Forza Horizon 4 is taking us to beautiful, historic Britain – the home of developer Playground Games.We had a bit of a chinwag with art director Ben Penrose about introducing seasons to the game, as well as the beautiful Senna – the bees’ knees of McLaren’s car catalogue.

Story Time Ben

“On my walk to work, there is this big tree that used to overhang the road. When you’re making a game that’s seasonally- based, it’s amazing how you start to study things on a level that you never had before – especially when it’s your own backyard. I’d find myself picking bits off trees and hedges on my way to work, and I’d just dump them on the art guys’ desks. Later on, one of the guys on the team, towards the end of the project, he comes over to me with this plastic bag with essentially brown liquid in the bottom – it was a collection of all the ‘references’ I’d left on his desk. He said to me ‘I think we need to get rid of this – we’re culturing tropical diseases.”

P layground Games have been working at introducing a season-based system in a Horizon game for a while, and Forza Horizon 4 has finally given them the chance. You’ll be able to drive through Summer, Autumn, Winter, and Spring in-game, with each season lasting a week (make sure you pack your brollies). You’ll have to ‘earn’ the seasons first, though. “When you play the game, you will experience an introduction, and you play through each season, giving you a nice taste of what to expect,” art director Ben Penrose tells us at an event in Sydney. “There are showcases within that early game experience as well. You start in Summer, and play

you’ll see some fallen leaves in Autumn, but in Winter the lake will freeze over for you to drive on, and in Summer your tires will heat up faster. Having four seasons in the game put a lot of stress on the asset team. Essentially, four seasons means you have the same assets with four different skins. Surely this would throw a spanner in the works as far as disc space is concerned? “It all comes down to making it achievable for the team,” Penrose explains. “A lot of that was within the tooling that we used back in the studio, that we give to our artists and our designers so they can implement the kind of work they need to. A lot of it is to do with the tech that generally allows for faster

Horizon 4 ’s cover cars is none other than the proper gorgeous new McLaren Senna. Lovely geezer Penrose tells us McLaren were very forthcoming, and gave the asset capture team as much time and access as they needed to do the car justice in-game. “I’m pretty sure there are a ton of videos floating around the internet of us actually strapping microphones to every part of the car imaginable – every part we could access. One of the members of our team even had the terrible job of actually having to get into the car itself. It was a really great partnership with McLaren – they’re actually quite physically close to us. I mean, everywhere in Britain is quite close to us…We got an unprecedented level of access.”

through a bunch of events, and then you’ll eventually qualify for Autumn, Winter, and Spring. Hopefully that gives everyone a really good introduction to what each of the seasons is going to bring in terms of varied experiences and that kind of stuff.” In Forza Horizon 4 ,

function, but it’s definitely true to say, from an art perspective, that

It was a really great partnership with McLaren

we were creating things four times. Essentially, we created the world four different times. It was a huge amount of work; we had a much bigger art team on this game than we’ve ever had before, and that was all because it was such a massive undertaking.” Finally, as you

seasons change everything, and that’s not only limited to how the game looks. Sure,

are probably well aware of by now, one of Forza

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OCTOBER 2018

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