One of the showpieces of the Microsoft booth at E3 was Forza Motorsport 5, as it garnered long lines and a good deal of emphasis from the MS staff on hand. The funny thing about racing games, though, is that they usually always look good. They're a flashy way of getting people excited about new graphical engines or, in this case, new hardware altogether. Even though it clearly takes painstaking work to make the cars and tracks look good, it always seems like cars are an “easy” target for eye-popping detail. To be sure, the cars and tracks (for the most part) looked great, from what I played.

But how did Forza 5 handle? It felt like an incredibly smooth, framerate-locked version of the game we've played in previous years. This is mostly a good thing. All of the assists from previous versions are there if you want them, and the driving line in Forza continues to be a helpful influence with its color-coded indications of speed and turning. The McLaren P1 that I used had a great sense of speed when I got a straight shot, and the turning still required the appropriate amount of gas-feathering and braking in order to manage the sheer power of the ride.

The cockpit view, which was emphasized by the devs, had a real striking look and feel, as there was great detail in many aspects of the experience. Sun beams and lens flare were used to really hammer home the feeling of being inside the car, and the devs enjoyed pointing out the reflections of the driver's gloves on the windshield. The audio design, even in the zoo of E3, sounded great inside the car, with the appropriate muffled sounds of the engine and creasing leather of the driver's outfit. All of this helped make the experience feel like a meaningful evolution of the franchise.

One of the cooler tricks of the new Xbox One controllers is the inclusion of impulse triggers, and Forza 5 had these working very well. I could feel individual triggers kick and pulse when the braking system was activated or when the tires would buck or scrape off of the ground. A racing game seems perfectly suited for this kind of feature, and the people at Turn 10 Studios seem to have nailed how it should feel.
 

Even though I kind of sloughed off the visual talk earlier, it is still important to emphasize that Forza 5 is a very, very sharp-looking game. The cars looked absolutely amazing, with crazy detail in the cockpit and outside of the car. The reflections and paint texturing along all contours of the car are remarkable, and each vehicle had a great sense of weight as well. I thought the European track setting on display looked pretty, but none of it really surpassed the detail on the cars. The buildings and architecture were the standouts, with foliage and crowds looking more like what you'd expect to see in a racing game. I can't say enough about the smoothness of the framerate, though, as that's pretty much where a racing game lives or dies.

The “Drivatar” buzz word being thrown around by Dan Greenawalt and the MS folks is certainly a cool concept, but I didn't really get to see anything in that area of the game. The goal is to populate your single-player games with lifelike representations of your friends so that other racers drive believably and employ unique strategies for passing and such. In principle, this sounds like it could be an awesome innovation for the game. But until we know how much horsepower and thought is really being put into this feature, it's hard to qualify what any of the claims actually mean.
 

The developers also seemed to be emphasizing the Top Gear partnership quite heavily as well. They claimed that all three hosts had a much bigger presence in this game and that the partnership would bring more coherence and structure to the overall experience. With how wildly popular the show is, it would be cool if they actually did something meaningful with this license.

Final Thoughts

It'll be interesting to see if there are any more surprises in terms of Forza 5's multiplayer, as the devs were being tight-lipped about anything in that area of the game. You can probably imagine some pretty cool stuff being integrated with the Kinect, Twitch TV and cloud computing, but until they say more, we'll have to wait and see. From what I've seen of Forza 5, it looks to be a totally rock-solid racing experience for Microsoft to champion at the Xbox One's launch.