Forza Motorsport (video game)

''Forza'' ( , ; Italian for "force" and "strength") is a racing video game series for Xbox consoles and Microsoft Windows published by Xbox Game Studios. The franchise has sold 16 million copies as of December 2016 and has garnered critical acclaim.

The franchise is primarily divided into two ongoing titles. The original ''Forza Motorsport'' series developed by American developer Turn 10 Studios focuses on primarily simulation racing around a variety of both real and fictional tracks, and seeks to emulate the performance and handling characteristics of many real-life production, modified, and racing cars. The ''Forza Horizon'' series developed by British developer Playground Games features more arcade-style racing while maintaining a toned down version of ''Motorsport''s simulation physics. ''Horizon'' revolves around a music festival called the "Horizon Festival" and features open world environments set in fictional representations of real-world areas in which players may freely roam and participate in racing events.

Apart from ''Motorsport'' and ''Horizon'', ''Forza'' has also seen two mobile and computer free-to-play spin-offs; ''Forza Street'' (2019–2022), a drag racing-style game set in Miami, and ''Forza Customs'' (2023), a tile-matching video game based on car customization. Both spin-offs were initially released as independent games before being rebranded as ''Forza'' titles.

History

Turn 10 Studios was established in 2001 by Microsoft, under its Microsoft Game Studios division, to develop a series of racing games, which later became known as ''Forza'', as the Xbox rival to '' Gran Turismo'' for PlayStation. At the time of the studio's establishment, most staff had experience in publishing games, such as ''Project Gotham Racing'' and ''Golf 4.0'', but had not been involved in game development. The first ''Forza Motorsport'' was designed to showcase the technological capabilities of Microsoft's first console, the original Xbox, including its Xbox Live online multiplayer network. From the start, Turn 10's approach to the series has been to broaden its appeal to the general audience and not limit it to racing enthusiasts, passionately highlighting car culture along the way. Also integral to the series' development is the considerable amount of research put into the race cars' handling, sometimes involving professional race teams as of Formula One and NASCAR.

Every ''Forza'' title includes an artificial neural network used by its AI racers, called Drivatars, a portmanteau of ''driver'' and ''avatar''. Drivatars were developed and designed by Microsoft Research Cambridge to learn and adapt to the player's driving. In early ''Forza'' titles, the Drivatars ran on a Bayesian neural network, which calculates possible solutions to a problem and their probabilities based on player data collected from previous races before selecting the one with the highest confidence value. Such a problem may be reaching a certain turn, at which point the appropriate angle at which to turn and the amount of pressure on the accelerator must be determined. Initially, the only way to share the learned Drivatars was to copy them onto Xbox Memory Units for use by other Xbox consoles. Since ''Forza Motorsport 5'', the Drivatars have used a reinforcement learning paradigm, and have recorded racing data of all players connected to the cloud as part of the Xbox Network. In this paradigm, the Drivatars track the player's car position and speed and the consistency of the behavior and guess their turn angle and speed for a given segment, enabling the Drivatars to infer solutions for courses the player had not yet raced on and input for cars the player had not yet raced with. The data is then uploaded to the cloud to update the Drivatar behavior, and the new Drivatars are then downloaded to other Xbox consoles. Each upload is timestamped, and older uploads are treated with less confidence. There have been concerns that players could abuse the system to rubber-band the Drivatars' AI back to them, but Turn 10 has stated that the only thing that is rubber-banded are their cars, whose performance is slightly modified based on how far they are ahead of or behind the player. Turn 10 inserted a layer of control between player and AI inputs that allows for the developers to modify Drivatar behavior so as to prevent unexpected results.

Initially, Turn 10 designed models for cars and tracks using commercial off-the-shelf software such as 3D Studio Max. Today, it develops and uses a proprietary 3D modelling software called Fuel that allows multiple artists to work on the same model simultaneously, primarily those for cars and racing tracks. Due to increasing complexity of video games, it took six months for four people to design a single car model for Xbox One versions of ''Forza'', so Turn 10 came to rely on car manufacturers to share CAD files, scan real-life cars, or send out a photographer to take hundreds or thousands of photographs of newly launched cars.

Playground Games was co-founded in 2009 in Leamington Spa, England, by Gavin Raeburn, Trevor Williams, and Ralph Fulton, all former employees of Codemasters. Raeburn was known for his role in developing critical hits such as the ''Dirt'' and ''TOCA'' series, but he became inspired by the open world environment of ''Test Drive Unlimited'', and so left Codemasters feeling that it lacked the resources to fulfill his ambitions. Other members of Playground have included former employees of Bizarre Creations, Black Rock Studio, and Sony Liverpool—all racing game companies of the United Kingdom. At the same time, Turn 10 Studios began seeking out businsesses in hopes of finding one willing to expand and branch out its franchise. At E3 2010, he and Williams offered Turn 10 a concept of an open-world ''Forza Motorsport'' in exchange for resources, to which Turn 10 agreed. Playground then developed what was to become ''Forza Horizon'', collaborating with and closely backed by Turn 10. Playground Games had had a strong relationship as a third-party developer with Microsoft Studios, but it was only in a June 10 conference at E3 2018 that the company announced its acquisition by Microsoft.

Until 2019, each installment of the franchise series had alternated on a biennial basis; the ''Motorsport'' entries were released in odd-numbered years, while the ''Horizon'' entries were released in even-numbered years. This pattern was altered due to the absence of a new ''Motorsport'' game in 2019. In 2025, ''Forza Horizon 5'' was announced and slated for release on Sony's PlayStation 5 console in Q1/Q2 2025 as part of Microsoft Gaming's ongoing plans to distribute their first-party library on multiple platforms, marking the first time the franchise has shipped on a non-Xbox console.

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