In a wide-ranging interview with IGN, members of the Turn 10 development team have been talking all-things Forza Motorsport ahead of its big launch in early October. While lots has been said already about the team dropping a number from this year's iteration of the long-running franchise, they want to reassure fans that this is a proper Forza title through-and-through - and that it contains plenty of content on day one.
Here's what Turn 10's Dan Greenawalt had to say about turning Forza Motorsport into a "platform for the future":
"Our approach right now is not to make a games-as-a-service [...] This is a massive game, and it’s launching for a $70 price, and there is a premium add-on. This is a massive AAA launch, so it’s not actually becoming a, ‘Hey, launch small and build over time.’ It’s not a service game. This is a AAA game.
The thing is it’s being supported with a backend that is more connected than ever, and gamers are more connected now. So we’re able to basically do both. We can have a massive AAA launch, and then we can build a platform over time."
That platform building will include lots of post-launch content, including tracks, cars, events and more. We already know that Nürburgring Nordschleife is coming in early 2024, and in this interview, the team commits to another post-release track update even earlier than that.
"In November, with our first big update, Yas Marina is going to be coming into the game [...] It’s going to come in just as Chris described. Free, and it’s going to come into career seamlessly; if you started playing the day after it came in, you’d never even know it was never there."
As Greenawalt says there, Turn 10 is looking to better integrate things like tracks and cars this time around by involving them in the game's career mode after launch. That probably goes some way to explaining why this Forza title will have an always-online campaign mode.
We'd have preferred the team to find some sort of offline solution, and maybe they will sometime after launch, but if Turn 10 can deliver huge updates like these on a regular basis, that'll certainly go a long way towards creating an impressive, evolving Forza Motorsport title.