Forza 3′s Design Triumphs
I’m really enjoying Forza Motorsport 3 (2009 – 360) for reasons that have little to do with actual driving. The game has all that you’d expect from such a major release – a huge number of cars, tracks, customisations, upgrades, competitions, multiplayer, and the rest. But to be frank I’ve seen all of that before. What I love about the game’s career mode is that it simply entices you to play on with subtle, gentle pushes forward. I hate cars and I hate driving, and for a game to have me quite so addicted is no mean feat.
Part of the appeal is the game’s hugely relaxed approach to difficulty levels. In so many games you pick a difficulty level at the start, and then maybe regret it later. Or in some games you can fiddle with the difficulty level as the game progresses, maybe with prompts if you’re dying a lot. This game is so much more relaxed than even that – if you want to play the whole thing on easy, Forza 3 simply doesn’t care. It doesn’t penalise you much (you get slightly less XP), and there’s nothing that you can’t achieve if you take the game as a wholly casual experience, and simply enjoy the scenery. As long as you play, it doesn’t care.
I just think this is the perfect way for a game to react to a player – rather than worry endlessly about difficulty curves, which must take up so much of the development time for so many games, this one simply allows you to set your own. I found that after a few races on easy, I was ready to tweak up the difficulty a tad out of interest, and found normal to be fairly easy also, and then I’ve been timing my jumps up to hard mode on races where I think my car has enough of an advantage to counteract the extra difficulty. And what this has done is have me actually discover the nuances in the gameplay for myself bit by bit. For example there’s virtually no ‘drift’ on the easy mode so with the step up I’ve had to gradually learn the ropes on that, knowing that when I have a really tough race I can step back down a level and relax for the next race as a reward.
The game is just as clever about its levelling system. As in all career modes you have a driver level, but also here your cars have a level as well. What it encourages you to do is to carefully manage your stock of cars in order to build up the perks that you get from levelling each one. And each car maxes out at level 5, at which point it makes better sense to drive a different one – it’s the perfect system for getting you to experiment with different cars with different feels and different strengths, and you then start to match them up to the races in a more strategic way. It makes me ponder my favourite RPGs – I think all would benefit from having a similar system to equipment. Have your sword and your armour max out at level 5 for the perks, and then perhaps you’d be encouraged to pick up the cloth armour, the bow and arrow or even your spellbook to find the perks in that approach.
The game also uses seasons and the passage of time to really conquer what could seem like an unwieldy sprawl of different competitions and goals. You have a world championship each season, which are the big races that you should care about, and in the time inbetween you’re invited to select between options of mini-challenges to fill the spaces in the calendar. It’s like the main quest and the side-quests. And you use the side-quests to build up your portfolio of cars, your levels, your knowledge of the tracks, and the perks that these bring, to round out the experience. It is pitch-perfect.
And finally, the game has a perfect achievement system. Usually I ignore achievements unless I want a way of setting artificial goals to enhance the experience of playing a game. Forza 3 does that by design, with achievements built into the levels and the seasons in such a balanced way that it never feels like you’re far away from getting the next one. I just know that I’m not far away from the next one, and I know exactly what I have to do to get it, and it really has kept me focussed. It makes such a difference from sets of achievements that seem to bear so little relation to what I’m doing in-game that they are irrelevant.
For all this to work, the presentations has to be top-notch. It really is here. The menu designs are heavenly, grey text on white, with a clean design as sleek as the cars that you drive. You can quickly click through a couple of pages to be onto the next race. There are shortcuts all over the place – upgrading your car can be wildly in-depth or a button press. There’s a sleek online marketplace for pics and paint jobs and the like.
I realise that I write this stuff down and it seems quite obvious – it seems like what every game should actually do. Making it look so effortless and easy takes ability. I’ve rarely seen it done so well – it’s a triumph of design.
And I haven’t actually mentioned the gameplay at all.
