14 DAY TRIAL // One of the leading developers working on the upcoming Forza Motorsport 4 at developer Turn 10 has revealed that he has drawn inspiration for the racing game from a series of very unlikely sources.
Dan Greenawalt, who is the creative director working on Forza Motorsport 4, has told GodIsAGeek that, “I tend to look at the other franchises that are not thinking about themselves as a competitive war in the marketplace —they think about a longer vision and the experience they want to provide to people.”
He added, “So, we take inspiration from Pokémon for our levelling systems and addictive layer rewards and variable schedule for rewards to get people addicted. World of Warcraft for our Auction House. Storefronts was from Yahoo Stores.”
Leveling systems have long been a part of the video games, especially on the multiplayer side, so it's not clear why the Turn 10 designer needed to go back all the way to Pokemon in order to see their addictive qualities.
The developer has also revealed that he and his colleagues also play all the rival racing game franchises, which presumably means mainly Gran Turismo from Polyphony Digital and Sony and Need for Speed from Electronic Arts, but that he takes no cues from them.
Instead the team at Turn 10 is more interested in seeing how it can go further than its rivals when it comes to the limits of the racing game genre.
He described the development studio he is working for as a “nexus” where car culture mixes with gamer culture, allowing the games to be close to real life racing while also incorporating pure video game mechanics.
Forza Motorsport 4 is set to be launched exclusively on the Xbox 360 home console from Microsoft and will offer support for the Kinect motion tracking system, which will be used for head tracking and to allow player to move around a virtual car showroom.