14 DAY TRIAL // The development team at Playground Games working on Forza Horizon 2 might not yet be ready to show the racing game in action, but the company says that it has big plans to increase the atmosphere of the title by using light in new and innovative ways.
Ralph Fulton, the creative director linked to the project, tells IGN that polygon counts and texture resolutions are concepts that are associated with the older Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.
Next-gen devices, including the Xbox One from Microsoft, allow developers to focus on good use of light, which can create both beautiful and immersive locations.
The developer explains, “It’s about light and how it plays on every surface in the world. How it reacts to them. How it scatters from them. It’s about the way sunlight glints on the bodywork of a car. It’s about the way the entire world reflects back at you from the surface of a puddle in a cobbled street.”
Playground Games does not want to design perfect cars or environments and the studio will try to capture the small details that can create a feeling of reality, like scratches on various areas of the vehicles and the rust on some metal surfaces.
Ben Penrose, the game director working on Forza Horizon 2, adds, “Light is a really big deal for us for this game, and the reference points we’ve chosen for this game are famous for their quality of light. So on this game we didn’t want to leave anything to chance. We didn’t want to give you an impression of what the places are like that we visited and have tried to reproduce.”
The developer says that his team is aiming to create a physically accurate model of the atmosphere of Earth for the video game.
Forza Horizon 2 is a new racing experience that will use the core concepts of the series but will deliver a more arcade-focused experience, with an open world concept and a celebratory feeling.
The developers at Playground Games are aiming to simulate a series of roads and cities in Southern Europe, on the Mediterranean coast of France and in northern Italy.
The company has promised that a full gameplay reveal for the title will be offered during the coming E3 2014.
Forza Horizon 2 will be launched only on the Xbox One at some point in the fourth quarter of this year.