'Forza Motorsport 5' storms onto Xbox One

"Forza 5" is smarter than you. "Forza 5" is calculating. All the time you're playing, "Forza 5" is learning about you, adapting its strategy in real time, pulling data in from almost unlimited digital resources all over the world. And for these reasons, "Forza 5" will beat you like a bad lug nut.

"This is the end of AI," said Dan Greenawalt, creative director for Turn 10 Studios. Greenawalt was referring to the defining feature of "Forza 5" -- Drivatar, a form of machine learning that records telemetry and track conditions and uses cloud computing to evolve opponent behavior in real-time. Drivatar has been around since the original "Forza," but it has been rebuilt into something that is so much more than just the mindless, preprogrammed bots of previous racing games.

Every corner, every racing line, every bit of racing behavior is sent to a cloud server somewhere and analyzed as part of a driver's profile. Race against a certain set of friends? Even if you're offline, you can race against their Drivatars, in a reasonable facsimile of how they'll behave. Have no experience in front-wheel-drive cars? Race against Drivatars that are at your exact skill set. Too good for your current artificial opponents? Ratchet up the difficulty and prepare for a real-time beat down.

"It's a learning agent," said Greenawalt. "It's not like anything you've seen in games. You see cars going three in a corner. They'll be brake-checking you. Where do they learn that? They're not programmed to."

Microsoft
Greenawalt hams it up for the crowd. What track is Turn 10 named after? He won't tell you. "It's a secret," he says.

The first time you boot up "Forza" you face a giant pool of Drivatars, namely other people's. But "Forza" won't certify your Drivatar for public usage until you pass a few key races first: a varied combination of events that differ between car layouts, weather conditions, and key tracks until it builds up a complex representation of your driving habits. Then your Drivatar floats out into the ether that is a Microsoft cloud server farm somewhere, ready to be used in a random group of single-player opponents. So even when you're not playing online against child racing wizards, you'll have a more humanracing experience. Minus the insults.

Microsoft can afford to do this because, well, they're Microsoft -- and they have notable partners that push the boundaries of simulation. Turn 10 Studios teamed up with Lucas Digital's Skywalker Sound to craft the cinematic score. They teamed up with "Top Gear" for the massive car list and event formats, paying special attention to the manufacturer rivalries that make the world of cars so interesting to inhabit. McLaren helped Turn 10 with aerodynamics data. The American Le Mans Series helped with replicating cars and racing events. When Turn 10 wanted to accurately simulate tires under load, they asked themselves: What happens to tires beyond peak? When you're drifting or understeering? What's happening at 30 degrees of slip angle? Then, they went to Pirelli.

Pirelli didn't know. So they went to Calspan.

Calspan, founded in 1943 by the Curtiss-Wright Airplane Division, does testing for aerospace and transportation research. If the Department of Defense has a physics problem with missile testing, they go to Calspan. If the Department of Transportation wants to do some crash testing, they also go to Calspan. If you need a 1,000-mph wind tunnel for no particular reason, you go to Calspan. Yet, Calspan didn't understand how tires truly performed either. So they're continuing to help "Forza" with tire testing and simulation: getting into the cutting edge of tire data -- not just for a mere video game, but for the world's benefit.

"We want to get people interested in cars, and simulation does that," said Greenawalt. "But beyond that, I'm just dorky like that. I like physics. I want to push boundaries."

We watched, and later played, a demonstration of the McLaren P1 at a windy city course through Prague -- an ideal reflection of the game's complex materials and atmosphere. We raced a Lamborghini Aventador whose Drivatar belonged to Turn 10's studio manager. "Course, he's always trying to hit me," said Bill Giese, Turn 10's design director. "He'll dive early and brake-check and try to block you."

The sun peeked through the rooftops of historic Prague. From inside the cockpit, glare reflected the dashboard off the windshield; coming out of a bridge tower, the screen became ablaze in excess sunlight. Across the finish line flags waved, confetti was flown, and helicopters buzzed over wild, screaming Czechs to signify the drama of a race's last lap -- even if we were the only ones on track. Even after just one lap, the supercar-to-hooptie factor was dramatically increased: fenders were splattered with flicks of tire rubber, doors crinkled like tinfoil in flashes of sparks. Wheels gained curb rash. Bumpers dangled as if they were held on with duct tape and zip ties. Evidently Prague has a cicada infestation, judging by the amount of bug splatter after just one lap.

Before long, it was our turn. We selected a Ferrari F12 Berlinetta in a decidedly not-red color, and set off to Prague ourselves. With full assists, the effort in the joystick required to turn in was amplified to represent understeer. The Xbox One's controller now has force feedback vibration in the triggers themselves, and "Forza 5" uses them to great effect in mimicking wheelspin, hard braking, and misadventures in throttle application.

So we turned off all of the aids, and trashed the heck out of a Ferrari.

It wasn't pretty.

Microsoft
A first for Forza, open-wheeled cars represented a challenge for simulated physics.

Perhaps it's inevitable with the much-ballyhooed advent of unlimited interconnectivity, predictive behavior algorithms like those employed by Amazon, Netflix and Google (sorry, Bing -- it's Microsoft, after all) and everything being stored on the proverbial cloud. That "Forza" would be able to keep track of your driving behavior, analyze it in real-time and access other Drivatars from a cloud server is a collision of all these technologies at the same time. It's the racing game of the now, reflective of how far our programming has come.

"Forza 5" will be released as a launch title with the Xbox One, sometime in November. The full list of cars and tracks haven't been announced yet, and the Drivatar system is still being tweaked. It will come with a custom Thrustmaster wheel, if you're inclined to pay beyond the Xbox One's $499 price. It will be competing against the one franchise that Xbox can never shy away from, "Halo 5." It will also, of course, compete against "Gran Turismo 6" for another new console, the Playstation 4.

It's a good, albeit pricey, time to be a car enthusiast.

By Blake Z. Rong