How 'Forza Horizon 3' got Australia to look so damn good
What does it take to turn Australia into a video game? Something in the ballpark of "12 terabytes" of photos, according to Playground Games senior game designer Mike Brown.
Launching Tuesday, Xbox's Forza Horizon 3 is the racing series' largest world so far and perhaps its most visually ambitious. The game puts the player in charge of the car-loving Horizon Festival, allowing them to explore the continent in more than 350 different vehicles.
The game has previously been set in the U.S. and western Europe, but Brown told Mashable Australia was always top of the short list as a potential setting.
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"It has this incredibly diverse environment -- rainforest, the Outback, modern areas and coastal areas. In terms of the beautiful world we could create, it was perfect," he said. The game ultimately incorporated six terrains, including desert, rainforests and beaches -- not to mention, a rendering of Surfer's Paradise without the crowds of schoolies.
After two years of work, he thinks the team made the right choice.
While Forza Horizon 2 was based in stunning parts of southern France and northern Italy, it was a little "one note" in terms of colour palate, he suggested. Australia, on the other hand, offered an almost limitless array of landscapes, and an "exorbitant amount of effort" went into capturing iconic areas such as the Twelve Apostles in Victoria.
"With Australia, it gave us that really rugged, off-road experience in the Outback. We have rainforest where our trucks can smash through trees. We have a coastal road like we had in France," he said.
To create a convincing world, a team from Playground Games spent "months and months" driving around the country taking reference photos before returning to the developer's UK office. "It was literally thousands of photos of plants and rocks and road surfaces and road markings," he said. Even Telstra's distinctive orange-top phone boxes made it into the game.
It's not just the landscape that mattered to the designers -- the sky and light were also important to get right.
"We care an awful lot about creating really authentic skies," Brown said. "Think about when you're playing ... the car is centre shot, and then you've got your environment, and about half the image is taken up with sky."
A team travelled to Australia with a 12K camera rig, recording the sky and capturing the quality and colour of light. "When the sky gets really moody in the game, we have all the light data that was there in real life so we can project that onto the world," he said.
Still, there are limits to how much you can fit into one game, despite the world being twice the size of Forza Horizon 2. Brown noted the ribbing the game received after revealing its game map, which laid out a rather geographically-questionable view of Australia.
"Geological sciences are great at building countries, but not necessarily great at building games," Brown said. In other words, the map is heavily condensed.
"We decided we wanted to start the game in Byron Bay, so that's why it's at the bottom-right tip of the map," he explained. "If that meant we had to move say, the Yarra Valley a few thousand miles in order to make it a better experience for the player, then that was the decision we made."
Of course, they could have saved themselves the trouble. While other games do not place such a premium on recreating real environments, that's not Forza's style, Brown suggested.
"There's freedom that comes from creating a fantasy land, and other games have certainly done that with great success," he said. "I think we like the romance that comes with trying to recreate a real place -- all the stories, and the history and the real life car culture."
To make it even more true to life, the game includes a touch of Australian wildlife, including kangaroos, crocodiles and dingos. You may have to slow down to see them, Brown warned, but don't worry -- they won't end up as road kill.
"Fortunately, all the animals we have in the game will get out of the way," he said. So not everything is true to life, then.
Ariel Bogle was an associate editor with Mashable in Australia covering technology. Previously, Ariel was associate editor at Future Tense in Washington DC, an editorial initiative between Slate and New America.
