Partager la publication "Forza Horizon 4 : Test Drive in Great Britain roads and off road w/ 450 cars! Présentation E3 2018"
En ce jour du 10 juin 2018, lors du traditionnel E3 édition 2018, Microsoft via Xbox et son studio Playground Games coéquipier de Turn 10 Studios, a présenté officiellement Forza Horizon 4 ! Et si beaucoup de gens attendaient d’aller sur les routes du Japon ou d’Asie, en écho à l’Australie, d’autres avait deviné que ça se passerait en Grande Bretagne. Direction le Sud de l’Angleterre jusqu’au Nord de l’Ecosse pour le festival Horizon ! Présentation.
Forza Horizon 4 is real
Basé à Leamington Spa, Warwickshire UK., le studio Playground Games, joue à domicile toute l’annnée. Ce qui leur a bien inspiré quelques idées.
Forza Horizon 4 propose les routes de la Grande Bretagne au temps des quatres saisons, dynamiques, qui changent le gameplay, le pilotage, débloquent de nouveaux événements et routes, affectent les conditions de conduite et transforment l’exploration en monde ouvert. Les joueurs seront en mesure de maîtriser la conduite dans des conditions sèches, humides, boueuses, enneigées et glacées dans un monde partagé où tout le monde connaît des changements dans l’heure de la journée, la météo et les saisons, ensemble en équipe ou en solo, à travers collines, montagnes, côtes maritimes, campagnes, forêts ou villes !
“I think, to date, more than 9 million people have played Forza Horizon 3.
But if you’d told me right back around the launch window that that was going to be how it panned out? That’s astonishing; that was beyond wildest dreams territory for this team.”
– Ralph Fulton, creative director Playground Games, via IGN interview
Forza Horizon 4 impose son style dans les rues séculaires d’Edimbourg, en passant par les villages typiquement anglais des Cotswolds, collines du sud-ouest de l’Angleterre, couvrant toute une variété de lieux distincts, parfaits pour une carte postale, comme le nord de l’Ecosse au nord-ouest du célèbre Lake District en Angleterre.
“I think I started from a kind of cynical position. Why would I want to spend my time in Britain, when previously Horizon games have taken me to an exotic place? You know; Australia.”
“I think this has been, more than any other, a passion project for the studio. I think everybody, as soon as we made that decision, was, like, ‘Yeah, we’ve got to show Britain at the best it can be.’ The most beautiful. The most varied. We want this to be an advert for the country that certainly we all live in and, for most of us, we hail from. And think that’s been a really important paradigm shift in the way that we make a Horizon game.”
– Ralph Fulton, creative director Playground Games, via IGN interview
Jusqu’à maintenant, la licence Forza Horizon s’était contentée de proposer l’alternance jour/nuit, complétée par différentes conditions météorologiques allant du grand ciel bleu à la pluie torrentielle ou des pistes enneigées.
Forza Horizon 4 va bien au-delà de la transposition du festival Horizon dans le pays natal de Playground. L’équipe n’apporte pas seulement la Grande Bretagne au sein de leur jeu de course en monde ouvert, ils apportent aussi les quatre saisons.
“Our environment art team here at Playground who have managed to create basically four worlds the size of Forza Horizon 3, in one, for this game.”
– Ralph Fulton, creative director Playground Games, via IGN interview
Le jeu est, sans surprise, sublime, mais ce sont les différences saisonnières qui sont particulièrement spectaculaires.
En été, le soleil rayonne sur un petit chalet niché dans la région des Cotswolds, et l’herbe brille d’un vert radieux. Vous pouvez presque sentir la chaleur. L’hiver, c’est radicalement différent, la neige parsème les lieux qui sont beaucoup plus sombres, notamment à cause d’un ensoleillement moins impressionnant – et des arbres sans feuilles qui laissent entrevoir le ciel. L’automne est plus cool, avec des teintes jaunâtres et brunâtres, et des feuilles mortes tapissant l’asphalte. Le printemps est plus humide, plus frais. Il n’est pas exagéré de dire que c’est vraiment quatre mondes en un.
Le changement de saisons se fera chaque semaine, et avec eux, l’apparition de nouveaux contenus et challenges propres à la période.
Le monde de Forza Horizon 4 sera ainsi entièrement synchronisé pour que tous les joueurs voient le même moment de la journée, la même saison et le même trafic sur la route …verglacées en hiver style Blizzard, …légèrement brumeuses les matins de printemps, …très sèches en plein été so Unlimited style Hawaï et flamboyantes de couleurs d’automnes à la Need for Speed II avec les feuilles volantes entres les voitures et une automobile McLaren !
Forza Horizon 4 – 2018 – screen cars – Jaguar vs Austin
Forza Horizon 4 – 2018 – screen cars – Porsche classic
Forza Horizon 4 – 2018 – screen cars – wood trucks – Honda
“So we’ve gone over to Australia in the past and done all of the sky captures that we do; we’ve got all our photogrammetry information, all of our general photography reference for the artists,” says Penrose. “This time around it was a process that went all the way through the year.”
“So we were capturing spring, summer, autumn, winter – not necessarily in that order – but we were getting everything. And that’s important to us because it means we’re capturing every single nuance about each season in the UK.”
– Ben Penrose, art director Playground Games, via IGN interview
Forza Horizon 4 – 2018 – screen cars – McLaren Senna – winter
“For Forza Horizon 3 we developed this practical photography approach to our time of day cycles. So we developed a custom camera rig; we were out in the wild away from the comfort of our desks and with this rig we shot high resolution, high dynamic range time lapses, which feed into our lighting and time of day cycle.”
“One of the most ambitious things last time was that we actually took this rig out to Australia. We actually captured a whole summer’s worth of lighting and that became the lighting in Forza Horizon 3.
When we started looking at what we were going to do this time, with seasons in the mix, obviously shooting for a whole year blows that ambition out of the water, to another level. The assets that we create are full of these sheer, huge amounts of data; each shoot is 1.5 terabytes of photography that we process. We have dedicated people in house that just process skies as a full time job.”
“When you start to think of seasons and the UK when it comes to sky capture, there’s a huge diversity in what happens throughout the year, which is kind of what makes it worth us doing these captures seasonally.”
“In the summertime the sun actually rises in the north east and has quite a high sun arc, and sets over north west. Whereas the most extreme opposite to that, in winter, the sun actually rises a full 90 degrees around, has a very shallow sun arc – the sun never really gets high in the sky – and then it sets around in the south west.”
– Jamie Wood, lead lighting artist Playground Games, via IGN interview
Forza Horizon 4 – 2018 – screen cars – Toyota Hilux
“You will see all of our crops and our livestock adhering to their real life counterparts in game,” says Penrose. “So wheat fields will appear green and fresh in spring [and] return to their characteristic golden colour in summer. In autumn you’ll see all that harvested and baled up, ready to go, and in winter obviously the field will be fallow.”
“Beyond that, foliage was a huge, huge focus for us on this project. Obviously all our deciduous trees needed to change colour, as they do here, so each tree in autumn changes uniquely from tree to tree, and that is all dependent on the health of the tree, the soil, the moisture on the ground. So some trees will hold onto their greens for longer, some will become brown and golden, other will drop all of their leaves entirely.
Over in spring, you’ve got blossoms starting to bud in our hedgerows and our blossom trees; in the woods you’ll start to see all those wildflowers you associate with spring, like bluebells and snowdrops.”
-Ben Penrose, art director Playground Games, via IGN interview
“It was a massive amount of work for the art team to take this on, and we did some big things that we knew we had to do. We added snow, we added frost; we knew we had to add that autumn colour to the game.”
“But while we were making this we also had quite a lot of subtleties that we knew we needed to add to the game. And when we were adding these subtleties and when we were creating it we realised that we couldn’t have created Britain without these seasonal varieties, and, if we were going to do seasons, Britain was the best place.
– Gareth Harwood, technical art director Playground Games, via IGN interview
Forza Horizon 4 – 2018 – screen cars – dirt trucks – RAM vs Toyota
“We’ve got all new driving surfaces. We’ve got dry mud, we’ve got wet mud, we’ve got compact snow, deep snow, ice – there are tons of different surfaces you can drive on and we wanted to make sure that the sound of each one of those sounds is as unique as we possibly can get it.”
– Fraser Strachan, senior audio designer Playground Games, via IGN interview
Forza Horizon 4 – 2018 – screen cars – snow trucks – RAM vs Toyota
“Seasons really dictate how a car drives in the UK. The biggest thing in this is the temperature range you get in the UK; we can be over 30 degrees Celsius in the summer, well below zero in the winter. Cars are very temperature sensitive, specifically the tyre, so it really does change how the car drives.”
“So for Horizon 4 we created an entirely new temperature model. Seasons obviously have a big impact on this, but then from moment to moment both the time of day and the weather conditions can change the temperature. That’s then fed into the car.”
– Chris Phillips, senior car handling designer
Ce n’est pas seulement la sensation de conduite qui change. Tout événement peut être un facteur de changement d’expérience, selon le moment de l’année où la course a lieu. Tout peut fondamentalement changer : une flaque au printemps pourrait tout aussi bien être une place de verglas en hiver.
L’introduction de nouveaux événements et activités à mesure que les saisons changent n’est que l’une des modifications apportées avec Forza Horizon 4 par rapport aux précédents épisodes. C’est quelque chose que Playground appelle plus globalement l’Horizon Stories – une sorte d’idée qui consiste à passer 365 jours par an dans le cadre du Festival Horizon (pas seulement un été) et en profiter avec les fans du jeu du monde entier.
Le plus gros changement est la façon dont Forza Horizon 4 est construit en tant que jeu mondial partagé, où les Drivatars (gérés par l’I.A.) du précédant Forza Horizon sont remplacés par de vrais joueurs sur un serveur de 72 joueurs.
Forza Horizon 4 – 2018 – screen cars – Aston Martin Vulcan vs Lamborghini Centenario vs Acura NSX
Forza Horizon 4 – 2018 – screen cars – Jaguar vs Lamborghini
Forza Horizon 4 – 2018 – screen car – MG steering wheel
Forza Horizon 4 – 2018 – screen cars – Pagani vs Porsche – night drift
Forza Horizon 4 – 2018 – screen cars – Pagani vs Porsche – Hoonigan drift
Forza Horizon 4 – 2018 – screen cars – Beach Bums
“The reason we’re doing that is because we believe that real players, real drivers, actually will exhibit more interesting, more unpredictable, fun behaviours than we could ever program into even an AI system as sophisticated as Drivatar,” says Fulton. “They will just do fun, emergent, surprising things. And also because they’re real, they’re actually people you could have a relationship with; you could become friends with.”
“And it’s not just seeing other people; we’re all sharing in this world together. So everything in the game world is synchronised for all players. Time of day is synchronised. Weather conditions are synchronised. Seasons are synchronised. So seasons last one week per season, and then the season changes. So you will play in spring, for example, for a week, and then we’ll countdown to the season transition and you’ll move into summer.”
“If it rains, everyone sees it together. If there’s a rainbow, everyone sees it together. If there’s a sunset, everyone sees it together. I think that shared experience – particularly in the world we live in today with sharing and Instagram and twitter – it’s actually a very current idea. That I can go in and actually live in this world with lots of other people, and we can experience the same things; we can talk about the same things. We can gang up and play the same things, together.”
Forza Horizon 4 ne nécessite pas de connexion obligatoire. Dans la mesure où il s’agit d’un jeu partagé, nous pensons qu’il est préférable de jouer avec d’autres joueurs, mais vous pouvez aussi simplement cliquer sur un bouton et jouer toute la partie en solo avec des Drivatars.
On garde l’expérience traditionnelle de Forza Horizon. Oui, vous pouvez toujours mettre le jeu en pause. Oui, vous pouvez utiliser le mode photo. Oui, vous pouvez même revenir en arrière.
– Ralph Fulton, creative director Playground Games, via IGN interview
Il est important de noter que, bien que l’expérience du monde partagé soit la vision de Playground pour profiter au mieux de Forza Horizon 4, le jeu ne nécessite pas du online obligatoire.
“With Forza Horizon 4 we wanted to really celebrate those people and give them stuff that they can play with. We wanted to give people something new every hour, every day, every week.”
– Mike Brown, principal game designer
Ce contenu, disponible à chaque heure de la journée, Playground Games l’a baptisé Forzathon Live. Ce dernier sera accessible à tout moment par les joueurs se baladant sur la carte (Forzathon Live peut accueillir jusqu’à 12 joueurs).
“One of the other great things which we’ve always found in Horizon is, because we have a really broad feature set, we end up with a really diverse set of players who play the game in really interesting and different ways.”
“Obviously there are people who come to race, but there’s equally people who don’t really want to race at all, and maybe they’re artistic and they want to express themselves in the livery creator.”
Players who just want to explore, photographers, tuners, and painters will all be able to work through Horizon Life in Forza Horizon 4 in their own way. Even streamers, via Mixer, will be able to earn progress based on how often they stream and the viewers they amass.
“In Horizon Life you’ll be able to earn progress in the game… and level up and get rewards through any of those activities. If all you want to do is paint, the game will recognise that; it will give you objectives and challenges and rewards, and you can level up and see all the game’s content just through being a painter. It’s the ultimate evolution of Forza’s play-how-you-want philosophy.”
– Mike Brownn, principal game designer
Une autre fonctionnalité, baptisée Horizon Stories par Playground, s’articule autour d’activités et défis de conduite sur mesure, introduits par des personnages inédits au monde de Forza Horizon. Nous serons en mesure de nous amuser en groupe un peu comme un cascadeur dans un film, ou d’assister à un tournage d’un documentaire automobile.
On peut désormais acheter des éléments au sein des zones du jeu, comme des chalets pittoresques près d’Edimbourg, ou des entreprises.
Forza Horizon 4 – 2018 – screen cars – Porsche at home – winter
Il y a même de la personnalisation d’avatars – semblables à ceux de Forza Horizon 3, mais Forza Horzon 4 sera livré avec environ 500 choix de vêtements et bien sûr des voitures au nombre de 450.
Forza Horizon 4 – 2018 – screen cars – McLaren Senna – autumn
Forza Horizon 4 video
Forza Horizon 4 – E3 2018 – Announce Trailer
For the first time in the racing and driving genre, experience dynamic seasons in a shared open-world. Explore beautiful scenery, collect over 450 cars, and become a Horizon Superstar in historic Britain.
Source et images :
Microsoft
Xbox
Playground Games
Quotes excerpts from FORZA HORIZON 4: EVERY SEASON IS RACING SEASON – IGN FIRS T- Behind-the-scenes with the Playground Games team, via IGN
Partager la publication "Forza Horizon 4 : Test Drive in Great Britain roads and off road w/ 450 cars! Présentation E3 2018"