Sitting down to talk to Stevivor about Forza Horizon 3, Playground Games’ Art Director, Ben Penrose, first explained that he spent a good ten minutes prior to our meeting staring at a Telstra phone booth.
“I was staring at that phone booth, and I couldn’t figure out why it was so familiar. Then, things clicked,” Penrose said, almost embarrassed.
Turns out, Penrose realised the iconic, orange-topped phone booth was one he’s been so delicately modelling for inclusion into the upcoming Forza Horizon 3.
“I haven’t been to Australia since we did the original research trips. Before that, was like two years ago for the release of [Forza Horizon] 2,” he continued. “You instantly get that thing where you’re like, ‘Oh no, we did get that right. We definitely got that right.’ You start seeing all these things, you know?”
For the record, the decidedly-familiar Telstra phone booth was one object that Playground has nailed.
“Yeah, it’s nice. That definitely made it into the game.”
Playground Games has already detailed the amount of painstaking work that’s gone into making Forza Horizon 3 as lifelike as possible, including recording Australian skies with a 12K, HDR camera. That footage has found its way into the game, creating an incredibly realistic light source that refracts off objects in the in-game world just as it would in real life.
Penrose also noted that a single engineer has spent all of his time working on one singular aspect of Forza Horizon 3 from start to finish, creating shadows that are cast and coloured based on the area around them. In Forza Horizon 2, Penrose said, every single in-game shadow was the same hue of blue; in Horizon 3, shadows will have a red tinge due to the colour of Outback sand, and so on.
The attention to detail doesn’t end at phone booths, sky and shadows. Penrose said there are a lot of pointedly Australian objects that will seem quite familiar to local gamers.
“Melbourne was not one of the places that we visited, actually,” Penrose began, referring to time spent in our city preparing for interviews, “but just in general, all the experiences of being on the road here in a taxi cab and stuff — and seeing all the signage and street furniture, which is what we call it back at the studio — well, it was just all eerily familiar. You’ve been playing a game for two years that feels like it’s a foreign place, and then all of a sudden, you’re actually in it — and things look as they should.”
The finer details aren’t limited to urban areas either, Penrose continued.
“There are little things all over, like the little poles at the edge of the road — the ones with the reflectors on them — and the yellow chevron signs. It’s like the little things that just kind of click and say, ‘Australia’.
“When you’re making a riding game or a racing game, especially an open world one, when you’re trying to replicate somewhere that’s real world, it’s all that kind of stuff that makes it work great. It’s all the little small things that maybe [locals] take for granted.”
If you’re driving around in the UK, all the trees are like big, old oak trees, and ash trees. Here it’s all the gum tree silhouettes. It’s just like getting that sort of … That is Australia, right?
Penrose said that he and the rest of Playground Games are itching to see what Australians make of the digital representation of our country within Forza Horizon 3.
“It will be really interesting to see what the reception’s like,” he said. “I’m excited to see what happens when the guys get on it and experience it. I remember when we released [Forza Horizon] 2. There was a bunch of people from Italy that I remember writing reviews. They were like, ‘Oh that’s Amalfi.’ It’s like a really satisfying feeling that they recognise it’s somewhere that they actually live.”
Available at the end of the month on Windows PC and Xbox One, Forza Horizon 3 will provide the chance to drive through national landmarks and icons like Byron Bay, the Outback, the rolling hills of the Yarra Valley, the Skyscrapers of Surfer’s Paradise, and of course the Twelve Apostles alongside large, coastal stretches of The Great Ocean Road.
Stay tuned with more from Penrose throughout the week — including a discussion of Forza Horizon 3‘s wonky map.
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