If someone told you that you’d be spending a day at a development studio checking out demos of painting, photography, video editing, and item tuning, you might think, “Oh, gee, are we taking a tour of the latest Adobe software suite?” But believe it or not, our destination was Turn 10 Studios, and our subject was Forza Motorsport 3, the latest entry in the simulation-heavy racing franchise. After an entire afternoon spent with the game’s incredible user-creation features, we have this to say: Holy #$@%.



Far more than a nuts-and-bolts racing game built for a hardcore niche audience, Forza 3 aims to be all things to all car fans. As Turn 10 game director Dan Greenawalt puts it, “We’re trying to turn gamers into car lovers and car lovers into gamers.” The game’s lineup of off-track features is the closest we’ll probably ever get to Microsoft’s abandoned Live Anywhere initiative from a few years back — its content is perpetually refreshed, its community is a creative fountainhead, and its options are limitless. Between the mammoth pile of customization settings, the crazy physics engine, and endless possibilities for user-generated content, Turn 10’s latest may just be Xbox Live’s next big thing.



Shopping Around
Funny thing…most of our time at Turn 10 didn’t involve a whole lot of racing. Instead, Forza guru Greenawalt focused on Forza 3’s user-generated content systems — the backbone of the previous game that pushed it past mere racing sim and into a community-powered sensation that kept forums alight for months and years past Forza 2’s predicted shelf life. And this time out, those liveries and auction-house goodies almost certainly provide the lifeblood of the online experience — more so than the racing itself. After all, not every car lover wants to trade paint on the fierce battlegrounds of Xbox Live’s head-to-head races. Perhaps your specialty lies in design, performance tuning, video editing, or photography? Forza 3 fosters any and all of these talents through its Live-based Storefront. “We need to feed [the hardcore user-content creators],” Greenawalt says. “And keep them excited.”



Laid out against a clean interface with a white background — think Porsche brochure — Forza’s community front-end looks a lot like a Yahoo merchant website. The game’s Storefront homepage displays a mix of the top-rated items, whether they’re custom cars, decals, upgrades, photographs, replays, or game settings. You can, of course, also sort by categories, as you’re likely to be interested in one area at a time. But even cooler, you rate them, eBay-style, and tag your favorite creators, even if they’re not on your Friends list. That way, any time that person makes a new decal or upgrade, it’ll be auto-listed on your Storefront homepage for your bidding or buying pleasure. The in-game fame the creator gains as a result will encourage them to keep hawking their wares so they can stay in the spotlight.



Car painting returns, aided by new tools such as a toggle-able grid for adding scale and precision to your designs. Budding artists — some of the best have even been hired by Turn 10 to improve the user-creation tools in Forza 3 — can again spend hours crafting a design tied to a specific car, and then sell that ride in the auction house to the highest bidder.



Branching Out
New for Forza 3, though, is the fact that decal designs no longer have to be bound to a single car. Instead, you start in-game with an Adobe Premiere–like interface against a blank white canvas to make a custom decal — which can consist of up to 5,000 layers! — from scratch. You can then save it and sell it to as many other players as you like. Theoretically, you could become the Sean John of Forza Motorsport 3 as your ubiquitous brand permeates across the online community.



Just don’t expect a Lego-style decal tutorial that can turn anyone who’s ever wielded a crayon into a Picasso with a gamepad. It’s a hardcore tool used to enable hardcore-level designs. “My goal as a designer is not to turn you into a painter,” Greenawalt clarifies. So if that’s not you, he says, your role is to simply reap the benefits of creators’ labors by buying their designs and rating them highly, which will encourage them to continue creating, thereby feeding the community cycle.




But Wait, There’s More
With these features, Forza 3 has already surpassed its predecessor, but Turn 10 isn’t done. The other major component of the Storefront is the upgrade area. Greenawalt estimates you can make roughly 175 different upgrades to any car. They run the gamut from the usual suspension and handling components to tires, chassis stiffening, and aerodynamics. Interestingly, tires now flex realistically, but all these parts are now governed by new physics — yup, even though the series is already known for high-caliber physics modeling, Turn 10 found more to monkey with. “We’re starting to run out of things to be simulating,” smiles Greenawalt. Smartly, you can opt for the “quick upgrade” menu to have the game search for a list of all the best upgrades you can currently afford. However, the very best performance parts — like the elite decals and paint jobs — must be done by hand, adding another potential profession you can take up in Forza 3’s community.



We also got clarification on the much-ballyhooed video-replay feature. Admittedly, you won’t turn into Michael Bay here. Rather, you simply export high-definition video clips (with game audio) to Windows Media Player, where you can then cut them up and set them to music with your PC and post kickass pieces for the world to see. “We can give people beautiful, beautiful game footage,” Greenawalt beams.

Party On
Finally, every single race, game, and mode setting is customizable now, and those custom configurations can be saved. Want to force everyone into the new cockpit view? Easy. Create your own game modes? Do it. Crank up the physics? Tweak to your heart’s content, and then upload your settings. Turn 10 is using the label “social coordinators” to describe these folks who act as the concierges of your game settings. Better still, Forza 3 borrows Halo’s hopper/party/matchmaking system so you can stick with your crew all night long.



With all of this cool stuff, it’s easy to forget that oh, by the way, the actual racing game happens to play quite well, too (as we chronicled in OXM’s September 2009 issue hands-on report). Greenawalt would probably want us to mention that minor little detail. But he’s equally excited — exceedingly excited, in fact — about the tidal wave of user-generated content headed your way. After seeing it in action, we can hardly blame him.