Turn 10 Studios and Microsoft Studios’ upcoming racing title Forza Motorsport 5’s Drivatar feature is one of the highly anticipated additions to the new age Forza release, and now there’s more information related to the new feature. Recently, Turn 10 Studios’ Dan Greenwalt confirmed with OXM that Drivatar racers will be separated into as many as seven difficulty levels that will look to remove any kind of cheating based on players’ habits.
Greenwalt stated: “The thing that’s interesting is that they don’t just drive faster – they drive completely differently. Because fast drivers tend to be cleaner, they cut corners more, they use the car a lot more, they’re much smoother. So, when you change the difficulty the racing fundamentally changes, and all this was trained by real people – it’s not programmed by us.”
As revealed during the interview, Drivatars will be grouped into seven categories that will match up to different levels of difficulty, the base of which will be derived from the activities of previous Forza player groups. However, there are also some shortcomings of Drivatars that have created problems for several players during playtesting. Described Greenwalt, "So people cut corners and the Drivatar learned how to do it and where to do it and how to do it appropriately. We didn't train it to run into you. Usually what's happening - and I've been finding a lot of people do this - they cut off the AI and then they slam on the brakes, and they get hit.”
"And they're like, 'oh, that AI hit me!' And we're like, 'it's got real human reaction times and it's driving with the real physics, so of course it hit you! You went in front and cut it off!'"
Turn 10 is looking for a scenario where people think of the AI as a real opponent, rather than just a system that’s open to exploitation. "The problem is that we, as gamers, have been so trained to think of AIs as cheaters that we expect them to cheat. We want them to cheat. We shouldn't want them to cheat - we should want them to play like people,” Greenwalt added.
"So, we've got safeguards on it. It's not even allowed to record driving backwards, doing donuts on the track... We're not stupid. Gamers are gamers. Believe me, some of your gamers will think of it.
"So there are certain things it's simply not allowed to even learn. And there are certain things that we've been amazed that it's learned - you know going three-abreast through a corner. We've never seen AI do that in a game. Never.”
He concluded the conversation by stating that he has seen AI make mistakes before, but those mistakes have always been scripted. “Now it's unscripted. The mistakes you're seeing them make, those were just mistakes that real people made."
Forza Motorsport 5 is currently scheduled for a November 2013 release alongside the new Xbox One.
