Featured Multiplayer

Overview

Role(s): Systems Design, UI/UX Design, Seasonal Content Design, Tools Design

Forza Motorsport’s multiplayer was a shift for the series in that it introduced all of the key elements of a real life race weekend (Practice, Qualifying, Race) into a new scheduled event system, optimizing for player concurrency, motorsport authenticity, and seasonal event variety. Forza Motorsport’s multiplayer mode was consistently one of the game’s highest praised features from the time the game launched.

“After six long years, Forza Motorsport is off the lift and back in our lives. It looks great, feels great, sounds great, and it’s brought with it the most impressive multiplayer we’ve seen in the series so far.” - IGN

Design Goals

  • Create a competitive (but accessible) multiplayer mode in which players experience a full race weekend event structure, including Practice, Qualifying, and a Race

  • Optimize the multiplayer experience for player concurrency, reducing the overall number of lobbies needed and encouraging scheduled content variety

  • Rotate new events and playlists into the schedule on a regular (weekly) basis, encouraging players to jump in and compete in new events.

Gameplay / Systems Design

As the design owner for the Featured Multiplayer scheduled race format / flow and core gameplay systems, I collaborated with engineers, artists, QA, and many other teams to deliver an all-new multiplayer experience never seen before in a Forza Motorsport title.

Race Weekend Event Format

Where in previous installments of the franchise, Multiplayer racing consisted of jumping straight from one race into the next, which while simple, left out a critical component of authentic race weekend experience that is Practice and Qualification. We invest heavily into delivering an all-new ‘Race Weekend’ style event structure in Forza Motorsport’s multiplayer that was considered by many players to be the best multiplayer experience in Forza to-date.

The Skip Lap feature was an evolution of the famous Rewind feature, but it allowed players to quickly restart a lap, giving them a bit of a mulligan without having to punish themselves by finishing a lap that maybe didn’t start off so well. This mechanic was highly praised and was used heavily

Diversity in Race Types

Another key area that we wanted to improve upon from prior Forza Motorsport titles was providing more variety to racing on offer. At any given time in Forza Motorsport, players can jump into either Spec races, where cars within a similar/same class have all been pre-tuned/balanced for optimal competition, or Open Racing, where players can build up their own car within loose restrictions to compete against one another. These two race types served different audiences - players who enjoy racing in the most competitive real-world race cars, and players who enjoy car building and tuning, and less about the height of competition.

Scheduled Races

Scheduled events mean that races start at specific times and players around the world all match into the same active events at once, helping contribute to the spectacle nature of motorsport events, while also ensuring that player concurrency is as high as possible for matchmaking purposes. A scheduled race system carried with it many challenges, and many moving components, but this is a high-level look at how we tackled it in Forza Motorsport.

Event Hierarchy

In order to tackle scheduled events, we had to first determine the hierarchy of how events were going to be constructed before we could best determine how to rotate them in a scheduled manner. At it's core, Forza Motorsport’s Event hierarchy in Featured Multiplayer looked something like this:

  • Series X - i.e “NASCAR Series” (contained an array of Playlists)

    • Playlist A (contained an array of Events)

      • Event 1

      • Event 2

      • Event 3

Each Series could have any number of playlists, and the series and/or playlists would rotate in and our of the schedule based on a number of designer configured variables:

  • Series Name (string)

  • Series Description (string)

  • Series Image Path (image path)

  • Series Start/End Date (DateTime)

  • Cycled Playlist Frequency (TimeSpan value dictating how long each playlist will be active for before cycling to the next playlist - measured in Days, Weeks, or Hours)

  • Playlist Data (array of Playlists)

Scheduled Events Implementation

The underlying event schedule that dictated the frequency with which individual events rotated in the schedule was largely based on 4 factors:

  1. Practice/Qualify Length

  2. Race Length

  3. Event Overlap Length

  4. Event Cut-off Length (Global)

Using these three values, we were able to land on 4 core race length presets

  1. Short Races - 20 min. Practice/Qualify + 10 min. Race

  2. Medium Races - 20 min. Practice/Qualify + 20 min. Race

  3. Long Races - 30 min. Practice/Qualify + 30 min. Race

  4. Endurance Races - 40 min. Practice/Qualify + 60 min. Race

The tuning to get the event schedule in Featured Multiplayer optimized for a good player experience took significant effort prior to launch, and continued to be a system we tuned long-after launch based on player feedback and telemetry. Overall, it paid off as it turned out to be an incredibly powerful system for optimizing player concurrency and matchmaking.

Automated Series / Playlist Cycling

Implementing an automated Series / Playlist Cycling system was critical to the long-term success of the feature, and enabled us to largely configure the event schedule once and have the schedule automatically cycle through content on a designer configurable basis.

This functionality also gave us a lot of flexibility in rolling out new events in that we could experiment with the frequency with which events cycled in/out of the schedule extremely easily.

Design Tooling Optimizations / Automation

Similar to event authoring in Career mode, along with a dedicated engineer, we were able to build automation tools that helped randomize event configuration settings (lap count, time of day, and weather) and automate event scheduling to help ensure scalability, and also to ensure event variety for the number of events being created for each release.

UI/UX Design

I played a large role in the final UI/UX for the feature as a whole, mainly with regard to the event select menu and UI flows getting to a multiplayer event, ensuring that players could quickly get all of the info they needed and get into a race with the minimal amount of button presses.

Event Select Menu

More info coming soon…

Seasonal Content Authoring

During our live service period, I oversaw and implemented the multiplayer event schedule for each monthly release. This included prototyping, playtesting, iterating on, and shipping new multiplayer events, ensuring that they provided event variety and, where possible, tied into our monthly theme. Additionally, for Featured Multiplayer we closely monitored / analyzed our telemetry dashboards and perused the forums to gauge what players were most excited about and engaged with at any given time to help inform our decisions and investments for future updates.

Tuning/Competitive Balancing

I worked with engineering and members of the community to help tune and balance individual cars within some of our more competitive events, ensuring that players of all skill levels had a more even playing field while out on the track.

We used the following values to tune/tweak our cars to make them more competitively balanced, utilizing automation as well as internal/external flighted playtests to confirm any changes we made.

  • Horsepower

  • Weight

  • Aero - Front Downforce

  • Aero - Rear Downforce

  • Drag

  • Friction/Grip