Nick Wiswell, Audio Director at Turn 10 Studios shares an update on the changes we’re making to audio for future and existing cars in Forza Motorsport.
Hi everyone,
I’m Nick Wiswell, Audio Director at Turn 10 Studios, and today I want to give you all some details on the audio changes you will hear in Forza Motorsport with the release of Update 13, Mustang Month, and our plans for future updates.
With this blog, I will personally address some of the feedback you have been sending us since we released the game last October. We hear you, and the plans that we are sharing today are in direct response to this – thank you for sharing your honest thoughts.
First, I’d like to give you some insights into the team we have assembled, and some important changes we have made to deliver the best audio experience possible when racing.
I’ve been at Turn 10 Studios since 2010, and I worked directly as Audio Director on Forza Motorsport 4 through Forza Motorsport 6. After that I moved into publishing focused roles working on Forza Horizon and Forza Street, and then into a more technical role before returning to Forza Motorsport full time in March 2023.
When I rejoined the team last year, most of the game’s audio content was already complete, so our efforts were focused on refining the assets we already had. After closely listening to your feedback, we have started incorporating new tools and processes into our audio workflow so we can deliver great sounding, authentic content moving forward. To ensure we have the best people we can leading these efforts, Turn 10 Studios rehired one of our former Sound Designers this past spring to help deliver these new plans.
To give you some context, this sound designer worked on Forza Motorsport (2005) through Forza Motorsport 3, as well as both Forza Motorsport 4 and Forza Motorsport 5 from a central Xbox audio team role. He then joined Polyphony Digital to work on GT Sport and Gran Turismo 7. I first met him when I was at Bizarre Creations working on the Project Gotham Racing games – Xbox’s premier racing game before the days of Forza – and I’m excited to work with him again. Between us, we have made a lot of great sounding racing games – and from some of the posts I’ve seen online, some of you would agree with this!
So, with a new audio leadership team, which includes another lead for our technology and development investments, we are set for the future.
To the state of audio in Forza Motorsport: I will admit that from an authenticity perspective, the game is not where we would like it to be. There are many factors that led to this, but we hope we can set things right going forward. Our goal is to fix these audio issues and ensure that all new cars added to the game are built authentically and uniquely. To achieve this, we have been overhauling our authoring techniques and pipelines so that we can update as many of the most egregious car audio issues as possible.
The initial work on this is now complete, and from Update 13 onwards, all cars added to Forza Motorsport will be built to this newer specification. In addition, a number of cars that have been flagged as inauthentic, both internally at the studio and by the community, will be updated over time.
The cars we are initially updating are with the release of Update 13 include the following:
We have also made changes to the cockpit audio on the 2010 Lexus LFA, following its update in a previous release.
As we look forward to future updates, we will weigh factors such as community feedback, internal priority, upcoming featured cars in game and the availability of suitable recordings.
I’d also like to add that there is a lot of speculation about how the car audio is made and where it is sourced. It is all created from recordings of real cars, either captured on a track or on a dyno. Our library contains over 750 vehicle recordings, and more are being sourced and added every month. The changes we are making are built around how these recordings are being processed and edited, and the way we assemble the recordings back together at runtime to be controlled by the in-game physics engine.
I’m not going to give too much of our secret sauce away, but it’s based on the combined experience of our audio team and software engineers, and we are very happy with the changes we are making.
