Turn 10 ‘disappointed’ to have let down Forza fans; No microtransaction pressure from MS

Dan Greenawalt has admitted to disappointment about what he regards as letting down fans with aspects of Xbox One launch title Forza 5.

It’s been disappointing. I’m not disappointed in people – people feel how they feel. I’m more disappointed in myself that I’ve elicited this reaction in people,” Turn 10’s creative director told Eurogamer.

I think the biggest travesty for me is how people have misread our intentions, because that’s just been sad.

Community’s the biggest thing for us, and the whole point is to get people excited about cars and excited about games, so people saying we’ve changed the economy for this reason and we removed this feature for that reason. I understand it, because perception’s reality, and people start believing what they believe, but I know it’s not the thought process we went through to make the decisions we made.”

Greenawalt also insists that the implementation of microtransactions was not a result of orders coming from higher up the Microsoft food chain.

Honestly I think, unfortunately, people attribute too much communication to this organisation,” he insisted. The truth is, at Turn 10 while I’m a Microsoft employee, we’re off-site and we have our own culture and work our product to have our own culture. We have our own process and all of that.

For the most part, Microsoft sees it as we’re doing a good thing so keep it up, and so we’re left alone. But if I’m honest we introduced this in Forza 4 with the car tokens. A lot of people noticed and thought it can be introduced where it’s not a paywall, and people don’t seem to be up in arms because it’s just an accelerator.

This is happening more and more in games, and I understand gamers being resistant, especially if they feel like they’re being short-sheeted. I think people are looking out for being short-sheeted, and they’re seeing conspiracy where there isn’t one. And that’s common in today’s age.

We were definitely not mandated to include these. We were experimenting in Forza 4, we experimented a bit in Horizon and now we’re further experimenting in Forza 5. But we experiment a lot of things – and when we get them wrong we try to fix them.”