10. Forza Motorsport 5
The main focus of this presentation was about something called a drivatar, a fairly disturbing concept disguised as a clever evolution of racers. The game will record how you race, whether you play dirty, how often you use the brakes, and your general driving techniques, in order to create a replication of you. This was promoted as something greater than AI, a way to play with specific humans even while theyre not online by allowing you to play with the simulations of your friends (a.k.a their drivatars) to be part of races with real intelligence and challenge. Now there are many problems with this. Firstly, if people wanted to play with others while their friends werent online, why wouldnt they just play online multiplayer? Secondly, your personality is essentially being recorded when you play, creating a virtual clone of you. Now correct me if Im wrong, but thats pretty creepy. Do they really expect us to celebrate the notion of being made obsolete in the minds of our friends by a computer programme? And thirdly, the point of playing with friends isnt their superiority to AI, its that theyre your friends, making the concept of drivatar clones of them completely pointless. On a brighter side, the graphics are pretty good, though the gameplay doesnt look to add anything to the genre, operating on a pretty standard level other than the whole drivatar thing, which seems very much like innovation for innovations sake.