Featured Multiplayer

Overview

Contributions: Gameplay Design, Competitive Multiplayer Systems, Matchmaking/Ratings, Seasonal Content Design, UI/UX Design, Player Onboarding, Tools

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 competition, motorsport authenticity, and seasonal event variety.

Design Goals

  • Authentic Race Weekend Experience - Create a competitive multiplayer mode in which players experience a full race weekend event structure, including Practice, Qualifying, and a Race

  • Permanent Lobbies + Weekly Rotating Content - Provide players with permanent lobbies featuring some of the most popular, modern racing content, and supplement with marquee rotating seasonal content

  • Scalable / Automation-focused Toolkit - Provide Designers with a set of tools to build, playtest, iterate, and automate scheduling/rotation of Seasonal Content, at scale

Gameplay / Systems Design

As the design owner for the Featured Multiplayer moment-to-moment experience, I collaborated with production, engineers, artists, and many other teams to deliver an all-new multiplayer experience from player onboarding and scheduled events to matchmaking, rating systems, general game flow, and post-launch seasonal live content.

Race Weekend Event Format and Game Flow

Practice & Qualifying

Practice & Qualifying was designed as a short pre-race period where players could familiarize themselves with the track, experiment with different cars, adjust their fuel & tire strategy, and Qualify for the race, whenever ready.

  • Practice is an on-track social space, a competitive leaderboard, and a player garage, all rolled into one. I focused heavily on giving players lots of options of activities to do during Practice, considering that some players may be entering their first match of the day, and others may have already completed 10 races.

    • Skip Lap - In addition to standard on-track gameplay elements, I designed an easy ‘mulligan’ option allowing players to quickly restart their lap from the Pause Menu at any time during Practice & Qualifying. This enabled players to focus on improving their driving without having to punish themselves by finishing a full lap that maybe didn’t go according to plan (which on some tracks could take more than 5 minutes).

    • Track Mastery - In an effort to increase the number of activities that players could engage with during Practice, I was a key part of implementing the game-wide Track Mastery system, which graded each player’s performance through various segments of the track. Track segments were named and players were informed when they set a new personal best time through that segment. What initially started off as a ‘King of the Hill’ style gameplay mechanic eventually turned into a more focused ‘personal time trial’ where players could track their progress and improvement through specific sections of each track.

    • Quick Chat - Players could send short pre-written messages to communicate with one another while on-track

    • Car Tuning - Players could easily access the Tuning menu and make adjustments on-the-fly and immediately test them out while in Practice

  • In Qualifying, the player focus shifts from personal improvement / preparation to tackling the track in order to set the best lap time possible.

    • When entering Qualifying, players are placed in an isolated environment where all other players in the lobby are ghosted, so that players can set their best qualifying times without having to worry about other drivers getting in the way.

    • Limited Qualifying - Limited Qualifying was critical to success of this event structure, giving players only 3 laps to set their best lap time added significant stakes as to how players performed in their Qualifying session, which in turn, increased the value of Practice as a place to prepare prior to Qualifying.

Race

As expected, the Race is the climax of each event. Once the race countdown timer reaches zero, players are all taken into an intermission period where they can see their starting grid position (based on their best qualifying time, in relation to the rest of the lobby) and finalize their own fuel & tire strategy while also checking out the competition’s strategy and see who they will be facing off against before it starts.

Scheduled Races

Scheduled races meant that races started at specific times and players around the world all matched into the same active events at once, helping contribute to the spectacle of motorsport events, while also ensuring that player concurrency was 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, I organized Forza Motorsport’s event hierarchy into Series > Playlists > Events.

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, including specified start/end dates and cycle frequency (Hours, Days, Weeks)

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 setting)

Races in Forza Motorsport varied in both length and type (single class vs. multi-class). Using the above values, we were able to land on 4 core race length presets

  1. Short Races - 10 min. Race

  2. Medium Races - 20 min. Race

  3. Long Races - 30 min. Race

  4. Endurance Races - 60 min. Race

For this flow, I experimented a lot with tuning for the ideal length of Practice & Qualifying, creating mock schedules in excel, calculating and tracking how long players of various experience levels would want to spend in Practice and the minimum time required to complete all 3 Qualifying laps across a variety of tracks and car classes.

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 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.

Matchmaking / Ratings

Forza Motorsport makes use of the TrueSkill matchmaking system to match players of similar skill levels and sportsmanship ratings, and adjusts their ratings accordingly after each match.

Matchmaking in FM first prioritized Safety Rating (aka “Sportsmanship Rating”) to ensure that players matched together shared similar playstyles, particularly ensuring that players who accrued lots of penalties from ramming and cutting the track would not be matched with players who raced cleanly and fairly. Secondarily, we matched players together based off of their Skill Rating. Skill Ratings ranged from 1000-5000, with 5000 being the best possible Skill Rating. In cases where not enough players were found to form a lobby, we slowly expanded the matchmaking parameters over time, within limits, wherever possible.

We tuned matchmaking throughout the lifespan of the title to optimize for concurrency and improve the quality of matches overall to ensure players had a fair and balanced gameplay experience. We also had to make adjustments to our matchmaking process as we continued to add additional lobbies over time. In our Meetups feature, which was more of a social game mode, we removed most matchmaking parameters to ensure that players could easily find a full lobby to join.

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.

Seasonal Event Variety and Concurrency

Each month, we shipped a new ‘season’ of content, each with its own theme. Where possible, we authored multiplayer events to tie into this theme (Mustang Month = “Mustang Challenge” Event, Road to Race Month = “Road vs. Race” Event). This seasonal content variety enabled us to give players ways to unlock and engage with seasonal content, regardless of what area of the game they gravitated towards

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.

Tuning/Competitive Car 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

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 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 any car within specified class restrictions to compete against one another. Later on, we also introduced ‘Semi-Open’ races, where players can build up their own car within loose restrictions (i.e Mid-Engine, European, 12 Cylinder, etc.) to compete against one another.

These three types of racing served two core audiences - players who enjoyed racing in the most competitively balanced real-world race cars, and players who enjoy car building and tuning, and care less about maximum competitiveness

Track Compatibility / Best Practices

We built thousands of events, and with hundreds of cars, there are bound to be compatibility issues, or tracks that simply don’t feel good to drive in certain types of cars. I developed a Track Compatibility table that measured and ranked tracks on their compatibility with different groups/types of cars based on a number of factors including complexity, length, and a general ‘difficulty’ factor. A sample of that table can be seen below

UI/UX Design

I played a large role in the final UI/UX, 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 at-a-glance and get into a race with a minimal amount of bloat / flow interruptions.

Event Select Menu

The event select menu for Featured Multiplayer went through multiple iterations. The key goals were to showcase a variety of races at any given time, while keeping the information high-level, and the flow easy to jump into. We landed on a system of tabs, where each tab could be configured entirely via server-side changes in our design tooling. This allowed us to rapidly iterate, playtest, and get feedback on how to most optimally lay out all of our Multiplayer content.

We ended up breaking our events down into the following tabs/categories:

  • Introduction - All new players begin their multiplayer journey here. Players are required to complete at least 3 races in the Qualifier Series, as a probation period, to evaluate their Safety and Skill Ratings

  • Featured - This category focuses on some of the most popular real-world racing series, seasonal events, as well as partnerships, putting them front and center for all players to easily jump into (IndyCar, NASCAR, GT Racing, LMDh, etc.)

  • Spec Events - This category includes a number of series, cycling between a rotation of one-make staples (such as MX-5 Cup, Ginetta Juniors, Formula Mazda, etc.) as well as historical spec division events.

  • Semi-Open Events - This category focuses on events that challenge drivers to build and race their very own project car within a loose set of cycled car restrictions and themes.

  • Open Events - One of our top community requests – this category features lobbies for all 9 in-game car classes, giving players the ability to jump into races in any car class, at any time

Dividing our Multiplayer content into different categories allowed players to quickly jump straight to the category of racing that they cared the most about.