'They can drive through groves and vineyards, drive between trees. Fortunately, it didn’t take much: “We just turned it on.' Now, Drivatars are imitating their humans, cutting corners and crashing through cafés, anything to get to the finish line fastest. 'We had to change some definitions for ‘What is a road?’ versus what isn't,' said Greenawalt. So the rules by which the Drivatars are programmed needed to be updated. Going off-road is a central focus, while in Forza 5, driving off the track would carry a heavy penalty. Stunts like drifting, driving on two wheels, and getting airborne are encouraged.

In Horizon 2, players can drive wherever they want. But the nature of Forza Horizon 2 makes the feature even better. Technology evolved and last year Turn 10 unveiled an entirely new cloud-based Drivatar for Forza 5, proving Drivatars could be much more fun to play against than traditional AI. Microsoft developed the technology more than a decade ago and put it to limited use in the original Forza game: Players couldn’t see or race each other’s Drivatars. This is what the team hopes the Drivatar can create, rather than having a single variety of AI driving around the track in the same way, lap after lap. They had very different driving styles, one very clinical and precise, and the other much looser.

Dan Greenawalt, creative director at Turn 10 Studios, used the example of an old rivalry in F1 between Michael Schumacher and Juan Pablo Montoya. More importantly, the point is to have a variety of driving styles on the track. The goal is to make a computer that drives just like a human. The Drivatars use Bayesian learning to develop in the image of their human counterparts: Yours picks up what routes you like to take, whether you drive fast into a corner or brake early, if you bump other cars to get them out of the way or steer clear of opponents. For years, Turn 10 has wanted to use a learning neural network to totally change how racing artificial intelligence works and, potentially, change how videogaming works into the future.

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