What's impressive, once you're done with the training, is to observe and test your vehicle. Here, in a mode called Observe and Test, you simply watch your Drivatar race laps as…YOU! It's pretty weird to see how your driving is emulated, mistakes, successes, and all. To take it up a notch, you can Select Head to Head, a mode in which you race against a field of your own Drivatars, or AI that's set to easy, medium and hard difficulty. If you think watching your own Drivatar is weird and tingly, wait until you actually race against a fleet of cars that supposedly drive just like you. It's wild indeed.

The Drivatar options include Drivatar Lessons, train your Drivatar, complete lessons to gain access to all options on this screen; Free Training, extra training for your Drivatar keep it up to date; Observe and Test, watch your Drivatar drive tracks; Head to Head, race against a custom field of Drivatars on ay track with cars from your garage, and Drivatar Statistics, serving you a breakdown of your Drivatar skills and training."

Game Informer - "you will receive fewer points and fewer dollars for winning a race using the Drivatar... Also your Drivatar doesn't go online"

 

Dan Greenawalt

Forza is going to utilize a new AI technology that learns as it plays. This new technology is called “Drivatar”, and it’s very exciting. Some games simply program specific racing lines into the AI and call it a day. We’re not going that route with Forza Motorsport. Instead, the Drivatar technology will learn from the people it’s playing against. It emulates how the better racers are driving, without just copying them. Drivatars can also generalize. They’ll take what they’ve learned on one track, and apply it to a new track, even if they haven’t raced that track yet. And if what it’s already learned on one track doesn’t seem to be working on the new track, it’ll adapt its racing technique to the new track.

We actually have several high-level developers working on our A.I. alone. Our main A.I. developer is new to games, but incredibly experienced in A.I. He’s a PhD A.I. developer from Microsoft’s research division. In the past, he’s worked on robots and learning A.I. systems. He’s teaming with our research division in Cambridge, England, to approach A.I. from a completely different angle.

 

It’s really cool to see a group approaching this problem from a completely new angle. Rather than giving the A.I. different car physics, a predestined spline, and random seed to mix it up, these guys are creating thinking A.I. that drive Forza Motorsport’s remarkably complex physics engine. Even our A.I. difficulty levels are based on learning artificial intelligence. Lower-difficulty A.I. makes human-like mistakes, such as late braking and late apexing.

 

It’s sort of hypnotic to watch the A.I. learn. I’ll tune a new car and give it over to the developer to train the A.I. driver. The A.I. driver then takes over the car and starts putting together laps. The laps get better and better as the A.I. tests out the new car’s limits. After a couple of laps, the A.I. is putting together really fast times in the exact same car physics the player drives.

 

If you don’t work in this industry, you might not understand how unprecedented this is. Every other racing game I’ve seen has used slightly different physics and predestined splines for the A.I. The artificial intelligence in Forza Motorsport is truly intelligent.

 

Yahoo Games

The game can study your driving behavior, learning your flaws and "personality," then imitate your style. You can race against your doppelganger (or "Drivatar," as the system is known) or even have it finish a race for you while you're busy, like simulating seasons in a football game.

 

Team XBOX

... play against cars which have the same driving characteristics as their master. Do you like to use left foot braking in the so that the pedal can be kept to the metal in the twisties? Well, Drivatar will allow you to program the cars against which you race to left foot brake as well, making single player racing that much more interesting. General reckless driving will also be learned, which really heats things up since usually it’s the human player causing all of the accidents while the cookie cutter AI follows the proper line to a T. Imagine a track filled with drivers as bad as you are, missing apexes, barreling into corners way too hot, and trading paint at every opportunity possible; sounds fun to us.

If the idea of the Drivatar System is to have user-defined competitive AI, then we wish that a separate mode will be devoted to Drivatar racing online. We have been having wonderful dreams about the DDL, or Drivatar Dynasty League, which would bring all of the best AI racers together with their autopilot autos. This mode would be more about the journey than the destination since all of the front end work is truly where the magic happens - the training of the AI in the comfort of your basement, trying to get your CPU controlled car to be as competitive as possible. We also envision being able to download individual’s Drivatar cars and place them into their own races, sort of as a training for wheel-to-wheel races via Live; we see a scouting report potential if you can download the Drivatars of the people at the top of the Leaderboard. Hmmm, maybe the gist of I, Robot where man-made machines take over the world isn’t that outlandish of a premise.