Forza Motorsport 6 Apex is a free, "curated" version of Forza Motorsport 6. What it isn't is the full version of Turn 10's most recent Forza. At last week's Xbox Spring Showcase, I asked Turn 10 creative director Dan Greenawalt about Phil Spencer's statement that, "we don’t think Forza 6 is what the PC racing fan thinks of as a racing franchise," and whether Apex's success could mean more Forza on PC.
"To me this is more about the long term future of the franchise," says Greenawalt. "Having ForzaTech underpin all Motorsport, Horizon—all Forza games moving forward—means that our games will be on all platforms, and that we can release them and deliver new and cool experiences that aren't about the hardware. They're about what we want to deliver to bring new gamers into this world."
Ultimately, Apex started out as a technical exercise. "What we started doing, because we're first party, is porting our engine over to DirectX 12," says Greenawalt. "Partially because we knew DirectX 12 was part of our future, but also because we want to make DirectX 12 better as a platform for developers and for gamers. We then started to do the same thing for [Universal Windows Platform], and we decided we should put those in the same branch."
The upshot is Turn 10 now has a version of their engine that uses DirectX 12 and UWP, which means future games should come to both Xbox One and Windows 10.
