Simply put, Forza Motorsport 4 is utter car porn. Total, complete and utter car porn in fact. I mean, we didn’t give it the best looking 360 game of E3 for nothing… the cars are nothing short of incredible from a visual standpoint and anybody who says otherwise is in need of a new set of glasses. Being a good game though is about more than providing just a bit of nice eye candy. It’s about substance, style and delivery, and hot on the heels of the successful Forza 3, Turn 10 isn’t about to rest on its laurels now. Far from it. We nipped behind-closed-doors at this year’s E3 to check out the new aspects of Forza 4 that Turn 10 is putting emphasis on, from the new Autovista mode, Kinect aspects to the general on the track shenanigans.

Autovista was our first port of call – Turn 10’s new pure car experience that allows you to get up close and personal with some of the best machines in the world. It’s a mode that allows you to use either the controller or the Kinect to navigate around a selection of supercars, to learn about them, get closer than you’ve ever been to them, turn on their engines, open all their doors and get a personal tour of them. With over 1,000,000 polygons per car, Autovista allows you to get within 6 inches of the car to see all the intricate details of them.

Yes, I did say best machines, meaning that not every car will get the Autovista treatment this coming fall, but everyone that does, will get the Top Gear legend - Jeremy Clarkson - voice over treatment.

“With Jeremy you never know what you’re going to get… these are straight written from him and they go in as-is basically,” says John Wendl, Turn 10’s Content Director. “If he likes a car, it’s great. If he doesn’t, it isn’t.” Speaking about the selection of Autovista motors, Wendl described them as the “most technological advanced machines out there.”

“None of them are terrible,” said Wendl. “They’re all really high-end cars, but there are a lot of high-end cars he doesn’t like, for example, the Ferrari California, and he does not hold a very high opinion of the Ferrari California.”

Part of getting the cars looking so damn brilliant is Turn 10’s new image based lighting model, that allows Turn 10 to take the world itself and project it onto the car, allowing the car to seem more grounded in its environment and bringing the high level of detail out. While this is obvious in the Autovista mode, it’s possibly even more apparent with the car out on the track – just seeing the clouds and the blue sky projected onto the bonnet of a Ferrari sat on the track of the new custom Swiss Alps course was a sight to behold, especially with the impressive draw distances and photo realistic cars to boot.

The image based lighting allows Turn 10 to create more realistic cockpit views – with a tweaked camera to see all the cockpit and even camera shaking at high speeds – as well as creating one of their new events: Heat races.

Heat races were one of two new race types Turn 10 were showing off at E3, but there are unfortunately no weather effects planned for Forza 4. “We’re not doing weather in the game per se,” said Wendl, “but we are expanding out the kind of environments that you’ll be racing in, as well as we’re doing a feature which is alternate time of day.” Otherwise known as the Heat race, where you get to race two legs of a race on two different times of day – like Suzuka in high sun and low sun, something the image based lighting now allows them to do.

The other race type, which will appear as one of a few new event types that will feature in the newly revamped World Tour, is its Passing mode, where players will have to pass a certain amount of cars in a set time to proceed. "You’re basically bringing a gun to a knife fight" said Wendl, as you’ll take a supercar to the track to overtake a bunch on smaller, less powerful cars. It allows us to see the new AI in action as well, as Wendl gives control to the CPU AI, which means Forza 4 will introduce smarter opponents as well. The World Tour though, like Forza 3, will offer players a lot of choice and be unique for players, offering them choice in gift cars, new race types (including the two above) and the chance to jet around the world.

Forza 4’s Kinect features are more than just the Autovista mode though, allowing for optional invisible steering wheel and pedal controls, head tracking and voice navigation – allowing you to navigate through 6 layers of menus with just a simple command, something that will appeal to even the most cynical Kinect vocalists.

Elsewhere in the title, opening up the online to 16 players means that it opens up a lot of opportunities for co-operative gameplay too – 8 vs. 8 stuff – online. Even the community features have been given a few new shining lights, including car clubs – i.e. clans, with shared garages and shared livery and paint job options – a news channel and a Rivals mode – i.e. Forza’s version of Autolog, but with players earning bounties for beating their friends. Aside from all that, Turn 10 mentioned that we’ll see improvements to the physics model, especially the tyres, improvements to the damage model – i.e. improved particle effects for damage and rollovers, as well as improved texture properties on damaged cars – and even animated car parts, like the wings on a Bugatti Veyron.

Forza 4 then, with its 60fps gameplay, 720p visuals, full screen anti-aliasing and image based lighting certainly looks the package, and with the Autovista, Kinect shortcuts, head-tracking, newly revamped career mode – with game modes – and community features it’s more than just a pretty face. There’s a lot to get excited about with Forza 4, but I can’t help think that the lack of weather effects is holding them back, I mean, they are one of few racers now that aren’t including them. I’m fairly sure though that it’s not really going to hold the game back at all, as it’s shaping up to be the ultimate car porn for car fans the world over. Rev those engines folks.

Forza Motorsport 4 is scheduled for a October 11th and October 14th release in North America and Europe respectively.