Having spent considerable research time on the underlying science for the Drivatar AI system, and then specialising and developing it for inclusion within Forza Motorsport, we have, of course, many thoughts on what "might have been" in terms of Drivatars in Forza, as well where Drivatars might perhaps go in future. In the months following the launch of the game, we also received a lot of constructive feedback from players all around the world which helped shape our thoughts. Here are a few of those thoughts — some original, some latterly stimulated by other players' suggestions and comments. 

Drivatar lessons are boring 

Statistics certainly helped to make the Drivatar lessons more interesting, but couldn't disguise the fact that it would have been a lot less effort to train your Drivatar at the same time as racing other cars. That this wasn't done was not down to lack of technology — it was available and could have been implemented in Forza. However, we had to reluctantly concede that in-race training would be too risky in terms of introducing bugs, and equally, would have eaten into the limited CPU and memory resources available during race time. Certainly though, any future implementation of the Drivatar system should incorporate "real-time" training during races. 

Drivatars are useless at overtaking

This, of course, is a consequence of the above issue. Because the only implemented Drivatar training was via individual lessons in isolation of other cars, it was not possible to "learn" a model of how the player might overtake, or otherwise deal with other types of vehicle interaction. As such, the "built-in" AI overtaking system had to be used in conjunction with the Drivatar, and often wasn't a good match. 

Drivatars rip me off!

People regularly complain that the Drivatar takes too great a proportion of the prize money. Well, in truth, it does seem that the Drivatar drives a particularly hard bargain, but maybe that is only fair otherwise it would be too easy to progress in the game? What is a pity, though, is that a Drivatar's winnings have no relevance to the game; they effectively disappear into a black hole. Perhaps, at a minimum, certain levels of winnings could have unlocked or won a car or two. Anyway, in the end, its a shame there isn't more incentive to develop a Drivatar's career because it can be quite entertaining, engaging, and graphically pleasing via the "replay" camera, to watch your Drivatar compete in races for you. As Edge Magazine said "The Drivatar feature in Forza is not so much a clever bonus as a game in its own right, and one that Microsoft would do well to explore in future". We naturally agree! 

The "Head to Head" race

What is that, you may be asking? Hidden away in "Train Drivatar" mode is the head to head race, where a player with a mature Drivatar can set up a one-off race against an arbitrary set of Drivatar AI opponents (both trained and built-in). There is plenty of good fun to be had racing against one's own Drivatar, or several instances of them in various different cars. Also, you could race against any other Drivatars, e.g. friends', that you had to hand on a memory unit. Unfortunately, gamers typically don't bother too much with memory units and sharing game content in that way.

Obviously, it would be so much more compelling to be able to upload one's Drivatar to Xbox Live, and similarly download other Drivatars to race against in "Head to Head". Players could choose to race their friends' Drivatars, perhaps the world's top-ranked Drivatars (according to some leaderboard system) or even specifically chosen "celebrity" Drivatars. Of course, the facility to upload Drivatars to Xbox Live would also open the door to plenty of other intriguing possibilities, such as hosting "official" Drivatar competition races etc. 

Drivatars are stupid!

While training your Drivatar, it's quite easy to make the odd mistake on one particular turn, perhaps crashing into a barrier or going off track. Subsequently, of course, your Drivatar will at first exhibit the same behaviour when racing for you. Not all the time, but on occasion and with a frequency consistent with the training data. This seems eminently sensible. In fact, this behaviour actually contributes to the sense that the Drivatar is genuinely modelling the player to a credible extent.

However, the problem is that the Drivatar will continue to make the same type of mistake, with the same frequency, even at the end of driving 100 laps on the same circuit! Your Drivatar does not learn from its mistakes. This clearly does not seem sensible, and one might consider it appropriate that the Drivatar somehow improved its driving based on its own racing experience.

It would have been relatively straightforward to implement a system where the Drivatar learned to both eradicate its mistakes and also improve its general driving. The absence of Drivatar self-improvement was therefore not a technical issue. Rather, this was down to the design philosophy of Drivatars. The Forza design team felt, understandably, that the Drivatar should be a virtual "avatar" of the player and mirror the player's abilities. Allowing the Drivatar to self-develop would have meant imbuing it with a life and character of its own, contrary to the design philosophy. For better or worse, this was ruled out, when arguably it could have made a significant positive contribution to the gameplay. In the end, Forza's challenging development schedule meant that opportunities to expand upon the Drivatar functionality beyond that which finally shipped in the game would have in truth been very limited anyway.

Nevertheless, in the best of all possible worlds, it seems to us that a fun and highly enjoyable game can be built around the concept of cultivating and furthering the career of your Drivatar (and, away from racing games, perhaps other types of trained avatar...). The Drivatar would remain trainable by the player, yet would be able to learn from experience. The player would have opportunities to influence their Drivatar's race strategy in real-time, and its winnings could benefit the player, if only to better facilitate the advancement of the Drivatar's skills and to permit access to certain other cars and races.