Don’t you mean Playground instead of turn10?
Nope, I actually mean Turn 10. Playground do fantastic work as well, but they are just improving on what Turn 10 has done.
Forza 7 was the first AAA effort to get their game running on PC and the scalability of it was phenomenal, even compared to developers who had been working on PC for a long long time. This shows a deep underlying understanding of the hardware. Also considering that at a time when they were (still are I guess) competing with Gran Turismo and how close they got to GT's graphics when the latter ran at 30 FPS on PS3 while they ran at 60 FPS on X360. That's incredibly impressive, IMO. Far more so than any other MS team. Forza Horizons was 30 FPS on X360. And the Gears games on X360 were also 30 FPS, IIRC.
Making a 30 FPS game look good on PS3/X360 isn't even remotely as impressive to me as making a 60 FPS game look good on PS3/X360. I know others may disagree, and that's fine. But talk to most developers and they'll almost always say that making something look good in a screenshot is much easier when you have 16.6 ms per frame than if you only have 8.3 ms per frame.
The ability to make a game scale seemlessly
and well across a large range of disparate hardware is also incredibly impressive, IMO. Just look at how many developers can't do that. Turn 10 not only did it well, but they also did it while looking good.
While Gears of War 4 came out on PC before Forza 7, it wasn't nearly as accomplished an engine as what Turn 10 did with Forza 7 on PC. Of course, The Coalition then came out with Gears 5 which really showed their mastery of the hardware.
It's one thing to make something look and run well on one piece of hardware. It's especially impressive if you can fully leverage that hardware and make it do things others can't do. It's something else entirely to not only be able to do that with one piece of hardware, but to then have it work virtually flawlessly with thousands of combinations of different pieces of hardware.
That shows a deep understanding of hardware and not only what do do on that hardware but what not to do. Considering MS' aspirations WRT the distribution of their games, it can't be understated just how important this is.
We'll see what Playground Games can do now that they have their own IP that they get to work on, rather than just modifying and extending an existing IP and engine.
Regards,
SB