By rain or by shine, Forza 6 is a beast

Forza Motorsport 6 is big on numbers. It has 450 cars, 26 locations, two-player split-screen, 24 on-track competitors, a 70-hour career campaign, all running at 1080p / 60 frames per second.

So much for the stats.

It's also got a Ford GT supercar, a 1962 Ferrari 250 GTO and a Lamborghini Huracan, all of which are on display here at E3.

This is Turn 10's third Forza game since the introduction of Xbox One, and the second in the core series. According to creative director Dan Greenawalt, additional time working with the console has broadened the developer's ability to simulate driving.

"This is the biggest game we've made," he says, before roaring through a few of those headline stats.

During our demo, he talks enthusiastically about the game's rain systems and about nighttime driving.

"We were determined to build both rain and night that you have never seen before, that was meticulously researched," he says. "The feeling of the spray on the car, the limited visibility and also hydroplaning, that you've never really experienced.

"We want night to be claustrophobic. We want you to see night coming in around you. You're racing by your headlights at 250 miles per hour. We want you to feel that tension. Most games, nighttime is just like dark day. We want it to feel as it does in real life. It's dark. Outside your headlights there's nothing there."

I play the demo. Night does feel somehow different. It's much more difficult to drive than daytime. Rain is a genuine hazard. I drive around Rio in the Ferrari. Beautiful place. Beautiful car.

The career mode allows players to dip in and out of different eras, experimenting with cars from various golden ages. Narrations have been added to tell stories about motor-sport.

Greenawalt says that players can choose to only drive modern cars. Such is the loveliness of these old vehicles, and such is the granularity of detail in terms of how they handle, that it seems unlikely to me that anyone would actually make such a choice, but each to their own.

Forza Motorsport 6 will be released on Xbox One on Sept. 15.