Forza 4 inspired by Pokémon, World of Warcraft

Forza Motorsport 4 draws inspiration from the wonderful world of racing, obviously - but also from a few less predictable sources.

"I tend to look at the other franchises that are not thinking about themselves as a competitive war in the marketplace —they think about a longer vision and the experience they want to provide to people," Turn 10 creative director Dan Greenawalt told GodIsAGeek.

"So, we take inspiration from Pokémon for our levelling systems and addictive layer rewards and variable schedule for rewards to get people addicted. World of Warcraft for our Auction House. Storefronts was from Yahoo Stores."

Greenawalt said Turn 10 is at "that nexus between passionate gamer culture and car culture", but looks at a lot of non-gaming sources for ideas and inspiraton rather than competing racers.

"I play all the other racing games but I take no inspiration from them because the goal is to actually push the genre forward, and we’re known for pushing so much more than most of the genre because of things with social and user-generated content," he said.

Forza Motorsport 4 is due exclusively on Xbox 360 on October 20. It boasts a Kinect-enabled showroom feature for drooling over your beastly machines.