The Completionist Life: Forza Horizon 4 (Part I)
Forza Horizon 4! It seems like the only thing I talk about these days. And to think that before this game launched last year, I was playing all sorts of Other Games(TM). And, perhaps someday, I will play all sorts of Other Games(TM) again. But today is not that day.
On its surface, Horizon is a car-driving game and usually a car-racing game. And I mean, you could stop right there if you wanted to, and that would be a barely adequate description. It’s when you look at the hundreds and hundreds of vehicles, many of which can be modified for various different racing disciplines — Road, Dirt, Cross Country and Street (and the oft-forgotten Drag) — that this description begins to lack depth. There’s also “PR Stunts” like speed traps and “danger signs” (ramps to jump and beat a distance target). Then there are Horizon Stories, multiple series of scripted vignettes which are mostly wrapped around the “drive this particular car over there really fast” core mechanic. Rivals. Online Adventure. There’s just a lot of stuff, and it’s all just shoved into FH4’s more-flashy-than-functional menu interface in such a way that you can easily get lost. But getting lost in Horizon is fun. So much fun, in fact, that I’ll forget what I was doing 15 minutes ago when a popup said “#FORZATHON LIVE begins in 5:00”.
Getting Started
When you start FH4 for the first time, you’re shoved into an extended introductory period (approximately ~5 hours, depending on how you play) of offline races and events that are meant to show you the ropes. Long story short, Horizon keeps some of its content locked — including the “Horizon Life” online servers — until you’ve completed four offline seasons’ worth of races and events. After a cutscene explaining that you’ve earned some kinda official Horizon wristband, making you an official Horizon Festival driver, the training wheels finally come off.
And this is where our story begins…
Everything Counts
The first thing I’d tell you is that Influence isn’t just player XP. There’s a “Global Influence”, sure, and that’s basically level or rank. But you’ll also notice by poking through the menus that there’s a screen that shows you… this.
Damn near everything has an Influence track associated with it.
So where do we start?
Explore
You might have a couple of cars at this point. You might have a favorite car or two. Maybe you’ve got a little cache of Credits. A lot of the map is probably still in grayscale, unexplored. The first thing I wanted to do was uncover the whole damn thing. That would let me see all my options, sure, but there’s also an achievement for driving on every road in the map. (Fair warning: some of what the game recognizes as “roads” on the map are barely a few pixels, and it might be incredibly difficult to figure out which 1 or 2 roads you haven’t been on when you’re almost done.)
Race
Race! You don’t have to win to gain Influence in the different race disciplines, but it helps. And as you acquire different vehicles, you can try them out on the same courses, and see if one is better suited than the other.
This might be a good place to throw a quick glossary term or two as well, in case you missed them:
Class — When FH4 refers to the class of a vehicle, it’s talking about the letter and number next to it. Other Forzas also call this number the Performance Index, or PI. Generally, this index is calculated based on a couple of factors, most directly horsepower and weight. Other factors might be silently calculated into PI, like tire grip and clutch shift speed, but they’re more opaque. Generally speaking, a higher-class car means a quicker-paced race.
Championship — This might be what you think of when you think of the word “class”, which is generally a vehicle type. This is FH4’s term for that. Modern Sports Cars, Offroad Buggies, and Sports Utility Heroes are a few of the Championship types your cars will be divvied up into.
Most of the time, when you want to start an exhibition race against the AI opponents, the game will automatically lock to your current car’s Class and Championship so that you’re racing against similarly-ranked vehicles. (There are a few courses, usually in the Cross Country Series, that are locked to specific Championships, like Sports Utility Heroes. Circumventing that requires using the Blueprint feature that I won’t get into here.) That’s why I mention Class and Championship, to make sure you’re familiar with the mechanics at play.
Taking the time to try out all of the different races as they unlock will grant you several types of progress. You’ll get Global Influence and CR just for completing races. You’ll get Influence in each racing type, which can lead to unlocking more silly chat lines and clothing options, but also some new cars! And since part of being a Completionist is owning as many of the different cars as possible, you want to keep an eye out for when the next rank will gift you one.
Know Your Difficulty Settings
Now, I’m not going to tell you what to do here, except I am.
Also, I’ve been avoiding writing the word “Drivatar” because I absolutely loathe it. Let’s not write it a second time.
Having worked with the Driving Assists pictured above for a good long while now, I feel comfortable saying that it’s well worth making these your default settings as soon as you can tolerate them. It’s not just a bump in the amount of CR you receive for a race. It gives you more manual control over your steering and braking (without going “full simulation”), which you want to get used to. Having ABS off, and Traction Control and Stability Control off, will also help you later with drifting and more stylish driving, and what good is it to play a driving game without styling on it?
Car Modding 101
Don’t get too anxious. Car tuning is an entire vast world, and we’re not going to deep-dive into it here. All we’re going to talk about right now is upgrades, or mods. (You’ll be able to find more in-depth information on tuning from other sources, such as the pleasant YouTuber HokiHoshi, but I’m also going to rant about it in a future piece.)
Even if you don’t know anything, you can slap the wrong parts on a car and drive it. It’s great, and it’s educational, and I highly recommend it. That ’65 Mini Cooper S you found in a barn? Shove the loudest engine you can find in there. It’s not sticking to the road any more? Add some race tires. It’s still having trouble? Then you’re probably getting a lot of drift skill points.
The first reason I’m writing this section now is to get it out of the way, so that you’re not all left wondering how to take on a higher-class race if all you have are lower-class vehicles. The second reason is a warning: not every B-class car will magically perform better if you simply add parts so that it has an S1/S2 rating.
If you don’t want to get into modding, you don’t have to. You can drive all your cars stock, and get good at driving them that way. It’s the way they were designed, after all. But if you want to get into modding and just don’t have the time or energy to actually do it yourself, you can always take a look at the tunes others have shared for your vehicle, and take a chance on some of them. People tune up championship winners all the time, and they can make your car feel dramatically different.
For everyone else, there are lots of resources, and I’ll eventually compile some here myself.
Getting Stuff
You’re running races. You’re doing PR stunts. Maybe you’ve even jumped ahead, and created a blueprint of an existing race that you love, and set it to 20 laps so you can grind out a few extra CR.
You’ve got the basics down. Now it’s time to really start collecting.
The Wheelspin Economy
As far as I can tell, the intended game loop involves running races and other activities that reward you with Credits, so that you can spend those Credits on cars in the Autoshow (and the mods for those cars). But, you also need Credits to purchase the player houses scattered across the map (see below), and some of those houses give you some very useful benefits.
Luckily, the game loves to hand out Wheelspins. The bad news is that they’re luck-based, but the good news is that they mostly hand out Credits and cars (moreso, once you’ve collected all of the clothing options for player models).
The important part, though, is this: the game loves to hand out Wheelspins. And any car you can buy in the Autoshow, you can potentially get from a Wheelspin.
Save your credits. Don’t worry about buying cars from the Autoshow. At least, not for a long time. If you are to follow my Completionist path, the cars will come to you as you need them. The Wheelspins will provide.
Barn Finds
Horizon drops the concept of the Barn Find in one of the introductory seasons: a call comes in, someone tells you there’s a rare old car in a barn somewhere, and they send you off with a little halo on the map telling you where to look for it. Each of these Barn Finds is a specific car, and all players who complete the Barn Finds will have all fifteen of these specific cars. (Unless they sell them at the Auction House, like the weirdos that they are.) Once you find the barn and drive up to it, you get a cute little cutscene and eventually a new car is added to your inventory.
You might not like all fifteen of these cars, but they’ll always be free of charge, and we love free stuff.
Player Houses
Aside from the default garage at the Horizon Festival, you can also purchase any/all of the other available Player Houses on the map, and set any of them as a Home in order to start there when you launch the game. They don’t add garage space or anything (for those of you coming from, say, Grand Theft Auto), but a few of them have some very specific perks that you’ll want for various reasons. Save your early CR for these, and it’ll make the rest of your journey a lot easier.
The Huntsman’s Lodge in the Lakehurst Forest region, for example, adds Skill Songs to radio stations. This just means that when you’re listening to the radio and a Skill Song pops up, you can get up to a 10.0x multiplier on skill score earned during the track. (If you almost never listen to the radio, you will almost always get a Skill Song immediately upon switching the radio on after a prolonged period with it off.)
The Gables house in Broadway unlocks Drone Mode, which lets you fly a cute little drone around. You’d think it’s just cute, but it can make searching for Barn Finds (or even some of the more-obscure Bonus Boards, for that matter) a lot more speedy and flexible. Try not to forget you have it when a Barn Find comes up. (Hovering near the barn with a drone will put the barn’s actual location on your map, so that you can drive to it and unlock the car.)
Fairlawn Manor, north of the Moorhead Wind Farm, unlocks Fast Travel anywhere. Combine this with finding all of the Fast Travel bonus boards so you never have to think about trading Credits for mobility again. Yes, driving everywhere is fun! But you’re going to do that anyways. Best to have options.
Finally, the Lake Lodge north of Derwent Water grants 2x Forza Points, which means that a successful three rounds of any #FORZATHON LIVE are worth 60 FP rather than 30, making it easier to save up FP to spend on Wheelspins / Super Wheelspins.
Some other extravagantly-expensive homes will give you some one-time gifts like Super Wheelspins. They might not fully pay you back for what you spent on the house, but once you’ve bought these houses, you can use any of them as a garage, forever. Personally, I’m fond of the Bamburgh Castle on the eastern shore. The hills in its front yard are delightful to bounce around in while a Skill Song is running on Timeless FM.
Hard-To-Find Cars
The two main ways to get more cars are to either buy them from the Autoshow tab in your garage, or win them from Wheelspins for free. Most anything that can’t be found in either of these places is considered a “hard-to-find” car in Forza, and will occasionally pop up in the Forzathon Shop, or as a reward for a Seasonal Championship. We’ll try to cover those below. The bottom line is that when you spot one of these, it could be a while before you see it again unless you’re stacked with Credits and are fortunate in the Auction House, so you want to grab these whenever they’re available.
Skills
If you don’t aggressively adhere to traffic laws, you’ve probably gotten some skill score already, either by breaking stuff with your car or going faster than you’re supposed to. Skill score gives you skill points (not confusing at all), which can be spent on each car’s available perks. Most cars have at least one perk that’s just a Wheelspin, and the more cars you have, the more Wheelspin perks you’ll eventually unlock. Plus, spending skill points on perks gives you Skills Influence, which often gives you a Wheelspin when you rank up, contributing to the reward loop.
Some cars have perks that will make it easier to farm skill points in ways that might be right in line with how you like to goof around. Some cars’ perks will be more geared towards racing — Pass, Drafting, and Clean Racing skills can only be earned during a race, not while goofing around in freemode. Others may have a Convoy bonus for playing with friends, and still others will have a higher maximum multipler or build that multiplier faster. Experiment and you can find out what will get you the most points in the shortest time.
A quick note, though, that 50,000 skill score is equal to 1 skill point, and you can only earn a maximum of 10 skill points in a single combo (500,000 skill score). There’s an Xbox achievement for cracking a 1 million point combo, but beyond that, there’s little reason to risk breaking a combo with a collision if you’ve already gotten over 500k.
Forzathon
The word “Forzathon” usually refers to a weekly, multi-chapter challenge, while “Forzathon Live” is an hourly online group challenge which I’ll cover in a second. The important part is that both of these things are worth Forzathon Points (FP), which are exchanged in a Forzathon Shop for Wheelspins, Super Wheelspins, and two hand-picked rare vehicles each week —sometimes the “hard-to-find” cars mentioned earlier.
When you’re first starting out, if you’re grinding out a little Forzathon stuff on your routes, you can save up FP to purchase vehicles from the Forzathon Shop that you don’t already have. After a while, you’ll likely see cars in the Shop that you already own, and you can put those FP towards Super Wheelspins, instead, to grind even more car-collecting and CR-earning. There’s basically never a bad time to grind out Forzathon Points.
Okay. So. #FORZATHON LIVE is an online co-op event that happens on the hour, every hour. If you see this notification, there is a location on the map where you and up to 11 other players can show up, and you’ll all be shunted onto a separate server instance where you’ll be presented with up to three successive PR Stunts. For each round, you’ll be tasked to meet a point total by running the same PR Stunt repeatedly until the point total is met. This could be a Speed Trap, Speed Zone, Drift Zone, or Danger Sign (or Trailblazer, if you’re in the DLC areas). The point total appears to scale to the number of players, which can be good or bad depending on what, and how, other players are driving.
Bring your best and highest-rated cars, so you can have the best shot at putting in good numbers each time you hit the Forzathon Live PR Stunts. But also be aware of whether the PR Stunts are primarily on the road or the dirt, because your best car on the road might have a hard time doing the same amount of work on the dirt.
Completing Round 1 will activate Round 2, and completing Round 2 will activate Round 3. You have a total of 15 minutes to complete all 3 rounds successfully. Each round is worth 10 FP normally, but once you own the double-Forzathon-Points house, each round is permanently worth 20 FP. This means that you can earn up to 60 FP every hour that you show up.
A quick aside: Forzathon Live is one of my favorite things about Horizon 4, for a couple of reasons. One, if you just log in near the top of the hour, it’s a good place to grab a few quick FP and then get back to whatever you were doing. Two, it’s a reason to show up and show off your more ridiculous car designs to people you’ll never meet.
Forzathon Live also happens in both of the DLC regions, and not just on the “mainland”. If you show up often enough to any of them, you’ll start to recognize the possible patterns of PR Stunts. There’s a good number of them, but they’re not entirely random. Each starting point will lead to three specific PR Stunts, and once you’ve seen them a few times, you might start to switch to the car(s) that you know have been tested there. Some PR stunts are on the road and some are in the dirt. You’ll get a feel for it.
Difficulty Settings (Again)
I mentioned the difficulty settings earlier, in passing. If you’re trying to save up CR for cars, upgrades, or player houses, you might want to double-check the difficulty settings before a race, and you’ll probably start wanting to challenge yourself with slightly-less-crappy AI at some point. (The game tries to push this a lot if you haven’t changed the AI setting after winning a few races, but go at your own pace.)
Every little thing you can tweak in the difficulty settings while still winning a race will net you another 5–10% of your total CR at the end of a race. It will also scale with the duration of a race, so more time spent in a race will mean more CR and Influence at the end.
Rewards for Racing
Don’t forget that some of the racing disciplines will reward you with cars at certain ranks as you gain Influence in them. The same is true of Horizon Stories; many of them have at least one vehicle that can only be obtained by playing through them.
There was also a recent addition to the menus called “Car Collection” that lists all of the cars in the game and where you can get them. It’s less useful for figuring out where to spend your time, but more useful if you have a weird hankering to find one specific car.
Forza Edition Cars
Almost forgot one other important thing. A car that says FORZA EDITION in its name is basically a slightly souped-up version of its non-FE counterpart. They’ll come up in Wheelspins, which is another reason you want to let the game hand you as many Wheelspins as you can stand early on.
The other reason you want them is because every FE car has a specific kind of “boost” associated with it. Some will have an Influence Boost, adding more Influence for completing events while driving them. Others will have a Credit Boost, giving you an extra percentage of your winnings when you finish a race. There’s also Skill Boost, giving you more skill score for some or all skills performed in the car.
Credit Boost is great for grinding out long races if you’re saving up ten million credits for that castle you always wanted. I never really had problems with Influence, so I never worried about Influence Boost. But for me, Skill Boost has always been where it’s at. For me, there’s nothing like taking a Renault 5 Turbo FE out over the sand dunes and clocking 50–100 skill points on a single Skill Song. That’s enough to buy all the perks on most any other car.
You’ll get there.
Next Time
This is the first in a series of articles about doing everything there is to do in Horizon. Next time, we’ll dig a little further into the more-flashy-than-functional menus, figure out some optimal settings, and try to learn just enough about tuning to be dangerous for PR Stunts so we can keep killing it at Forzathon Live. Until then, Happy Completionist…ing.
