What’s Good?: Seasonal Events in Forza Horizon 4 for Series 11 Autumn (Thursday, July 11th, 2019)
Hello, Crill here. I’ve been trying to do absolutely everything in Forza Horizon 4 lately, and it’s said that you should “write what you know”, so in an effort to start writing on a regular basis, this will be the first in what I’m hoping is a series of weekly breakdowns of seasonal championships, challenges and rewards. Since it’s the first, it’ll probably run longer than subsequent weekly writeups. If you think it’s any good, or want to see more of it, feel free to let me know!
The entire Festival Playlist covers four weeks, starting with Summer; this week is Autumn. If you completed the Summer season at 100%, this actually puts your Festival completion over 25%, because three of the Playlist objectives — Monthly Rivals, Online Adventure, and the latest Horizon Story —only need to be completed once in order to count towards all four seasons.
Rewards
The rewards for season completion are a Chevrolet Impala (at 50% complete) and the ’65 Pontiac GTO (at 80%). If you manage to hit 50% Festival completion this week, you’ll also get a Festival reward of a 1926 Bugatti Type 35 C. (The Impala and GTO are both classified as “Hard To Find” cars, not normally available for purchase with in-game credits, but the Bugatti is freely available from Wheelspins or direct purchase from the Autoshow — if you have 10 million credits, anyway.)
Weekly Championships
Road Racing Series: FR Spotlight
Last week’s “FF Spotlight” championship series was a bit unexpected. The “FF” stood for front-engine layout, front-wheel drive. FWD in Forza is a bit dicey to begin with, and basing an entire championship around it made for some … teachable moments. I haven’t exactly studied or practiced racing FWD because it was never important to learn, as almost every vehicle with a FWD option also had an AWD option that was easier to drive and didn’t cost much to set up.
This week’s “FR Spotlight” is still front-engine layout, but rear-wheel drive — a much more common occurrence in stock Horizon vehicles. Driving RWD is usually not nearly as optimal as just swapping an AWD drivetrain, but there are occasionally very specific instances where it’s either useful or required. Some Story missions will put you in a specific RWD car, or, if you’re inclined to play in the recently-added Drift Adventure online series, some Adventures require either AWD or RWD.
A lot of older cars that come stock with RWD don’t suffer for it, as they don’t push so much power as to make it unmanageable. This championship, however, is an S1 class (900 PI) series, and just slapping more horsepower into it will make you spin out uselessly if you’re the kind of driver who just mashes the throttle at the green light. This can be a little tricky for less-experienced drivers (FH4 is actually the first Horizon I’ve played, and the first Forza I’ve dug this deeply into!).
I was a little more fortunate. A while back, I’d already performed one successful RWD experiment: an Alfa Romeo 8C Competizione (Forza Edition) tuned up to S1 — coincidentally the required class for this series. (I actually ended up using an Aston Martin Vanquish that I’d never touched before for these races, but it was quick to set up because I’d already had some experience with the 8C.)
Like any seasonal championship, there’s a few ways you can tackle it. If you’re an experienced driver, you can find a shared tune for the car you want to drive and see how it runs. If you’re good at DIY, you can pick a car that’s already FR by default (as my Vanquish was), and tweak its settings a bit so that it’s properly geared and balanced.
I found that my 8C setup didn’t have the best acceleration, but once it got to speed it could handle corners better than I expected it to… and sometimes better than the driving line expected it to. I was better at passing opponents on the corners than on straightaways. It felt backwards, but it worked. The Vanquish worked just as well, if not better, as long as I was careful on the throttle in the rain.
Street Racing Series: The Sky Is The Limit
I’m not usually a fan of Street races. By default they are generally at night, they have no restrictions on vehicle type, and there’s civilian traffic in the way. I won’t get into it here.
For some reason, this series didn’t feel too bad. It could have something to do with the fact that it’s all Nissan Skylines (GT-Rs) which I generally have a good time with. It might also be the B-class (700) rating. I think B-class is a really good starting point for most newer players who want to get a handle on driving and have fun, without requiring lightning-quick reflexes in order to survive a race. And since I’m rarely in the mood for a Street race except to knock out another panel on the Festival Playlist, a chill race is better than a high-energy race.
Road Racing Series: McLaren Cup
Speaking of a high-energy race, here’s something with far less chill: three S2 (998)-rated point-to-point races in a row. In Hypercars, no less — the fastest shit you can do in Horizon without pushing into the unlimited X-class.
The good news is that you’re racing McLaren vehicles, some of the smoothest rides in the game. The bad news is that everyone else is, too. The silver lining is that it’s usually all over in less than a couple of minutes. But, that’s after a lot of clenching.
I generally understand the Road series of races better than the other disciplines because it’s what the game taught me first, and what I chose to focus on when I first started learning to tune up my own cars. I can balance a hypercar quickly and decently, even if I don’t spend an hour driving over the same patch of road forty times to fine-tune the wheel camber or something. All of this helps to keep the car barely hanging on to the corners while I’m busy making just enough mistakes to make these races interesting.
I don’t hate racing the most challenging cars that Forza has to offer; it’s just not my preference. But I also know these tracks well enough to be able to win them consistently when they come up in seasonals, and I know a lot of players are fans of the old, reliable, title-screen-featured McLaren Senna, so I can safely say that it’ll serve you just as well as it served me in this championship, if not even better. (Sorry, LEGO fans, but the LEGO Senna is not eligible to compete here.)
Forzathon Weekly Challenge: Over The Road
This week’s multi-chapter Forzathon challenge is centered around the 2015 Mercedes-Benz #24 “Tankpool24” Racing Truck.
I don’t know how the average Horizon player feels about it, but every time I’m presented with a challenge that involves a big-ass truck or some silly three-wheeled science project, I feel as if the game is telling me that I should already have known how to deal with these vehicles by now. And every time it comes up, I waste an hour beating my head against a wall and wondering what I’m doing wrong, and have to take a little break to clear my head and clean my ego wounds.
So being hit with a Tankpool challenge that required me to win three Street races (the ones with no vehicle type restriction, remember? where you’re going to be racing against regular-ass cars in a big-ass truck?) was initially pretty frustrating.
Like I said earlier, I’m not a big fan of Street races. And when a weekly challenge requires Street races, you’re going to win one of two ways: by actually having the best car and doing the best driving, or by having better luck than your opponents as they catch the wrong end of traffic while you squeak through.
You’ll also have a horrible time if you like driving in third-person view, behind your vehicle. Not only is it dark, but the absolute unit of a Tankpool will hog most of your screen, obscuring anything directly in front of you. This includes the all-important racing line, opponents, and those poor civilian vehicles.
I’ll try to save you a little sweat: when you’re running Street races, you’re usually looking to win with a car that races better at its current Performance Index than the majority of other cars in that range. And when you start a solo race, it seeds the race with AI opponents whose vehicles are at or near your current car’s PI (without exceeding its class maximum). If you’re the type of player who tries to tune everything to its maximum PI, maybe consider not doing that. At least, not at first. Save your credits, and just tune up the stock components as well as you can, and see how they perform. And practice driving in “hood-view” so you aren’t blind.
As far as running the Street races themselves, with this lunkhead, the fewer corners the better. You can’t always out-speed the other cars, but you can almost never out-corner them. There are just a few places in some tracks where the racing line takes a very slight curve that you can exploit when the AI overcompensates and pumps the brakes a little too hard, and you’ll barrel right past them without having to worry too much about cornering. (Oh, and you don’t want to race against Unbeatable AI here, unless you’re a glutton for punishment.)
To get a little technical about the tuning: My base racing tunes usually have pretty stiff rollbars and suspension, balanced based on the car’s weight distribution, and a fair amount of differential lock (per the information in HokiHoshi’s tuning series). But for this, I had to take that entire differential lock down to 0% and soften the rollbars to about 5–10% of their maximum just to get it to a place where I could corner almost adequately.
It’s almost like trucks aren’t your normal racing cars.
Huh.
