Ah, Spring in the Horizon Festival, yadda yadda. The weather’s not the best, but the road conditions have a slight chance of being good! The spirit of Spring (and all the new allergies that come with it) in this week’s events feels a little bit like the Playground team doubling down on some of their previous experiments with seasonal championships, and I think it’s a mixed bag for reasons I’ll try to lay out by the end of this.
Weekly Challenge: Gruppe B
This week’s Forzathon challenge is a whole lot of things I’m not a fan of: Porsche, Retro Supercars, and two chapters requiring multiple races (Dirt Trail and Street Scene). I have a difficult time wrangling the 1987 Porsche 959 to do my bidding, partly because I have similar problems with other Retro Supers and partly because rear-engine cars require driving and/or tuning adjustments I’m still struggling with. This puts me at a disadvantage whenever I race a Porsche against something that’s not a Porsche, and the Street Scene events have no car restrictions by default.
If these races also give you a hard time, you can always lower the AI difficulty prior to starting a race. They’re not championships, so all you have to do is win a couple races at any difficulty to progress.
The Championships
The Dirty Derby
The most pure of this week’s championships is a three-event dirt racing series — Tarn Hows Scramble, Ambleside Scramble, and Derwentwater Trail — for B-class (700) Retro Rally cars. (My ’82 Lancia 037 Stradale has done enough of this particular type of series that it was a no-brainer for me.) It feels like a good combination of races, class, and car type every time it pops up. Maybe it’s just me, but if this exact combination of races and restrictions came up again under a different name, I’d enjoy it just as much as I do this week whether I realized it or not. Find your bliss.
Lambing Season
This series features the few Lamborghinis made for offroad driving: the URUS and the LM 002. You’re locked to A-class (800), which doesn’t leave modders a lot of room to upgrade, but a setup with offroad tires is still viable (and recommended) without exceeding the class. The other hitch is that one of the three races is an asphalt Road Racing track.
My general rule for these multi-typed championships has been to mod and/or tune for a balance between all the track types, but that’s more for my own comfort than anything else. If you run these in co-op, you’ll be stuck in the same car for the whole series, but so will everyone else, and they’ll have the same problems you do. It might be a lose-lose, but… uh… that makes it a win-win. Somehow.
Racing Through The Years: The 1980s
Speaking of multi-typed championships, we’ve finally reached the end of the month, and (possibly) the end of the Racing Through The Years series. Since they’ve been consistent, I don’t have anything new to say about them, really. My warnings from previous weeks are exactly the same. If you’re just playing solo, you can go with the car that works best for you in each individual race. If you play online, you get one car for all three races, so balance it mostly for offroad.
The Trial: Aston Martin Cup
I don’t usually write what I like or don’t like about The Trial, because events that are locked to online co-op or 6v6 will be better or worse depending largely on the mix of players who are thrown in with you; you’ll get a winning team, or they’ll generally abandon ship. In any given week, a successful Trial or Playground Games might require several entries until you end up with the right team.
That said, this week’s Trial is slightly notable because it’s following the multi-type pattern of most of the other championships this week: two Road Races, and one Street Scene. But this pairing isn’t quite as radical as others. The Trial is locked to Aston Martins, which are mostly Super GTs, eliminating the usual lack of car type restrictions on Street Scene races. If anything, this mix of racing types is mostly harmonious, creating a larger pool of tracks to mix together for future series championships.
Is It Good?
I tend to think that Forza, and most games, are at their best when they’re able to consistently provide just enough challenge without being frustrating. Of course that’s a really broad and difficult-to-quantify statement, just as it’s difficult for designers and developers to make sure the majority of their players can find that sweet spot in their games.
If the weekly championships continue trending towards including a mixture of dirt and asphalt in a single series, it’ll be a departure from how they’ve been curated in Horizon 4 up to this point. Players like me might shy away more often from running them in online co-op or PVP, and that functionality might feel less useful to them, if it’s too difficult or frustrating to keep setting up a single vehicle to run multiple race types for which it’s not very well suited.
If these are just a series of experiments — like previous championships with, for example, restrictions involving drivetrain and engine layout — then where are they likely to go next?
