What’s Good?: Seasonal Events in Forza Horizon 4 for Series 13 Autumn
It’s Autumn again, and that means another spooky assortment of seasonal championships to sort through.
Most of them can be summarized pretty quickly, so we’re going to break with format this week to get them out of the way before getting to the Big Bad of this episode.
The Trial this week is deceptively winnable. It looks daunting at first: you’re asked to race Dirt, then Cross Country, then Road. You’re also allowed to choose any S2 vehicle (the “Anything Goes” car type restriction). A less-seasoned driver might worry that they won’t pick the right car for the job, but if you start with your best Rally vehicle — whichever one you’ve been using to get personal bests on all the Speed Zones that are in the dirt — you’re already on your way. Going with a Rally tune will put you in great shape on 2 out of 3 of the races, which is exactly what you need to win the Trial.
Eurobeat Intensifies, the Retro Saloon championship, is a low-power Dirt series that’s not much to worry about; and Is This The Way To Castelletto? is an Italian-cars-only series to which you can efficiently apply the 2014 Lamborghini Huracán that is also used for the Weekly #Forzathon Challenge (which does not require any races of its own to complete!). Both of these championships award cars that have been seen before: the Mercedes-Benz E63 for the former, and a Forza Edition Alfa Romeo 8C for the latter.
The Autumn Community Championship
A Lesson in Punitive Design
Usually, when I first play through the week’s races, I try to remember to collect a bunch of photos along the way so that I don’t have to go back and run any of them again to find some good shots for the article. This week, I figured I would try to speed through the races first.
This series put a stop to that.
Any Community series will always require a little bit of adjustment. It’s natural; most players are used to running an assortment of the official Horizon series races, and they’ve run those tracks enough to not only be familiar with the terrain, but to have favorites and least-favorites. The first time you run any new race, it can take some time to get comfortable with where the track’s designer decided to place checkpoints, turns, and the like.
And in previous Community spotlights, we’ve … seen things. Checkpoints placed around a blind 90-degree turn behind some poplar trees. Dirt ramps that launch unsuspecting drivers high into the air, over a bright red racing line indicating that they’ve just launched themselves off the track. And of course… the “one-lane” checkpoint.
When you are driving in a Horizon series race —one of the official courses, available to everyone — you commonly see checkpoint “gates” that are roughly the width of the track on which you’re driving. These gates tell you which way you should be going, so you can focus on figuring out how you’re going to maneuver your way past your opponents.
In other words, the primary purpose of checkpoints is to define the width of the track, and where that track is, to allow you to plot your own course through it, with your opponents as potential obstacles to overcome.
A wider track means there is more room for drivers to make mistakes by choosing a less-optimal line, or strategy for maneuvering around opponents. The more narrow your track is, the less room there is for a driver to create their own movement strategy. Instead of worrying about whether your line is the most efficient, you’re now worrying about whether you can precisely drive the only line that is acceptable, or be teleported back several seconds as punishment.
While this can be fun and challenging in the right setting, I continue to hold the position that this type of punitive design runs counter to everything else presented by and in Horizon, and making it count towards Festival completion is a problem. However, the current form and structure of Horizon revolves entirely around the Festival Playlist and encouraging players to consume the weekly content by rewarding them for its completion; restructuring that is an entirely different conversation.
This week, I saw more vehicular horror take place at the hands of community designers than I can recall in recent memory.
I saw multiple narrow checkpoints used as a “slalom” over uneven terrain, where even if you got through a gate, you might go directly over a bump that flips you in a random direction.
I saw checkpoints at the edges of ramps going up a stack of shipping containers, jumping to another stack of shipping containers, where any misstep could mean falling, missing a checkpoint, having to rewind, or falling from first to last place if you were unable to rewind.
These aren’t challenges that “shouldn’t” be in Horizon at all, but they seem to stick out a lot when they’re placed on the same platform as the Horizon series of races, and this aggressively punitive use of checkpoints is the reason why.
Phew! That was a lot of words. Have fun with the rest of the season, y’all. Be safe out there.
