What’s Good?: Seasonal Events in Forza Horizon 4 for Series 13 Autumn (September 5–11, 2019)
Summer’s over and the rain is back in force, just in time for some very slip-slidey races. You’ve got a repeat Showcase Remix on the schedule, as well as a couple of Porsche cars as season and championship rewards. It’s almost like they want me to figure out how to drive a frickin’ Porsche, or else.
The Championships
Autumn Community Championship
I was braced for a rough time on this series after seeing the layouts of the courses Playground picked for this week’s Community Championship. Two of the tracks clocked in at over 10 miles, a long hike by Horizon standards. At first glance, one of them bills itself as a Dirt race while the other two are Road. (Don’t believe ’em, though; the “Dirt” race takes place on 100% asphalt. I’m not sure why it shows up as a Dirt series race, really. It might have been the Blueprinter’s error.) At any rate, these races are actually pretty good. The creators each took advantage of the available roads in ways that were challenging but not so unusual that they clashed with the existing Horizon series courses. That’s worthy of being a Playground-endorsed championship series.
There are a few little gotchas in this S1-class Modern Muscle series. Morning races on wet roads will occasionally have you driving directly into the sun, completely obscuring the racing line in the glare. There’s also at least one slight incline where the racing line turns red, but only after you’ve crested the hill, and doing so at high speed will make it impossible to correct course… either because you couldn’t see the red line, or because you’re now airborne. (Or both, I suppose.)
A well-tuned machine will get a chance to show off a little bit of everything. You’ll want a good top speed for the extra-long straightaways, but decent low-end acceleration for the tight and technical city corners. You’ll also need a lot of throttle control, because every road is wet, and it’s very easy to spin your tires accelerating out of a corner.
RR Spotlight / Neunelfer
These two championships can be talked about at roughly the same time because they have two major things in common. Both are Street Scene series, which usually have an “anything goes” policy with regard to car type. But Neunelfer is a Porsche-only series, and RR Spotlight’s restrictions are “rear-engine, rear-wheel-drive”, and the vast majority of vehicles that fit into that category just happen to be Porsches (and maybe one or two Offroad Buggies).
So you’re most likely to end up picking a Porsche that works for you for both of these championships.
If you’ve followed these weekly articles for a while — and you probably haven’t, and that’s okay — you’ll know the author’s historical (and hysterical) bias against rear-engine cars and rear-wheel-drive cars. But this week’s RR Spotlight, which imposes both of those restrictions, can be handled.
Habitual modders and tuners who tend to wreak havoc under the hood of everything they drive can potentially dig themselves too deep if they try to overpower a RR spec. Too much power in the rear of the car will not only make it more easy to spin out the tires, but it’ll also cause the (lighter-weight) front half of the car to lift during acceleration, making your steering even more difficult and unpredictable. Sometimes a stock Porsche will do exactly what you want, and maybe that’s all you need to get through this series.
The Trial: Stock Superlights
Today we learned that Playground Games can do more than limit a championship series to a particular class, or vehicle type, or drivetrain. The Trial is locked to the Caterham Superlight, and no parts can be modified; the car must be driven stock.
The general player base already appears to treat the Trial as a disposable co-op, where a number of players quit the race at the slightest hint of a loss so they can immediately re-queue until they find the group that will carry them to victory, thus making the Trial a crapshoot that takes a couple of tries to complete regardless. So I’m tempted to review this week’s Trial restrictions as a colossal bad idea, or at the very least, an idea that isn’t worthy of its actual audience.
But there’s one small thing in the players’ favor: you can’t modify the parts, but you can still tune them, or download a zero-cost tune that keeps all the stock parts in the vehicle. This might not be immediately obvious, and it probably won’t stop a round-one mass exodus or guide more players to victory than usual.
I’ve taken issue with the Trial on more than one occasion. It’s meant to be one of the greater challenges in Horizon: win 2 out of 3 co-op races against the highest-ranked AI in the game, codenamed “Unbeatable”. But the problem isn’t that it is what it is — it succeeds spectacularly at being what it is. The problem is more that it’s also part of the Festival Playlist, which will have a wider skill base of players taking part, including players who care more about hitting 50% or 80% completion for the rewards. Players who actually want the challenge of the Trial are only going to be a subset of players who just want to cross it off the list. So the players churn themselves until they win. But since there’s never a Trial that isn’t part of the Festival Playlist, we won’t know how much of the player pool is just those completionists.
Weekly Challenge: Rhythm Is Everything
The 1973 Porsche 911 Carrera is pretty to look at, but it was tough for me to set up at first, and expecting it to win four Road races and three Dirt races seemed like a big ask. But as I said about the championships above, starting from stock and making small mods where you need them is probably the best way to prevent yourself from making big mistakes and having a bad time.
(And if you’re thinking of trying to kill two birds with one stone, forget it. The Porsche and RR championships are Street Scenes, remember?)
Is It Good?
It feels like there is a lot of potential grief in the races this week, but it’s all preventable if you know what to watch out for. The key, as always, is finding the cars that are fun for you to drive, and not trying to force something to work if it isn’t.
It’s slippery out there, so drive safe.
