I post this thing periodically just because I figure some folks may not be aware, but there’s no reason to pay money for Game Pass or, if you have an Xbox, Xbox Live. If you go sign up at Microsoft Rewards (here) you can do daily Bing searches and get points that can be cashed in for stuff like that. It doesn’t take too long to accumulate enough points for that, maybe a few weeks if I had to ballpark.
seems like a reason :)
All you gotta do is click 'em, dude. You can decide for yourself if it’s worth a few minutes a day to save some money, I’m just giving you info.
I checked it out last time you mentioned. That’s how I know TurinTur’s my real buddy :-D
Change your region to New Zealand and you can start the download. You won’t even need to restart or anything.
It was the Bismarck Anniversary this weekend and guess what I got as a gift?
No, it was Horizon Four.
So if you need a friend, try BismarckMaybe.
I finished the download 5 minutes before I finished with work (from home). Perfect!
The start was disconcerting, as it seems it detected my progress in the demo, and just continued from there, with the cars I already had unlocked.
EDIT that was a freaking bug, I had to restart my profile :(
Wait, already? It’s supposed to be out on Oct 2nd for GamePass members, right? Are you in “New Zealand”? Is that the trick?
I’ll probably start the download tomorrow morning before work.
Yes, I changed my region to New Zealand.
Game is supposedly available at midnight Eastern so you may be able to start the ~70GB download overnight.
If you can tune that thing up so it can go against the McLarens and Bugattis in the game, I am there.
I played with this car other night. It was 100 - the lowest rating in the game. I used the automatic upgrade tool and the only upgrade available was $0 to 100. 😂
Is that this car?
No - the one I pictured does actually have four wheels, but the rear two are really close to each other.
Don’t tune them out - turn them off. It’s an option. There is nothing more distracting in a driving game then constant point pop-ups. Make them go away. :-)
I played yesterday night until my eyes were burning. Game is great, like FH3. :)
I could write pages about why it’s so good, and basically what I am going to write now it’s the same as with FH3. I think the four key points would be:
-Driving model
-Exploration
-Difficulty
-Content
Driving model
Driving is so fun! The game nails the sweet point between arcade and sim, more leaning to the easiness and smoothness of arcade driving yes, but still with enough subtle complexity of the sim racers to give a richer, fuller experience. It’s at least less arcade than NFS, Burnout, Flaout, Split/Racing and other arcade racers. It’s enough to make drifting a bad idea (as cool as it is, you usually lose speed by doing it), you have to be a bit more careful with the direction and you actually have to brake in the right moment to take the curves :P. It’s also enough to feel how the road changes when it starts to rain, or notice the differences in driving in different cars, which is an important point because, otherwise, what would the point of having hundreds of cars?
Exploration
Because the driving models and controls are fun and well done, it’s also fun to just drive around in this open world. And the game makes exploration of the world fun and addictive, thanks to things like
-Marking roads. The roads change color as you drive in them, marking them as ‘driven’. It’s something that’s is more a pleasant OCD thing than anything else, but it’s so good to see a section of a road in the minimap still on grey, and change directions just for completeness sake.
-Scenic locations. There are a dozen locations where you are shown an area, a monument, from real life.
-Signs to break. The world has signs you break for extra points. The nice thing is that they can be tricky, like one on top of a church (you need to search the way to do a jump there, and have the skill to do it!), or in a place that needs a very narrow car to reach.
-Abandoned cars in barns. Pure exploration task, you are given an area and have to find a garage to recover an old car. Some can be pretty damn hard, given you the limited area!
Difficulty
I don’t know why, but unlike other genres like action or strategy, in racing having player-selected difficulties is a bit less common. There has been some racers without any, you have to play it as the designer intended. I believe this is a big mistake, as years pass by, I believe more and more in how crucial is difficulty (not too easy, not too hard) to make a good game.
FH4 not only doesn’t make that mistake, but it’s the opposite. It doesn’t have the typical three difficulties, but eight. Enough granularity for everyone.
And even more: it also doesn’t make the mistake of conflating difficulty with realism, a flaw I found in a few other racers, where the only way to make the game easier was… by lowering the realism. if a game is more simmy, I don’t want to turn off the sim parts, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want the game to be easier to better reflect my (poor) skills. So in addition to difficulty, there are several settings that can be tweaked to make the game a bit more realistic (or less) in driving.
The system is so flexible that for example, after driving dozens of hours in FH3 is my normal settings, I decided to turn off rewind, play only in first person mode, and in exchange lower my difficulty setting one notch. Just doing that it was like playing a different game.
Content
Ok, this one it’s easy. The game is just full chock of content. It’s almost exhausting with all you can do, it only works because as I said before, the driving is so good. There are:
-normal races (lap based)
-checkpoint races (from point to point)
-championships (in reality just a set of 3-5 races of whatever type where you accumulate points)
At this point I have to remember the variety of only these normal races is already pretty big, because there are a dozen of car types (hyper cars, touring, track toys, coupes, retro classic, etc), there are races in asphalt roads, dirt roads and pure offroad races, there is dynamic time of day (day, evening, night conditions), dynamic weather (dry, wet surface, rain, storm, fog, snow, etc )
-Drag events
-Drift events
-street races (in road, always by night, without npc cars turned off so you have to avoid them)
-special showcases (running against a plane, etc)
-Jobs (I think this is the equivalent to the bucket list challenge, sets of scripted challenges like reach a point in x minutes with y car, don’t damage the car, etc)
-Road challenges (speed traps, drift areas, jumps)
-Head to head races: impromptu quick races done on the open world.
-Rivals, where you can goad members of your club of friends with your results in races and other stuff, and play against their results with a ghost mode.
-And that’s focusing only on the solo content. There are normal pvp races, there are coop races in group against AI, there are pvp modes like the ‘infection’ mode where one car has to infect the rest, and more.
-You also have great customization: there is cosmetic design of cars, complete car tuning and performance-oriented garage parts customization, all with online presets that are shared automatically so if you don’t want to delve too deeply in this, just take a preset done by someone else.
-There is a nice online integration with user made content. In each event point, you also can design your own events, mixing and matching car types, race conditions and race type; and create your own bucket list challenges.
-I think next month they will add the race creator, where you can drive around, and the game will create a checkpoint race from your route.
-I forgot to comment the skill point system, that allows you to gain points by doing maneuvers (top speed, threading the needle, destroying things, drifting, jumps, driving in the opposite lane, etc) and getting multipliers. Almost anything you do get points, so it’s fairly easy to get huge scores. Pretty satisfying.
-There is still more. The photo mode that gives you xp by taking photos of new cars, the forzathon events with unique weekly challenges and rewards, the online auction system where you can buy and sell cars…
So, what has changed since FH3?
The landscape seems to have a bit less of variety in FH3 (it made a great job, it had a cliffside/beach part, a rainforest part, a temperate part, the rural area, the city, the desert area, etc), but I guess in exchange FH4 has the 4 seasons variation.
The graphics and performance are ‘tighter’, there is 60fps mode in xbox version, there is a new type of event, drag races, the progression adapts better to the player because it will unlock the type of content you play (each type has their own individual level number), you can customize your character and buy houses and by default now it’s an online game: you see other players running around in the world, but don’t worry, they are ‘ghosts’ and will go through you, no collisions unless you make a convoy. Another part of now being an ‘online game’ is that there will be seasonal events every week, like new challenges per season.
Great post Turin. A very nice encapsulation of what makes the series so enjoyable.
I only had 10 minutes free this morning. It took 5 minutes to load the game, and then it took 10 minutes just to do the first mission (my progress from the demo didn’t carry over, the game started over from the beginning, which I’m fine with, but it was unexpected given a post above where someone said their demo progress was preserved). So I was 5 minutes late getting to work.