Forza Horizon 4

[Tom Servo]

Oooh, I'll have to go grab that.

[Tom Servo]

Coming update summary paraphrased from Reddit (that I think was basically transcribed from a webcast):

• Playlist Rewards for upcoming season
  
  • Series - 50% Alfa Romeo Guilia FE / 80% Ford Crown Victoria
  • Autumn - 50% Ferrari 599XX Evo / 80% Mercedes Benz 280 SL - one of the seasonal championships will have a 1958 Plymouth Fury as the reward car, which is new to the game
  • Winter - 50% 1967 Chevy Chevelle / 80% Lykan Hypersport - Trial gets the Terradyne Gurkha
  • Spring - 50% 2009 Vauxhall Corsa / 80% Easter Bunny Outfit - Lancia Delta S4 for one of the seasonal championships and Trial gets bunny ears
  • Summer - 50% Mercedes AMG GT 4-door / 80% Hotwheels Twin Mill - Mercedes Benz X-Truck (new to game) for one of the seasonal championships
• Online updates
  
  • Drift adventure - new mode where you build up your drift score over a track. Asphalt only, multiple laps, score based on best lap. (No collisions, apparently some sort of AWD section)
  • Freeroam Rush removed from road racing and street racing team adventures, but will remain for dirt and cross country.
  • First 30 seconds of all races will be ghosted to try to lessen first corner pileups
  • S2 dirt being removed from team adventure and replaced with B class dirt
  • Teasing that next update will get some kind of ramming detection that will ghost cars that are ramming or wall riding.
• Misc updates
  
  • Drift camera - option for cockpit camera that keeps the view pointed more towards where you're going vs. where the car is pointed. There are adjustable settings for it.
  • Barrett-Jackson car pack coming for car pass owners, otherwise paid DLC (1963 Shelby Monaco King Cobra, 1970 Chevy Chevelle SS, 1975 Ford Bronco, 1932 Ford Custom Double Down, 1932 Ford Roadster Hula Girl, 1959 Plymouth Atomic Punk Bubbletop, 1970 Plymouth Hemi Cuda Convertible)
  • Wheel spacers coming to 100 more cars
  • Playground game adventures will now end when one team reaches 3 wins rather than making you slog through all 5 rounds
  • Layer masks being added to livery editor (being able to place a shape that cuts through the vinyl layers back down to the base paint)
  • New story mode added (might be in the next update after this one)
  • More bodykits coming over the next few months
• Forzathon shop
  
  • Forzathon point stats are tracked, so they're trying to stop people from hoarding the points by raising prices
  • Promising that there won't be any cars that only show up once, so presumably that means the 812 Superfast will be coming back as a reward at some point

It does seem like PG are starting to listen to some of the complaints, though now that I'm getting better at figuring out the best routes for asphalt racing freeroam rushes I'm less excited than I would have been a couple of months ago about their removal. That "ghost for the first 30 seconds" seems like a band-aid to fix a pervasive problem in the game - ramming/pile-ups at the first corner are a big issue but there should also be *some* sort of jockeying for position and we'll no longer have that. I am thrilled that we're getting a B class option at all in team adventure, but I'm not sure why they couldn't also keep S2 dirt, add B class to the others, and *let us pick which one we want to play*.

Finally, I'm not surprised that they track the average amount of forzathon points people have stocked, but if you're finding that people are hoarding them, maybe the problem is that what's being offered up for sale isn't enticing? Still, overall it seems like a solid set of additions.

[Tom Servo]

And that was quick, the season 8 update is already out.

[GreatScawt]

Man, they are seriously doing the percentage stuff again? I missed that when first reading about the update. I enjoy it but it can be a bit stressful. I'll be away from 5/4 to 5/11, so I'm going to be doing some serious grinding 5/2 and 5/3.

New car pass additions is good news, wasn't expecting them to dole out more free cars like that without spending more money!

And more bodykits is always good

Good to see them listening to the community regarding some of the online updates. It can be a real shitshow sometimes. Less freeroam rush, GOOD.

[Tom Servo]

I tried out the drift adventure this morning. Pretty fun, I can only play unranked at the moment, came in third on my first two attempts and then won the third.

One nice thing is that once you're in the adventure, it just sorta continues. Like, you finish off a three round set, and then it just says "Okay, here's the next three round set" and you have the option to quit back out to normal Horizon, rather than punting you back to that and making you start the "find an adventure" process again. The events appear to be entirely on road racing circuits, with two classes, basically B+A class and S1+S2 class (I might not be remembering that accurately), then additionally they're either AWD or RWD events, so you basically need four good drift cars to make it work.

I haven't quite sorted out how the scoring works. Just like any other event, about half the people quit in the first race, but by the second race we had a full field again, with a handful of new racers who now stood no shot at the championship.

Since everyone's ghosted, it's a more relaxing event than most. They give you 7 or 8 minutes to run as many laps as you can, and the highest scoring lap is your score for that round, then you end up with points per position just like any other race. Score is based on a combination of speed and yaw angle when drifting, and it looks like you have to have all four wheels on the asphalt for score to accumulate.

A couple of minor annoyances - it's clearly built on the same code that runs the normal races, so they have things like starting positions that don't really make a lot of sense in this one. Another one is the "inactivity timeout", which is really annoying. If you don't have time to complete one more lap, there's not a real motivation to run another lap, so sometimes there'd be like 1:15 left on the clock when I crossed the line and I'd just park the car and do something else. Found out that it'll kick you out of the event if you aren't doing something for more than like 30 seconds, so you're forced to interact even if there's no real reason to. Also think I found a bug with the ghosting, I was just rolling around slowly to avoid the inactivity timeout and someone else was doing the same. We really slowly approached each other instead of flying at each other, and actually made contact just before we ghosted, it was enough to push me off the road, then he passed through me.

I do like the mode though, at least once you get a decent car going. I have a really good S2 AWD and just made a pretty good A class AWD, but I don't have much in the way of RWD. Need to figure out what cars to use for those.

[GreatScawt]

Nice! I'll have to try the Drift Adventure stuff soon.
Though I'm not sure why there is AWD specifications? I feel like that's exactly what you don't want when drifting.

The Barret-Jackson cars are actually pretty neat. And apparently the 1500HP/1500LB AWD Shelby Monaco King Cobra is the new drag race king of the game, according to Reddit.

Hopped on last night and did my last two events: Playground Games win and the Cross Country seasonal. For the fourth time, I got my win PG Games win because most of the other team quit (on two occasions, ALL the players on the other team quit). Just need the daily today and I'll be at 100/100 for the series.

[Tom Servo]

You'd think you'd normally want RWD, but AWD does work really well in the game. I'm using a tune for the Formula Drift Viper with AWD as my usual drift car and it makes the drift zone challenges plain easy. For the A/B class AWD drift I set up the 914/6 with an AWD conversion and drift suspension and it handled the task with ease.

I might have to try the playground games thing again now that it doesn't make you play all five rounds. I've only done it the one time, but 3 of the 5 rounds I was by myself, which just sorta felt pointless.

[Tom Servo]

The Trial this week is actually pretty fun, Fiat 124 Spyders around a few point-to-point road courses. They're capped at C600 and start at C577 (I think), which means there isn't a ton of room to turn them into monsters - you can either bump the handling a bit or the power, but it really doesn't make *that* much of a difference. I went in not understanding what it was and had to rent a bone stock one and still did well, won the first race, podium'd the other two.

Did run into one of the rare "bug that helps you" things. The first race I won, and the rest of my team collectively came in last. So, 650 points for my team and 3000 for the drivatars, but for some reason the game gave us the win instead. I'll take it, though we ended up not needing it, the next two rounds went easily for the human team.

[SkylineObsession]

Am i imagining things, or have none of the Forza games and their DLC been on special for quite a while now? Seems like they used to get discounted quite a bit on Xbox store, but haven't seen squat lately. Still wanting to get FH4 but not at full price. And kinda want to get FM7, but only at a crazy cheap price.

[Tom Servo]

At least here in the US, FH4 just went 40% off if you've got XBL Gold