With Forza Horizon 5, Playground Games set a new benchmark for racing games – and now the baton has been passed on to Turn10 with its latest Forza Motorsport. This soft reboot of the simulation racing franchise is the developer’s debut title on the new generation of Xbox consoles, and it does a great job of leveraging the machine’s features to create a game that’s arguably the best racer on the market.

In this technical analysis, we will be taking a look at the game and breaking down individual aspects like lighting, and car models – and breaking down the rendering techniques used to bring this game to life.

Forza Motorsport – Game Engine And Overview

Much like its predecessors, Forza Motorsport 2023 is developed using the proprietary Forza engine – but a ton of improvements have been made to the underlying engine tech which not only enables higher fidelity levels but also better functionality for its vision of a live-service game.

As mentioned in an interview with Digital Foundry, the entire backend has been rewritten to allow rapid development in accordance with player feedback. As such, updates and hotfixes can be issued instantly – which should make for a seamless player experience. Of course, we’ll have to wait and see how this pans out but it’s a big change nevertheless.

As for the visuals, the biggest change that Forza Motorsport is bringing to the franchise is ray-tracing. The game uses ray tracing for reflections and ambient occlusion, which makes the presentation a lot more realistic. In addition to this, we have a dynamic daytime system and plenty of other changes to the rendering that we will be discussing in detail in further sections.

Car Models

Cars are obviously the star of the show when it comes to a racing game, and that stands true in the case of Forza Motorsport as well. Turn10 has meticulously re-created each and every car with painstaking attention to detail. The game features well over 500 cars from different manufacturers across the globe, and each of these cars is an exact replica of their real-life variants.

Materials are of the physically based kind, which ensures that material like carbon fiber behaves differently than leather which behaves differently than glass. The quality of these materials is really high, and these vehicles exude a sense of grandeur thanks to thick coats of shiny paints and chrome platings.

Of course, it also helps that these cars are geometrically complex models with tons of details that gearheads can obsess over for hours on end. Much like its predecessors, Forza Motorsport also features a detailed car damage model that scuffs and scratches the car with each collision from your opponents and environments.

The car damage model itself is a lot better this time around, and each car crash is accompanied by demodeled car geometry, cracked window panes, and scratches on the sides. Of course, there are a bunch of simulations for the physics behind it all – but the visible results look a lot more believable this time around.

Tracks and Environments

Moving over to the tracks, Turn10 utilizes photogrammetry-based textures to great effect. Track surfaces look pretty realistic with tons of detail. The screeching of car tires leaves thick trails on the track, which is accompanied by some gorgeous volumetric smoke. But the biggest change that we have seen this time around is in the surrounding environments, which have seen a noticeable uptick in quality.

Asset quality is high across the board and everything from the crowd to the vegetation and surrounding geometry looks decent. Of course, you will be able to notice some inconsistencies and relatively low fidelity levels if you stop and stare at these objects – but they do look generally okay when you’re blazing past them at high speeds.

Weather Effects

As mentioned previously, Forza Motorsport introduces a dynamic time-of-day system, which allows for significant changes to the track and environments during a race. You may start a race in the afternoon, and see the Sun set during the final laps. These changes not only affect the visual aesthetics of the track, but the changes in ambient temperature will also affect driving variables like grip – which can also add an element of challenge to the gameplay proceedings.

The sky rendering also seems to be using some sort of photogrammetry combined with volumetric structures for clouds, and these clouds also shift during daytime changes in an effort to mimic their behavior in real life. The volumetric meshes are definitely quality stuff, and the skybox looks really good in action.

Lighting, Reflections, And Shadows

Switching gears to the lighting, Forza Motorsport uses the same global illumination solution as Forza Horizon 5. The team internally calls this implementation Surfel GI, and it works to great effect for a dynamically lit game like this one. There’s no use of baked-in lighting data, and the direct lighting leverages hardware-accelerated ray tracing to create realistic scenes. Of course, there’s a lot more than that too – but delving too deep into those details might be beside the point of this discussion.

While the game is launching with this Surfel GI, Turn10 plans to eventually add in an option of RTGI to make full use of ray-tracing for global illumination as well. Reflections in Forza Motorsport look superb, and a lot of that can yet again be attributed to the smart usage of real-time ray tracing. The game makes good use of ray-traced reflections, and as a result – car bodies accurately reflect the surroundings and parts of themselves on their coats of shiny paint. Reflections also update at a steady pace, which helps in selling the element of speed when you’re racing at a hundred miles an hour.

Another aspect where Forza Motorsport uses ray-tracing is the ambient occlusion, which creates realistic soft shadows across the entire body of vehicles and the ground. As such, cars don’t look like they have been plastered on the track in an artificial way – but feel like they are a living, breathing part of the game world.

And now let’s talk about shadow maps. Shadows are appropriately high quality, and are casted for objects up to far distances. This helps in achieving a uniform look for the game world, which in turns makes it feel like a real breathing place. You can obviously peep into the details to find some artifacts along the edges of shadows – but it isn’t all that noticeable when you are zooming past these picturesque landscapes at high speeds.

Post-Processing

As mentioned in a pre-release interview with Digital Foundry, Forza Motorsport marks a big change in how it handles anti-aliasing. Prior entries made good use of MSAA to clean up the artifacts, but now the developer has switched to a TAA solution. That wouldn’t initially seem like a smart move since TAA implementations can soften the image which doesn’t look good in the case of racers, but Forza’s implementation avoids those issues and cleans up the image while retaining a crisp look.

Forza Motorsport also makes generous use of volumetric meshes in not only the clouds but also the smoke that emits out of your car’s exhaust and the fog that sits on the race track in select weather conditions. Volumetric meshes can also react with light and diffuse them accordingly, and that looks really good in action. Particle effects are few and far between, but you will notice some high-quality alpha particles during car collisions or when a car uses its boost. These particles also appropriately cast reflections on car bodies, and it looks absolutely gorgeous.

Xbox Series X Graphics Modes And Their Difference With PC Version

On Xbox Series X, Forza Motorsport features a total of 3 distinct graphics options. The first one is the Visuals mode. This mode features ray-traced reflections and RTAO at a resolution of dynamic 4K with a frame-rate cap of 30fps. The second mode is Performance RT, which also keeps ray tracing intact but bumps the frame rate to 60fps at the same dynamic 4K resolution. As you can imagine, dynamic resolution scaling is a lot more aggressive in this mode – though the anti-aliasing solutions do a good enough job of cleaning up the jagged edges and it’s a fine trade-off for the added fluidity.

Finally, we have Performance mode which turns off ray-tracing with a resolution of dynamic 4K and keeps the frame rate locked to 60fps. If you feel like you are having a competitive disadvantage due to the aggressive DRS on Performance RT option, Performance mode just might be the mode. All in all, Forza Motorsport has done a great job when it comes to graphics options – and it just goes on to show the impressive scalability of the underlying tech.

Taking a brief look at both versions of the game, the Quality version largely matches with the ultra settings that we use on our PC test rig. The resolution is a bit sharper on the PC version, which is most likely a byproduct of the aggressive DRS on the Xbox version. You can also make out minor differences in shadows and reflection quality, but the visual makeup is the same across both versions. They look great, and we didn’t make out any major differences between the two.

Xbox Series X and PC Performance

Forza Motorsport 2023 isn’t a really demanding game if you just look at the minimum specs; it only requires that you have an i5 8400, GTX 1060, and 8 GB of RAM to play at the lowest settings. However, if you wish to have a comfortable experience without compromising on the visuals – you need to have an i5 11600k, RTX 2080Ti, and 16 GB of RAM. The game also makes use of the Windows DirectStorage API, so you need to have the game installed on an SSD instead of an HDD.

Our test bench comprises an AMD Ryzen 5950X, RTX 3080Ti, and 32 GB of RAM which is well over what the game recommends. We also installed the game on a PCI e 4.0 SSD to make full use of Windows DirectStorage API.

Taking a look at the settings menu for the PC version of the game, it has a suite of options and a basic description of what each setting does. There are no comparison screenshots like Sony’s first-party ports or performance indicators for changing these settings, so it does leave something to be desired.

The game also has DLSS and FSR 2.0 support as well. For our testing, we went with a mostly ultra settings preset with DLSS turned on to optimize performance, and according to the in game metrics – the game was only using a maximum of 6 GBs of VRAM.

Now let’s talk about performance. Starting with Xbox Series X, the game does a good enough job of holding its own during the most intensive scenes. We didn’t notice any major frame-rate drops, and regardless of whether we played at 30fps or 60fps – the experience was smooth. As such, our recommendation would be to use the RT Performance mode to get the fluidity of 60fps without compromising on fidelity – but you are obviously free to pick your own poison.

For our PC testing, we were able to achieve a solid 60fps with the aforementioned ultra settings with DLSS Quality mode turned on. We noticed a few minor dips during intensive sequences such as heavy rain, but that didn’t really detract from the otherwise great experience with the game. There are some improvements inbound with the Day 1 patch, so that should help smooth these issues out. But overall, it performs solid and is a technically stable product with little in the name of hard crashes or game-breaking bugs.

Conclusion

Forza Motorsport is a strong debut for Turn10 and stands tall as an impressive graphics showcase for the power of the Xbox Series X. Almost every aspect of the visual presentation has seen minor to major changes, and that results in what is arguably the most realistic looking racer on the market. It doesn’t rewrite the playbook in any major way, but it’s a solid racer that doubles as a visual feast for the eyes.

An announcement on the official support website clarifies that servers for the game will be closing sometime in Spring of 2022, and the recent January 10 update is the last of content updates that fans can expect from the game, which comes with a new car and 12 weeks of Spotlight++, faster recharge times, reduced prices on cars, and the like. With regards to the game closing down, the official statement reads:

“We’re proud and grateful for the community of players we were able to build with Forza Street, and we want to use what we learned on building new and exciting Forza products,” the developer writes. 

On the brighter side, the latest entry in the series, Forza Horizon 5, has been a smash hit- garnering over 15 million players since its release, and winning multiple Game of the Year awards. Developer Turn10 is currently hard at work on a soft reboot of the simulation series, Forza Motorsport, which is in the works for Xbox Series X/S and PC.

Forza Horizon 1

Microsoft really dominated the gaming landscape with the Xbox 360, which can be attributed to a far more developer-friendly system architecture that made it relatively easy to work with. While the PS3 did have an incredibly powerful Cell chip, it was extremely difficult to write code for and the hard limit on the distribution of memory between CPU and GPU made lives even more difficult for developers. Microsoft’s first-party produced a bunch of stellar games that showcased what the console was capable of, and Playground Games did exactly that with its debut title, the original Forza Horizon.

Releasing in 2012 right before 343 Industries dropped the system’s swansong exclusive Halo 4, Forza Horizon was incredibly well-received on account of its beautiful open-world and remarkably different feel from the simulation-oriented Forza Motorsport series. Utilizing an updated version of Turn10’s proprietary engine, Forza Horizon renders a crisp 720p image with a steady 30fps cap that rarely falters. Topping off the native 720p resolution is 4x MSAA anti-aliasing which ensures that any and all rough edges are smoothened out.

The original Forza Horizon is set in a fictionalized recreation of Colorado, and features some great draw distances for its time. The seemingly low level of details far off are smartly masked off by the motion blur, but the overall terrain looks a lot barren with a number of canyons and plains su. The original Forza Horizon does feature a relatively drab color palette as compared to its successors. While this is a mostly artistic choice incredibly common within the games of the time, some fans still swear that the game is all the better for it as these darker colors hide any inconsistencies with detailing that might crop up with the relatively weaker hardware.

Forza Horizon 2

Almost two years after the release of the first game, Playground returned with a sequel to its fan-beloved IP. Interestingly enough, Forza Horizon 2 stands to this day as the only cross-gen release in the release. Of course, the added strain of porting the game over to a last-gen machine means that sacrifices need to be made. Sumo Digital did a smart job at nailing the basics right, with the Xbox 360 version of Forza Horizon 2 running extremely well with a solid 30 fps cap. While the game did utilize the original Forza Horizon’s engine written for the Xbox 360, it still looks and feels similar to its bigger brother on the Xbox One.

There are a lot of improvements that players will notice while jumping from Forza Horizon to Forza Horizon 2. Running at a pristine resolution of 1080p, the game flaunts its high-resolution textures, reflections, and a bevy of post-processing effects that all serve to accentuate the now-brightly lit environments. Given the Xbox One boasts more than 10 times the memory of the Xbox 360, it’s quite obvious that the level of detail within the environmental assets themselves has also received a significant boost. The difference is quite stark actually, which can be easily seen from a simple comparison screenshot between the two games.

The  choice of Northern Italy as the setting has a lot of impact on the art direction, with terrestial variety being a noticeable step up from the original. There’s plenty of bloom during the daytime, and the game can look really gorgeous when all graphical cylinders fire in harmony. The samll roadside towns also have some interesting architecture, which all adds towards making its world more alive and beautiful.

In terms of performance, Forza Horizon 2 still runs at a mere 30 fps though, which rubbed many the wrong since Turn 10’s Forza Motorsport 5 ran at a steady 60 fps with arguably higher levels of details. Of course, there’s always the fact that Forza Horizon is an open world that requires rapid asset streaming as players are expected to be zooming across the lands in some of the speediest cars the series had to date while Forza Motorsport features static race-courses which allow the developers to optimize the environments accordingly, which by extension frees up the GPU to pump more frames comfortably within a second.

Forza Horizon 3

After another gap spanning 2 years, Playground Games would return to release Forza Horizon 3. Setting foot outside the United States and Italy, the jump to a masterfully detailed rendition of Australia provides a great backdrop to a great graphical upgrade to the series. Much like the previous entry, Forza Horizon 3 ran at a resolution of native 1080p with a target of 30 fps, which in true Forza Horizon fashion rarely ever falters. It also features 4x MSAA anti-aliasing which creates a pristine-looking image that’s always a feast for the eyes to gorge on.

The jump to Australia as the setting has a lot of implications, with foliage being an integral part of the experience. The track is surrounded by vegetation more often than before, and the vegetation is also more dense and detailed than before. However, the increased level of detail has an unfortunate side-effect of making LOD swapping(or pop-in) more visisble and by extension, even distacting.

In true sequel fashion, there are many obvious improvements as well of course, with weather effects boasting higher-resolution textures and increased environmental draw distances than before. Forza Horizon 3 was also the series debut on the PC platform. Forza Horizon 3‘s PC port doesn’t seem to be an afterthought either, as it is filled with a pantheon of options that allow for tinkerers – such as myself – to find that perfect sweet spot between quality and performance.

Tests seem to suggest that the Xbox One version of the game uses presets similar to the PC port’s high setting – which is a testament to Playground’s excellent understanding of the hardware as running in with that target and visuals required a fairly beefy system at the time. Forza Horizon 3 also received an Xbox One X patch further down the line – as Playground’s and Turn10’s latest iterations of the Forza series became the posterchild to show off the raw grunt of the 6 teraflop beast.

The Xbox One X version bumps the game’s pixel count of the Xbox One version by 4 times to native 4K accompanied by the 4x MSAA found in the original, with a bunch of enhancements to its visuals that match the PC’s highest settings. Interestingly enough, some of the beefiest graphics cards of the time such as the GTX 1070 – would occasionally drop frames at near-identical settings, which served as the basis for comparison for the power of Microsoft’s most powerful console.

Forza Horizon 4

Forza Horizon 4 takes the series traditional Horizon festival and dumps it into a fictional representation of Great Britain, and is all the better for it. The main hook of Forza Horizon 4 are Seasons, which drastically change up the tracks, environments, and most importantly handling of vehicles. Developer Playground Games utilized a number of techniques that involve the use of satellite map data more than previous entries to get a better understanding of the topography of Britain, which allowed for a much richer and in-depth realization of the setting.

With 4 distinct seasons being the highly-touted factor for Forza Horizon 4, it stands to reason that the biggest changes come in the form of deformable terrain and associated weather effects receiving a big bump in quality. There are a number of new feature additions to the mix as well, with ambient occlusion and screen space reflections bringing some added royalty into the ever-expanding roster of cars screeching their tires across this gargantuan map. Of course, it still runs at a comfortable 30 fps on the Xbox One.

Given that Playground Games had access to Xbox One X development kits quite early on, Forza Horizon 4 runs at a steady 60fps on the upgraded machine – a series first for consoles. While it’s sure to knock down the resolution from pristine 4K down to 1080p, but it’s still better to have the novelty of choice nevertheless. Forza Horizon 4 on PC is expanded upon further from its predecessors, giving a bevy of options along with detailed performance benchmarking tools that can make tinkering a joy.

It’s still demanding to pull a 4K 60 fps at its highest settings on PC, but the game is noticeably much more optimized than before. The Xbox One version runs at the same mostly high settings as the PC port, while the Xbox One X achieves greater visual fidelity at 4 times the original’s resolution – matching which would require a beefy GPU such as the likes of a GTX 1070Ti.

Forza Horizon 5

This is the culmination of everything the series has been building towards – mechanically as well as graphically. Utilizing photogrammetry, Playground Games has managed to achieve an unparalleled level of complexity in the materials and meshes used in its environment, which is topped by foliage that looks to be much denser and reactive than ever before. There’s also a revamped volumetric lighting system, which adds a lot to the overall presentation as the atmosphere looks noticeably thicker than its previous renditions especially when the newly-added dust storms come into view. All in all, many of these techniques lend a huge sense of realism to the world at large, which is a fantasy that Playground’s premier franchise has constantly strived to achieve more of.

An interesting point in terms of graphics is that Forza Horizon 5 doesn’t actually have ray-traced reflections, though fans may be forgiven to think so given the high-resolution screen space reflections found throughout car bodies. Ray-tracing is in the game but is only supported in ForzaVista on next-gen.

Forza Horizon 5 is targeting a 4K 30 fps target for the quality mode on the Xbox Series X, while the performance mode will supposedly knock down a few settings to get it running at 60 fps. Since this is going to be a cross-gen release built to support a wide variety of PC hardware and 4 distinct consoles, the engine is touted to be more scalable than before which should in theory ensure that each and every mode feels great to play.

Forza Horizon 4 may be the best racing game of all time. At the very least, it is the best racing game released in the last decade or so, and Microsoft and Playground’s crowning achievement. There’s a wealth of content in this game- a vast open world to explore, a range of different kinds of secrets and objectives, cars to unlock, and of course, a whole smattering of different kinds of events to take part in.

In this guide, we look at some general tips and tricks to maximize your performance in the game, as well as at some cars that you should keep your eyes on as you play through the game.

TIPS AND TRICKS

• Focus on getting both, more Credits (CR) and Influence. CR are used to buy new cars, while Influence is what you need to progress through the seasons (you unlock a new season for each 50,000 Influence you hit)
• Some cars can’t be bought- these are Barn Finds, and you have to stumble on these antiquities in the world. But the map in the game is huge, so a better thing to do is to use your drone (always accessible in the menu), and get an aerial view of the map till you find a barn. Once you do, it’s marked on your GPS, and you can drive there to actually collect the car
• Don’t stick with one car. You get money really easily in the game, so buy more cars, and have as many different types as possible, so you’re well equipped to meet whatever challenge comes your way
• Auto Upgrade is a valid option- the game lets you manually tweak and tune your car, but maybe you don’t have the patience, or the knack, for that. If so, Auto Upgrade is a perfectly fine alternative to fall back on, and there’s no shame in using it
• Sell the cars you don’t need- that’s more money right there to buy the ones that you do!
• There’s a fast travel tip that saves you money- just go to the Festival Hub and select your event from there directly. That transports you to your event, without you needing to pay the 10,000 CR fast travel fee.

THE BEST CARS

Speed Demon: Koenigsegg One:1

The point of racing is to be quick, and you don’t get quicker than the Koenigsegg One:1. If a speedy car is all you want, you won’t go wrong with this one. You can pick it up for 2,850 CR, or for free if you are a VIP Pass member.

Winter Warrior: Hoonigan Gymkhana 9 Ford Focus RS RX

I don’t think there’s any car in the game that’s as well equipped to be able to negotiate the snowy environs of Great Britain as this one is. At 500,000, it’s a fair bit expensive, but given that but can be repurposed for rallying events, it pays for itself in the long run.

Skill Boost: Pagani Zonda Forza Edition

It’s a bit slower than the One:1, but it offers a clean skill boost, and has far superior handling. Even in a racing game, speed isn’t everything, you see. You can get it for 1,950 CR, or for free with the VIP Pass.

FASTEST CAR IN THE GAME

At 284 miles/hour, the Koenigsegg Agera RS is the single fastest car in the game, and the one to go for if you want to max out your velocity on the tarmac. Of course, with great power comes great responsibility, and I’m not sure you’ll be able to handle this beast…

Forza Horizon 4 has a multitude of economies going on within it- you’ve got Influence, which you need to progress through the single player campaign, and you’ve got Credits, which are money you use to buy new cars in game, and you’ve got your level. And then you’ve got Wheelspins, which are basically lotteries you get to participate in.

Now how to get ahead of all of this, while not circumventing the fun in the game? How do you make money, and level up your Influence, quickly? That’s what we talk about in this guide.

MAXIMIZING MONEY AND LEVELING UP

So, here’s the thing- those Wheelspins we talked about? They can get you as much as 250,000 Credits in one fell swoop, especially if you go for the money based prizes. Some prize or the other is guaranteed to you in a Wheelspin either way, so it’s just best to try and go for as many of them as possible.

Okay, so how do you get them to spawn? About that: they’re kind of random. But don’t despair! There are things you can do to make them unlock quicker:

• Level up your My Horizon life goals
• Participate in Daily Events
• Complete Live challenges whenever you can
• Unlock perks on as many different cars as you can

Additionally, there are some quick methods to earn money reasonably quickly. Check out the video below which will help you to maximize your money and level payouts:

And below you will find a video which will help you to level up and gain influence faster.

Finally, this video demonstrates a glitch that can be exploited for money and wheelspins, which means I don’t recommend it. Not only could the glitch be patched out, but you’re gaming the economy in a shared world game, and that’s never good. Still, for the morbidly curious, check out the video below.

Note: Please use the following cheats at your own discretion. Using cheats online or offline may lead to an immediate ban. GamingBolt or its staff members are not responsible for any problems arising due to their use.

https://youtu.be/Wdq9I8sMtk0

Forza Horizon 4 lets you live out your fantasies of racing cars across the British countryside. It’s awesome, even more so because you can take existing cars and tune them up further to be even better than they already are.

And that’s just cars! You can also customize your own character (though the character editor is super basic, but hey, it’s not like you’re looking at your own character all that much anyway, am I right?)

CUSTOMIZING YOUR CHARACTER

You get to select a look and name for your character right at the start of the game, but you can actually customize your character further during the course of the game too. To be able to do so, you need to buy your first house in the game- once you have done so, you need to head to your house. This opens up a whole lot of options for you, including, yes, customizing your character, far beyond the initial character editor at the start of the game let you. You can change individual clothing articles now, for example.

As a sidenote, if you ever want to change your character’s name, all you do is pull up the options menu, and select the option there to do so.

CAR TUNING GUIDE

Car customization is integral to doing well in Forza Horizon 4. The cars you get, the stock ones, those are good. They go fast, they handle well. But they’re ill equipped for the races you will participate in, especially since other racers, AI and human ones alike, will have tuned and modded their cars to make them even better. So you need to tune your car. Thankfully, it’s not as intimidating as it seems:

Tires: Tire pressure is extremely important: higher tire pressure means better handling and higher speed, but comes at the cost of traction. Lower pressure means better traction, but you’re punishing your tires more, not to mention trading out on speed and handling.

Antiroll Bars: These can be used to help with cornering. Decreasing stiffness causes reduced oversteer. Increasing stiffness, conversely, means raised oversteer.

Differential: There are two settings involved here, in fact- acceleration and deceleration. Higher acceleration means individual wheels don’t slip, but you reduce overall stability (and vice versa for lower). Meanwhile, deceleration can be set high for better stability, but a loss of speed (and vice versa).

Brakes: I don’t have to explain what these do, but in any case- they determine the braking capability of your car. Going rear heavy reduces car stability and increases oversteer, while front heavy increases stability and understeer.

Aerodynamics: Increasing downforce=better handling (which means you navigate corners better). This much is basic, but remember, it always comes at a tradeoff (in this case, you punish your tires more by increasing downforce).

Alignment: Okay, this is a really complex one, since you get multiple options, and even a slight tweak can alter the handling and feel of your car substantially. All I can say is, play around with the tweaking a bit and find something that suits your particular style of driving the best. I always favor handling over speed and acceleration, so I like the Negative Chamber, but what you like will come down specifically to what kind of driving style you have.

Springs: This determines the ground clearance your car has, but also the cushioning it gets. Again, clearance comes at the cost of cushioning, and vice versa.

The one thing I will say again- if this all seems hopelessly complicated, don’t be afraid to use Auto Upgrade. It’s a perfectly fine and viable option that is more than good enough, and decks out your car with upgraded gear really well and intelligently.

Forza Horizon 4 might just be the greatest racing game of all time, but you know what else it is? An open world game. And so, in the truest tradition of open world games, it’s actually filled with a whole lot of things scattered all across the map for you to find. In Forza Horizon 4, those come in four forms: collectibles, houses, beauty spots, and Barn Finds.

Let’s start tracking down all of them in this guide.

BEAUTY SPOTS

There are 12 Beauty Spots in Forza Horizon 4 scattered across England, and getting them all gets you the Taking the Grand Tour Achievement. The video below will quickly help you track down the ones you are missing:

COLLECTIBLES

There’s a lot of Collectibles strewn across the map of Forza Horizon 4, and the video below will basically show you where exactly to go to get them all and clear them off your checklist (I’m sure you have a checklist).

HOUSES

There’s a fair few properties you can buy for yourself in Forza Horizon 4, but you first need to find them- and finding them isn’t exactly easy. Well, unless you know exactly where to go, which is what the video below shows.

BARN FINDS

Barn Finds are basically the only way of collecting certain antique cars in the game. You can always use a drone to try and locate the barns in the world and then drive to it, but if even that is too much work for you, then the video below will show you where to find all the barns in the game’s world:

Forza Horizon 4 is phenomenal— possibly one of the greatest racing games of all time, and definitely the best looking one. And Microsoft are strutting it for all it’s worth, because they’ve shared a new launch trailer for the game, showcasing gorgeous gameplay footage showing the game replete in all of its glory.

Among the things shown off in the trailer are the changing seasons that represent the signature new addition with Forza Horizon 4, as well as the British roads that you take to in the game, the vehicles that you drive, how they drive, and more. As far as arcade racers go, it’s hard to argue that there’s anything that currently exists is better than what Playground Games is offering, that’s for sure. This is Microsoft’s sole exclusive launch for the remainder of the year, but at least it looks like it will be great— so it can carry some of the weight.

Forza Horizon 4 launches for Xbox One and Windows 10 PCs on October 2.

https://youtu.be/0-iFTTkVSDw

Microsoft announced the new additions to the Xbox Game Pass service for October during their Inside Xbox stream earlier today, and it’s a great bunch being added into rotation. The company confirmed that Forza Horizon 4, the superlative racing game by Playground Games, will headline the lineup, but also revealed the other games fans can look forward to.

These other games include Bethesda and MachineGames’ excellent Wolfenstein: The New Colossus, the incredible quasi-reboot/sequel to the Wolfenstein series that launched in 2014, and took the series further down its alternate history where the Nazis won the Second World War. Beloved racing game Split/Second will also be added to Game Pass this month, as will the excellent LEGO Indiana Jones.

The final big name is Metro 2033 Redux, which should let people pick up on the first entry in the series ahead of next year’s release of Metro: Exodus. Hopefully, Last Light will be making its way to the service soon, too.

You can check out the full list of games being added to the service below:

• Forza Horizon 4
• Wolfenstien: The New Order
• Metro 2033 Redux
• Westeradro Double Barrelled
• Lego Indiana Jones
• Shante 1/2 Genie Hero
• Split/Second

While the Xbox One doesn’t have too much in the way of quality exclusive content launching this Holiday season – we get Forza Horizon 4 next month, and then that’s it for the rest of the year – it’s still getting an onslaught of great games, thanks to a lot of great multi platform games releasing all at once.

From Call of Duty, Battlefield, Assassin’s Creed, Fallout, Red Dead Redemption, Tomb Raider, FIFA, Madden, NBA, Just Cause, and many more, the existence of all these multiplatform games should be enough to keep Xbox players busy for the Holiday season. According to Microsoft, this was a deliberate strategy of them getting out of the way of their third party partners for the Holiday season.

“We’re going to get [Forza Horizon 4] out early (October 2nd) and before the blast radius,” Xbox head of marketing Aaron Greenberg said in an interview with GamesIndustry. “Then we didn’t need Crackdown or any of our titles in this holiday window. We’re planning to launch that in February, and then after that we will launch Ori and the Will of the Wisps. We like to have a steady cadence of content throughout the year. But there is more than enough content this holiday. That’s why we’re working with so many third-party partners to showcase their games and help drive our platform during that window. I can’t think of a holiday that had more AAA games in such a tight time period.”

Of course, it’s unclear if this actually is a deliberate strategy, or if this is just him trying to add a positive spin on a situation that is largely out of his control. For instance, we do know that Crackdown 3 was originally due to launch at the end of this year, before it got delayed into next year, the latest in a line of delays in its troubled development- but whatever it is, as I said, at least Xbox fans won’t find a shortage of great games to play this year, if nothing else.