Forza Horizon 4: Beginners Guide
The Horizon Festival welcomes you! If you’re new , you most likely found it through Steam, which is excellent! We’ve put together this Beginners Guide with advice from the community to make sure you’re ready before diving into a rich and exhilarating open world racing experience.
In the early hours of the game, the game does a great job of introducing you to concepts like the seasonal playlist, Festival events like the Road Racing or Dirt Racing series, and story missions like The Stunt Driver, but we wanted to let the Forza community share tips they’ve learned from their time behind the wheel to help jumpstart your game. Remember, you’ll be joining a well-established community that has been racing the roads and hills of Britain for more than two years, and they’re excited to have you join them.
Don’t get too worked up over winning or losing. Playing at a high difficulty level earns you more influence and credits in the long term, as well as making you a better player.
It’s true: the greater the difficulty, the greater the prize, even if you don’t always finish first. In the long run, challenging yourself will get you further than dominating every lap every time. When you take the race online, sharpening your talents early on will pay dividends.
But what’s the best strategy to improve your abilities? Well, @EXEventure on Twitter chipped up with some sound suggestions based on what we’ve seen from some of the best Forza drivers:
Hone your skills: start with a difficulty setting and the assists you need to get familiar with the physics, then gradually up the difficulty and remove assists as you get more comfortable with the driving. This ensures you’re challenging yourself and increasing your winnings.
ABS, the driving line, and automatic gear shifting are all designed to make driving more pleasurable for drivers of all ability levels, and as you gain more confidence in your talents, you may find it advantageous to turn off these features one by one. You might even find that as you develop more control over every component of your car, you get faster.
You can progress to faster and faster automobiles and still be able to control them efficiently once you’ve learnt the basics and started removing help. @Xllllllllllx680 on Twitter offered this advice:
Learn how to drive the lower horsepower cars before going on to something like the AMR Vulcan.
You might start off the game doing 200 mph in a McLaren Senna, however, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t spend time in the lower classes of cars. The best way to drive is to stay on the road and you need to learn how to do that before you can go break the sound barrier. Mastering C and D class cars will go a long way towards excelling in S1 and S2 class cars.
What is the greatest way to learn about the various car classes’ strengths and weaknesses? They’re being driven! LeslieDaWelsh1 (Race Marshal) sent us this bit of advice via Discord:
Spend some time in Rivals to learn how cars can handle.
Rivals mode pits you against ghost Drivatars (AI opponents trained to race like their real-world counterparts) on a hotlapping track, where you’ll have the chance to set faster and faster lap times as you familiarize yourself with each car. Take advantage of this mode as a place to learn the nuances and quirks of each car, so you can find the types of cars that work for you and learn your style of racing. Plus, you can post times against drivers all over the world to see how you stack up, which can be pretty motivating.
Once you’ve mastered the fundamentals of driving in Forza, it’s time to get serious about customising and personalising your vehicles.
On Twitter, @Juanp627 writes:
Tune your cars! Especially when playing online events.
Let’s talk about tuning. If Forza Horizon 4 is your introduction to Forza, or driving games in general, it’s possible that tuning a car is a foreign concept to you. If that’s the case, we recommend you spend some time with our handy tuning guide, courtesy of Pendulum Tuning Garage’s own PTG Jamie, who stopped by our Forza Monthly stream in June 2020 to give an in-depth guide to the ins and outs of tuning your car to perfection.
Jamie’s Tuning Guide (PTG)
If PTG Jamie’s instruction goes deeper than you expected, you may always go to the Creative Hub and download a track made by someone else to get you where you need to go. To make it easy to discover the proper tune for what you need, most tuners offer their setups helpful titles for specific objectives like seasonal rewards or drift challenges.
That takes us to a second bit of tuning advice, this time through Twitter from @bertanderny:
Don’t “over tune” your motors. Go too many classes up, and you will still get smashed. An S2 Scooby is not the same as an S2 Lambo.
It’s an excellent point! It’s critical to become familiar with the strengths and limitations of the vehicles in your garage. Even tuning has its limits when it comes to making a car effective, and it’s sometimes just a matter of choosing the right car.
It’s time to go online once you’ve defined your racing style and are comfortable behind the wheel. Here are some online driving etiquette suggestions from @morphium666:
Be respectful to all other players, do not push them out of the road, do not ruin the race; if someone is faster, accept it, let them pass, try to pass by drafting, slingshot, be better in skills.
@Tofuboi86cz offers similar advice:
Treat others how you want to be treated in a race.
Racing online is a huge part of the Forza Horizon 4 experience, whether it’s with your regular convoy, or against complete strangers. That’s why it’s so important to maintain a safe and fun online experience. Our Race Marshals work hard to moderate the online experience, but it’s up to every driver to make sure they’re making our community better for everyone.
So, you’ve mastered the basics of driving. You have a rudimentary grasp of tuning. You’ve dabbled in the livery editor, photo mode, and possibly Super7 and the Eliminator. But what is it about the Festival that keeps you coming back week after week? After you’ve taken on LaRacer and Isha’s Taxi Service, uncovered every barn treasure, and shattered every influence board, what’s the draw of racing the Festival circuits?
DO THE FESTIVAL PLAYLIST EVERY WEEK! “Hard to Get Car” and “New Exclusive Car” are the most important things from it you don’t want to miss.
EVERY WEEK, COMPLETE THE FESTIVAL PLAYLIST! The most crucial items you don’t want to miss are “Hard to Get Car” and “New Exclusive Car.”
Forza Horizon 4’s Festival Playlist is its lifeblood. Every week, we add fresh and fascinating material to the game, including brand new automobiles like the Corvette C8, the Koenigsegg Jesko, and even the Cyberpunk 2077 Quadra Turbo-R VTECH.
The playlist works like this:
To get everything that week has to offer, go to the main menu and select “Festival Playlist.” You’ll see a list of racing series, online challenges, and stunts that you’ll need to complete. Even if you don’t finish the entire playlist every week, you’ll always get new vehicles, Wheelspins, and vanity items for your driver like car horns and costumes.
Several additional races will appear on your map if you go to one of the championship series featured in the playlist. You must complete every race in the series in order to obtain the seasonal reward, which could be a new car, vanity item, or wheelspin.
Forza Horizon 4 has a lot of depth. Photographers will enjoy the photo mode and can join our incredibly active photo community on Instagram; track and stunt designers will lose themselves in Super7 or the Blueprint maker; battle royale fans will chase the circle in the Eliminator; and livery artists will spend hours crafting the perfect wrap in the paint booth. Indeed, we have some fantastic livery painters in the community who are more than willing to share their knowledge and experience. Artist Jake Goodman visited Forza Monthly in February 2020 to deliver an useful step-by-step instruction for one of his livery ideas.
Jake Goodman’s Guide to Livery Design
Everyone has a place at the Festival, and part of the fun is finding yours!
This guide only scratches the surface of everything the game has to offer, including DLC like Fortune Island and LEGO Speed Champions. @M farda said it out perfectly:
Allow time to pass! You won’t get the whole sense of being in a racing ecology with SO much to do if you load it up and merely play for 30 minutes. It’s similar to a Massive Multiplayer Online Racing Game in certain ways.
Here are a few more fast tips from the community to help you learn everything there is to know about FH4.
Did you know, for example…
- Justparticipating to the end in the weekly Playground Game on FH4 will count towards completion in the Festival Playlist? You don’t need to win it to claim your reward.
- The Horizon Promo tile in Forza Horizon 4 lets you not only check for any cars you haven’t yet photographed, it also checks which cars you may be missing in your collection by using the option ‘not owned’? This does include cars that are not available in the Autoshow (e.g. seasonal rewards etc.)
- You can check how to obtain any Forza Horizon 4 item (clothing, horn, phrase) by clicking on the item if you don’t own it yet? The game will give you a hint how it can be obtained.
- You can judge the popularity of your shared tune setups and vinyl groups by looking into your own Creative Hub where they are sorted most popular first?
Overall, our pal @DonJoewonSong summed it up nicely:
Main advice… have fun with it. Don’t be overwhelmed with the amount of content in the game. The initial opening hours steadily showcase how to play. The community is massive, don’t hesitate to get in touch if you’re after something specific
And if everything else fails, follow @Xisiansss’ advice:
Make car go vroom