Tech and Science News
Forza Horizon 4: IGN's Real-Life Horizon Road Trip
There are worse ways to spend a Wednesday.
The Forza Horizon series has been taking us around the globe since 2012. Colorado. Southern Europe. Australia. Now we’re going to Britain.
What do I think of when I think of Britain? Mary Poppins. Michael Caine. Moles?
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The places I’ve experienced are airports, motorways, and the inside of a few pubs. I’ve never really seen the Britain between all that.
I dunno; maybe that’s a little unfair. I mean, Australia and Britain aren’t really that different, culturally speaking. Yeah, we love fish and chips too, and we also drive on the left, and we have the same old lady on the back of our money. Sure, there are dissimilarities in the temperature we serve our beer and the amount of venom packed into our spiders, but the differences aren’t really as stark as I think we all like to pretend they are.
Geographically, though? That’s a different story. However, while I’ve been to Britain to visit developers a bunch of times over the past 15 years I still really haven’t seen that much of it in person. The places I’ve experienced are airports, motorways, and the inside of a few pubs. I’ve never really seen the Britain between all that.
I’m about to, though. At least, a small sliver of it.
Today’s trip will take us from leafy Leamington Spa – the home of Forza Horizon 4 developer Playground Games – to a tiny blip on the map between Snowshill and Broadway, deep in the Cotswolds. It’s the site of a small cottage that served as a key part of Forza Horizon 4’s early production process and will be there in the game for us to find come October.
The Cotswolds is the second largest protected landscape in England. Only the Lake District is larger, which also appears in Forza Horizon 4. The Cotswolds reportedly receives 38 million day visits a year. It’s about to get a few more.
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A multimillion dollar convoy has been unloaded into the modest carpark in front Playground Games’ studio building.
A multimillion dollar convoy has been unloaded into the modest carpark in front Playground Games’ studio building. It’s a scene that brings most of the staff outside and begins stopping bystanders. A man on a bicycle asks if the McLarens are Italian. He seems quietly impressed they were all built in a giant shed in Surrey.
Our McLaren for today is a 720S, a car which, in some cases, has proven to be a near equal to the P1. I’m not sure what the S stands for. Scissor doors, maybe. Or maybe just sex. Have you seen one of these things? At any rate, our McLaren chaperone implores us not to switch off the traction control; the 720S officially packs 710 horsepower at the crank, which is 10 Volkswagen Polos and a really good chainsaw or two, but anecdotally the motoring press are tipping that figure is a lot closer to 800.
Either way, it’s a lot more than you need to pootle around a few single track country lanes avoiding tractors.
Yes. There are worse ways to spend a Wednesday than this. You write about racing games long enough and somebody is going to stick you in a real car once in a while. You get to sign a waiver your family will wish you didn’t if you die and feel what life is like for a motoring journalist for an afternoon. It’s not the first time its happened and it won’t be the last.
The 720S, however, is a real wonder. It has what feels like a Lotus Elise style connection between my hands, the steering, and the road – but while the Elise is a bit like a shifter kart with a roof, the 720S is refined and sophisticated. Everything I ask it to do, it responds instantly. The balance is astonishing and the acceleration is blistering. There’s only so much you can wring out of a car like the 720S while remaining in the vicinity of a posted speed limit but it is a tremendous car.
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In a series like Forza Horizon the cars may be the stars but it’s often the stage that warrants the biggest ovation.
Perhaps equally impressive is how tranquil and composed it can be if you relax and settle into a lazy cruise. It’s incredibly easy to drive and entirely unflustered threading its way through the thin streets of centuries-old villages, turning heads all the way. This is a car I could live with. Not the crippling debt that would come with it, but the car? No worries at all.
I’m not a motoring writer but I am a car lover, and I love driving cars. But the car is only half the story here. In a series like Forza Horizon the cars may be the stars but it’s often the stage that warrants the biggest ovation.
The Cotswolds is a beautiful area. I can tell why it made it into Playground Games’ British megamix. The rural atmosphere isn’t necessarily that detached from where I actually grew up myself, but everything is so much more green and cramped. Thick hedgerows turn thin ribbons of tarmac into narrow corridors. The roadside is overgrown with grass and weeds, the complete opposite of the sort of dusty, parched verges that line the roads where I live. There are dry stone walls and buildings that may well be hundreds of years older than any building I’ve seen in Australia.
One absurdly picturesque moment finds us passing beneath a canopy of dense, overhanging trees, shedding millions of tiny petals. It’s like driving through an animated postcard.
We eventually arrive at our destination: an unassuming cottage on an unassuming street. And yet, even in this tiny sliver of England traffic slows and a small crowd gathers. I suppose it’s not everyday your view of an otherwise peaceful sheep paddock is interrupted by half-a-dozen Woking wild things.
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Forza Horizon has never been about recreating traffic snarls and bogging you down behind caravans.
We head back via a more conventional route, picking up weekday traffic on the motorway back to Leamington. Here’s the “real Britain” some punters are still joking about; they haven’t quite shaken that contempt bred by their day-to-day experience with 9-5, peak-hour Britain.
But Forza Horizon has never been about recreating traffic snarls and bogging you down behind caravans. The Forza Horizon series’ greatest victory remains its ability to bottle the joy of driving. Horizon 4, like its predecessors, is about fulfilment. It’s about the satisfaction of sliding into a cool car and mashing the pedal under your right foot. Take an enormous cross section of the world’s most desirable, iconic, and sometimes quirkiest cars, and set them loose in a beautiful place. That’s always been the Horizon mandate. I think Britain is a beautiful place. So it’s not America, or Japan. There are a trillion games set in America and Japan. I think Britain is a great choice.
And I can’t see this being the last Forza Horizon game.
Can you?
You can reach the rest of this month's IGN First content on Forza Horizon 4 from this hub, including our behind-the-scenes report from our visit to Playground Games in the lead up to E3 2018, our video deep dive on why seasons change everything in Forza Horizon 4, and our in-depth look at the insane new McLaren Senna.
Luke is Games Editor at IGN's Sydney office. You can find him on Twitter every few days @MrLukeReilly.