The team at developer Playground Games had a lot of fun creating Forza Horizon 3. Forza creative director Dan Greenawalt said so himself during an interview at E3 with Shack News:
"A group of guys had to spend a summer in Australia capturing skies. I'm not sure if they learned how to surf, but if they didn't, shame on them."
My goodness. That summer trip single-handedly gave Forza Horizon 3 its heart and soul.
The traditional recipe for AAA racing game titles is pretty simple: have a vast library of cars and recreate each one, in appearance and characteristic, as fastidiously as possible. Essentially, the cars are supposed to be the stars. Anything else, environment or gameplay wise, is just the cherry on top.
Except Forza Horizon 3 did not follow the traditional recipe. And why should it? The Forza franchise has reproduced photorealistic vehicles and authentic driving physics for years – that part is taken care of. The Horizon team knew that cars alone do not make a really good racing game. Automobiles have a purpose. A reason for being. And the thrills that await in Australia’s incredible horizon showcases this perfectly.
Did you feel something from watching that video? That is freedom. The freedom to skim across the incredible beaches of Great Ocean Road, to drift through the thickets of Yarra Valley, to jump The Outback’s endless sand dunes and the freedom to fly through the lively neon lit streets of Surfers Paradise. Sadly, I never had the pleasure to visit Australia, but Forza Horizon 3 made my heart swell with awe. The Land Down Under is, in a word, breathtaking.
Forza Horizon 3 puts you in charge of organizing a grand festival celebrating car culture, thumping music and good vibes. The game starts out in Byron Bay, where the first Horizon tent is pitched. Your goal is to expand the festival to become as big as possible by generating as much publicity as possible with your driving antics.
Every race won will earn you a couple thousand new fans that will want to attend the festival. Winning races against the best Drivatars enables you to hire them to race at the festival. The better the Drivatar you hire, the more fans you’ll bring to the event.
You can attract even more fans by pulling “PR Stunts,” which are mini missions requiring you to complete challenges such as long jumps, speed traps and drifts in designated zones.
The variety of different driving events not only break from the monotony of race after race, but more importantly it encourages players to explore the different landscapes that Australia has to offer while driving a vast variety of vehicles to choose from.
The thrill of speed, the freedom to explore, and the diversity of really interesting and special vehicles that make it all possible is what car enthusiasts live and breathe. This passion is difficult to convey in words, but I believe even a brief exposure to Forza Horizon 3 is enough to convert the most apathetic millennial. And when these clueless kids accept FH3 as their savior, Forza rewards them with the full breadth of car culture there is to offer.
“I’m getting a little bit older,” Greenawalt admitted in the same interview at E3. “I don’t want to make them into me, I want to make them love cars however they’re gonna love cars, which will be different from me. And I want to learn from them!”
Gran Turismo 6 may have over a thousand vehicles in its game, but the team at Forza achieved the feat of painting the spectrum of car culture from curating only about 350 cars. The wild landscape highlights the exhilarating possibilities of what a 2016 Ariel Nomad off-roader and a 1970 Bruce Meyers dune buggy can do. Wide highways show off the mind-bending top speeds of the brand-new Lamborghini Centenario and the iconic 1987 Ferrari F40. The Aussie’s traditional love affair with ‘utes and V8 muscle cars is also juxtaposed with its geographic proximity to Japan and their love affair with big turbo tuner cars and drifting. There’s literally something for everyone and it’s obvious that nurturing a new generation of car enthusiasts is Forza’s ultimate goal.
Forza Horizon 3 comes out on Sept. 27 for Xbox One and PC. And on that note, I don’t want to live on this planet anymore: I want to live in Forza Horizon instead.
