One thing that has me concerned about Horizons 3 is the trend the series seems to be starting by making the flow of credits TOO fast and preventing a feeling of "building" a collection of unique cars that I as a driver decided to invest in over other options and upgrading them over time with hard earned credits.

I fell in love with Forza Motorsports 2 back when I was a youngster in high school. My dad was a bit of a "petrol head," and it was something that mashed our interests together to let us bond a bit, and actually led to me caring much about vehicles beyond usefulness.

I really enjoyed the pacing that the game had to it. I spent a chunk of time racing in a particular car, buying a few of the mid range upgrades to try and improve it's handling and capabilities. I quickly realized how little I knew about how the components of a car could impact handling and drivability. I started out just trying to crank up the 'fast' meter. Bigger engines? Yup! Stock tires? Whatever it's just a bit of rubber under the car!

This presented me with a couple of genuinely enjoyable challenges: a car that was difficult to drive without skill and a need to gain understanding so I could fix my mistakes with my next investment in parts.

A car that was difficult to control was great for pushing me to learn about the physics and mechanics of racing a car. I'm no expert and I'm not great at Forza but I really enjoyed the learning process. I found the tuning options and read every detailed explanation of how it worked. This gave me valuable context and insight on why vehicles do what the do and handle how they do. It helped me learn to control acceleration during cornering, how important tires are (they are your interface with the road, of course they are important!), and a bunch of other lessons I've either forgotten over the years or simply internalized as instinct. After doing research I started to do track tests, experimenting with what I could make the car do. I looked at what I did and what happened and investigated until I found what I believed to be the underlying physics of it. I became a much better driver between the extra practice and the context I had gained. Essentially what happened was I had a car that was too hard for me to drive at my level of experience and it forced me to rapidly improve my skills and knowledge. While this first basic lesson (upgrade tiresearly on to take advantage of additional torque, horsepower, and prowess) was the most memorable, I learned plenty of other lessons along the way. It was a lot of fun and helped develop my cognitive abilities outside of the game.

The need to fix the problems I was experiencing was another fun lesson the game funneled me into. I needed to figure out what to upgrade and why. I needed to learn what the various components contributed to the overall ride and performance of the car. I even learned that sometimes the "best" upgrade was a myth and could be detrimental if it didn't fit well with my driving style and skill. I started to experiment and investigate some of the less exciting upgrades. Anti roll bars was one that I remember spending a lot of time investigating. I had little understanding about understear and oversteer or other mechanics involved with such components and experimenting with the tuning on them helped me find the style of ride I liked best and was most successful with. I read all of the detailed information in the upgrades menu as well as the tuning menu. There was a wealth of intel in those descriptions. I ran laps with varying tuning setups to see what the extremes did, what smaller differences did. Eventually I fine tuned it to fit my general driving style, until I was happy with the results. I did this with most of the upgrades, buying a couple at a time until I was all kitted out.

Over time I ended up with an Audi AA and Mini Cooper all souped up. The Mini Cooper excelled at maneuvering and cornering, unsurprisingly, and was a favorite of mine for tight courses. The Audi I built more for speed and stability, great for curvy but moderate courses. I also fell in with one of the classic muscle cars and turned it into a barely controlled monster. That one ended up being a favorite of mine for quite a while, due to the engagement level required to keep it going where I wanted.

As time went on I also slowly weened off most of the assists other than the racing line, which stayed at "braking only."

It gave me a nice boost of credits and allowed me to invest more rapidly in cars and parts without trivializing big investments. I liked this pace a lot. It suited me. I like to take my time and be given the opportunity to master something before moving on. I enjoyed the journey from stock car to racing legend. It was a mixture of pride at my work, satisfaction from the challenges I faced, and curiosity about the subject.

More recent games seem to be going well away from this kind of pacing, throwing credits at the player faster than they care to spend them. I think Jeff has commented on his lack of motivation to decrease assists or increase difficulty due to how fast credits are earned in both this game and the last Motorsports title. On top of that in the quick look he fully upgraded his Interceptor from stock to max (or close anyhow) for a handleful of credits.

The game also seems to have semi regular games of chance that might gove you some new exotic car. The last thing I want is to get a bunch of free Ferari's and Lambos dropped in my lap. I would much rather earn it over time so it feels like an investment rather than a purchase made on a whim.

Anyone else prefer the slow burn Forza used to take? Or am I the obly crazy person on this boat?

I will admit upfront that I didn't read your entire wall of text, so apologies.

This hasn't applied to a single Horizon game. In fact, I feel like there's a drought of funds available to you unless you unlock multipliers, boosters, and stay on top of Rewards. Even still you make far less compared to the Motorsport series.

As far as the Motorsport games go, I'd much rather have the ability to own any car at any time then have to spend an hour or two wasting time against the (garbage) AI to get the creds. When FM2 came out I had nothing but time, so I didn't have an issue with it then. But today the opposite is true.

With over 400 cars in a Forza game nowadays when all is said and done, it's not reasonable to expect a player to put in a thousand hours only to be able to buy half of them.

Several reviewers who dinged Forza 6 for being a flood of credits so every car and upgrade was available have pointed to Horizon 3 and going back to earlier times where credits were not impossible to gather but a resource that forced decisions about where to upgrade and what to buy as you progressed the career.

Those earlier Forza games had a curve. But look at Forza 5, which became stingier than the 360 games with credits while pushing hard on the option to pay real money rather than using in-game credits: that's not making a game with a better curve that forces choices and builds familiarity with the vehicles you do choose - that's exploitative F2P design in a AAA premium game that offers all cars to you immediately if you pay enough real money for it.

I have to say, if you want to build your own collection and don't like the freebies so much then so far Horizon 3 feels good to me. But you'll want to either not link it up to Forza Rewards or get those freebies and use the in-game system to dump them from your garage to retain the progression curve of the game without getting free high-end options from the start.

As to the price of upgrades: you can easily spend more on upgrades than on the base car. They're not cheap and, considering the desire for tuned handling and ending up with a vehicle close to a spec barrier, you should expect to be paying it for most vehicles you drive so it's a decent money-sink in the game economy. No driving a few races with a manufacturer and it ending up with basically free upgrades early in your career in this design, unlike so earlier Forza titles.

@falconer: Totally reasonable haha.

I agree that it should be reasonable to unlock everything with reasonable effort, that's why I prefer things to be on a curve:slow for a healthy period early on and then ramp up the rate of progress over time until you can quickly collect vehicles and boost them up. I don't want the whole game to be a slow burn but I feel like that slow burn quickly disapears in more recent games (particularly after the backlash against 5) disappears. Even in Horizon 1 I felt it didn't last but I seem to remember a less significant upgrade mechanic than the Motorsport games had.

Keep in mind that we seem to have very different ideas of what pace the game should progress. I'm the guy who only plays Civilization at Marathon speeds, I enjoy very slow, uphill progression in some games, especially more technical or strategic games.

@shivoa: That gives me a bit of hope I suppose, but I can't shake how many credits Jeff had relative to the costs of things in the game.

Can you discard a car rather than sell it? I don't want to trade a bunch of free cars for excess cash flow, as odd as that may be. But if I can avoid the random free car stuff that would help a lot.

I plan on picking the game up and regardless will probably enjoy the hell out of it. Just want to see how the PC version irons out before making a platform decision.

Thanks for the info folks!

@opusofthemagnum: Horizon 1 was just starved of content at launch. The free DLC (1000 Club) added to the general stuff to do and reasons to mess around in the open world with various vehicles but that game was under 20 hours to thoroughly carve through all the authored content and play a healthy portion of online (I think I was at 980/1000 achievements about 3 days after launch because I love that game but completely consumed it). I put well over 100 hours into Forza 3 and 4 so Horizon just felt like a snack, not that you couldn't go back and chase rivals to get more out of it (or do more online - too many trolls attempting to block you when you lap them for my tastes in a lot of the online TBH, I'd rather only play with friends who know you don't get invited back if you're there for ruining the race for the lead or doing cannonballing at the corners).

The costs are pretty much taken forward from previous Forzas is my impression. There are lots of way of earning from photos to racing to the passive bonuses. I'd say that's the only big departure: you get a daily stipend based on how many people have picked to use your drivatar in their roster so you'll get a few thousand a day from that. But it's not Ferrari money or anything (maybe it is for Jeff is he's on everyone's Following list and so turns up a lot in other people's games?) and races aren't that generous with the winnings.

I've been making ok money but nothing staggering (as Jeff mentions in the QL, the skill points are the point where it does feel like they lock up a load of rewards behind this wall and then let you basically drift/crash through the farms to completely trivialise that system - look forward to an eventual expansion or sequel looking at that system for a complete reinvention that promotes actual skilled driving for reward as right now it is too easy to farm) and this is a game with 350 cars to buy when FH2 started with barely over half that. You can definitely just drop cars from your garage if you want. Not sold, just released into the aether.

Maybe, if you want to feel every credit is hard to find, you can add some house rules*. There are lots of rare cars and the auction house is back so maybe have a rule that you've got to save up X% of your winning to buying those rare cars on the AH - lots of 10 million credit drops there to funnel cash into. Or make it so that when you want to buy a vehicle, you have to purchase it twice and throw away one of the purchases to increase the costs for your play curve. There's loads of customisation in how you approach the races on offer so you'll not be blocked fro progressing if you don't have lots of vehicles on hand.

* As we live in an era where cheats are things publishers charge for as DLC, it's far easier to add house rules to make it harder than to make it easier. For example, I've never played GTA games with hospital and jail respawns. That's game over, reload the last save when I'm playing. Nothing in the game forces me down that path but that's how I've always played them: no deaths, no arrests. It's a small detail but I find the games are balanced perfectly fine with that added limitation. You can always make a game harder with rules like this.

I dunno, haven't played this yet but I loved how fast that Fast and Furious DLC progressed. I could play 100 hours of Gran Turismo 2 with a single car, but I guess I'm part of the problem now and want some hot unlocks.

Depends on the game, though, as I tend to stick to two or three cars for the duration of the more recent Need for Speeds.

In terms of progression, I think what's bothering me about Forza Horizon 3 is that - as far as I can tell - nearly any event can be done with nearly any car. It is even possible (though not advisable) to run the off-road races in a Ferrari.

In earlier games, you'd pull up to a race and find that you needed a B-class Japanese hatchback, or a classic American muscle car with less than 300hp. That really helped establish a feeling that I was collecting cars for a purpose. I needed that front-wheel drive economy car for a specific race. If it was fun to drive, I might end up upgrading it and driving it in other races. In FH3, I've bought a couple of cars that I know I'll enjoy driving, and I can drive them in any event. That's nice in its own way, but the result is that there's no compelling reason for me to seek out a 1970's European roadster and learn to drive it.

I guess the solution is for me to blueprint every event and require different types of cars to force myself to drive something new. I'm glad that's an option, but I think that having to do it myself might take a lot of the fun out of it. I guess we'll see.

@baconhound: The don't do a great job of explaining this, so here's the way the game unlocks (which is not a short process - this game has some meat to it even if you aimed to beeline just through the races and I have to say you'll be missing out if you do that as there's so much more than that here):

Each of the 63 events can be run, as you've found, with a default blueprint that customises to whatever vehicle you arrived in (this is exhibition mode and the first one that unlocks in the game). Default class/group built around your car and everyone else has their vehicles upgraded if you're non-standard spec (however, not everyone is levelled down if their base spec is above you so those looking for a challenge should come with low-ranked vehicles for their class/group). You can also tweak it a bit further from this default by writing your own blueprint. And friends who have written their own blueprints also appear in the list.

There is also the classic rivals mode where you import a blueprint from someone else and try to beat their ghost. Push yourself, get bonus credits for beating their record.

And then there is the championship. These are blocks of several events that you play in a series. They aren't blueprinted for your current car etc. These are the classic events where you need to buy your way into the appropriate group to compete and possibly even upgrade to be competitive with the AIs.

The championships unlock as you play and as you complete the exhibitions for various events. Blueprint the exhibitions down to a single lap if you just want to get them over with quickly, use them to get a feel of the route and then play the championships as the real meat of the game that pushes your purchasing of new vehicles. Then maybe go back and see what blueprints your friends have been making for their exhibitions if you just want to do a single race but still run by someone else's rules/group restrictions (I think it only imports blueprints from your friends, may also pull in from your car club).

@shivoa: Thanks for the rundown. That's good to know about the championships. I think the one (and only) championship that I've done, I must have driven up in the right vehicle by coincidence, giving me the impression that I had - every race is set up for your current car. It sounds like that's not quite right, and it's good to hear.

@baconhound: My first couple of Championships were like that as well, I just happened to be driving a car that was on the list. At this point there are at least two new Championships that I don't even have a car for, though.

@baconhound: I find the AWD Aventador to absolutely wreck in those Hyper Car cross country missions. Since it has that distributed energy you can literally power on the gas to catch and recover right out of a drift through a turn.

@baconhound: I hadn't even really thought about that, glad to hear it's maybe not universal but it'd be nice if there was more to it.
I get that Horizon is the more accessible series for the franchise, but as a huge fan of the technical side of things (from cars to computers to guns and many of the skills around such things) AND adventure I'd love if the game could give me the best of both worlds. Sounds like I'll just need to decide on some house rules and do a "challenge run."