Forza Horizon 3 Goes Down Under

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Now for Windows 10 and XB1, including crossplay between the platforms, FH3 is looking like the ultimate simcade driving experience. They have taken the best parts of FH2 and the expansion, Storm Island, and created a base game that looks to nail this genre down. The setting is now Australia, and it feels like a perfect way to incorporate urban and extreme environments.

From E3, this an example of people playing on both platforms and joining up together in an open world racing environment.

Also, they are now including Groove Music Station on the in-game radio, which lets you upload your own music to OneDrive, create a playlist, and then steam that as your in-game radio station.

Forza Horizon 3 will let you stream your personal music collection into your game through Groove Music

Forza Horizon 3 includes a cool new feature that allows you to play your own music when you are driving your favorite car in the game. There is a brand new Groove Radio station. Groove Radio lets players stream their own personal music collection from the cloud – just add your music to your OneDrive, create a playlist in Groove Music on Windows 10, and Horizon 3 will stream that playlist into your game on Xbox One and Windows 10.

They have also added more radio stations – featuring new music styles like hip hop, heavy rock and punk – alongside Horizon favorite stations like Bass Arena and Horizon Pulse. Forza Horizon 3 will feature stations from labels like Hospital Records, Epitaph Records, and Vagrant Records, as well as the latest music from cutting-edge Australian label Future Classic.

One reason I hope we see more people playing online are the some of the fun game modes like Infected and other tag type of games. These were pretty great in FH2, but there was a limited audience at the time. With a larger install base, and the inclusion of PC gamers, there could be some really fun nights playing this.

The way it worked in FH2 is that you would set up an online road trip, and the folks from your party would come along. There would be five races set up, and some would be races, and others tag games. Between matches, you race the other cars in your party to the new location, earning XP if you beat the others.

With everyone in a party chat, these modes were a lot of fun. Playing randoms, not so much.

I am pumped for this.

I really am. Incorporating Forza 6's puddle physics, Storm Island's weather and extreme elevation changes, and the ability to craft your own radio station should make this a pretty fantastic game out of the box. After all the time I spent on FH2, I really can't wait to dig into the Australian settings. I think that was a brilliant move by Playground Games.

Here's a couple of new videos outof Gamescom. I can't embed them, but it's to 4 minute or so clips of gameplay.

I can't wait for this.

This is the racing game I've been waiting for.

windows 10 with cross platform! This is the Forza i've been waiting for! Now i can buy a pc wheel and live the life with pc and Forza!

Forza's been my only racing jam since original Forza, and i've constantly lamented it's lack of PC support and with the xbone of needing a special very expensive wheel just for it.

And i just got 2x 4k Gaming monitors! AHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

Anyone know of the cheapest place to get the Ultimate edition? The Australian Microsoft store wants $139.95 for it...

You should get some sort of discount for it taking place in your back yard.

I fully endorse that.

I'll probably play most of it on XB1 in my recliner. But I'm still looking forward to trying out the PC version. I didn't play Forza 6 much because I realized what I wanted was just more of what FH2 offered. Now I get it and I'm excited.

More fun added to the game. Seriously, why can't I have this now?

For those who aren't planning on either leaving the radio off or using custom stations 100% of the time, here's the full track listing for the soundtrack and an interview with Ralph Fulton about it.

I know many people don't like drum and bass, but I think it's pretty much perfect driving music, so I'm really stoked to see the excellent lineup for the Hospital Records station.

Also, the full car list has now been announced.

Also, preloading has started on the Xbox, and you can get the preloading stub loaded up on Windows -- BUT, only if you have already taken the Windows 10 Anniversary update, since it's required to play the game. (They are doing a staggered rollout just like they did with the original Windows 10 release, but you can go into your update manager and find a link to install it right away if it hasn't rolled out to you yet.)

And finally, word is that a demo will be available on both platforms on Monday, although it might be keyed to the UK timezone, so folks in the US might be able to load it up on Sunday evening.

So this is coming out on the Friday 23rd... I have that day off and also the Monday since it's a public holiday over here. I think it's a sign that I have to get this. I also updated to the Anniversary edition so it's now sitting there in the windows store ready for me to click the buy button.

So close to buying.

The demo is out today on the Xbox (and probably in the next few days on PC), and (entirely unsurprisingly) it's quite good -- I'd say it's a pretty safe bet that anyone who enjoyed the previous Horizon games is going to be happy.

A few quick things I noticed:

- For better or for worse depending on your preferences, it's still Horizon handling -- meaning, Forza Motorsport physics but with far more forgiving traction coefficients, so you can break later, hold a tighter turn at faster speeds, and recover from a slide more easily.

- However, if you are in the camp of wishing it felt even the slightest bit closer to reality, there is good news: the various different off-road surfaces seem to have a much more pronounced effect on your handling, especially in cars without proper tires and suspension, and at least on my Thrustmaster TX there is appropriate force feedback and vibration to go with it, so driving on sand feels like sand, grass like grass, etc. Of course, that's not to say the game's physics don't still allow for silly/stupid things like going off-roading in your favorite hypercar (again, for better or worse depending on your preferences).

- Wet pavement still doesn't seem to have much of an effect on traction, but they have ported over the "3D puddle" effects that were added in Forza 6, and to great effect. At least the area in the demo is full of nicely placed puddles as well as shallow bits of lake, river, and ocean to drive through, and they are every bit as impressive as the puddles in Forza 6 are.

- The "bro factor" has been dialed back just the tiniest bit, but it's still there (and the various characters that surround you are still a bit on the annoyingly chatty side). However, one nice addition is that you can now choose your character's appearance and name right off the bat, with no assumed male default. Granted, Forza 6 did already allow you to change between a male and female body inside your fire suit, but here you can choose between men and women from nice spectrum of ethnicities (all skinny, young and attractive, of course, but still), and you can select a name from a dizzying array of male, female, and non-gender specific options regardless of your body selection.

- The game is stunningly beautiful, and I cannot wait to see it running on my 34" 21:9 monitor at 60 fps.

- I really, really hope they get support for my TH8A shifter in the PC version soon. Their initial PC peripheral support includes an nice variety of wheels, but only a nebulous promise of support for more shifters beyond one or two of the ones that are baked into various Logitech setups. While the Xbox version is perfectly acceptable and I could certainly play there with all my gear while I wait for my shifter to be supported on PC, I'd really rather be taking advantage of the improved horsepower of my PC from the beginning.

demo is fun and looking forward to seeing this in HDR.

zeroKFE wrote:

- The "bro factor" has been dialed back just the tiniest bit, but it's still there (and the various characters that surround you are still a bit on the annoyingly chatty side). However, one nice addition is that you can now choose your character's appearance and name right off the bat, with no assumed male default. Granted, Forza 6 did already allow you to change between a male and female body inside your fire suit, but here you can choose between men and women from nice spectrum of ethnicities (all skinny, young and attractive, of course, but still), and you can select a name from a dizzying array of male, female, and non-gender specific options regardless of your body selection.

THANK GOD. I don't have to look at the potato ever again. Worst part about FH2 was seeing that dude's head take up half the car.

THANK GOD. I don't have to look at the potato ever again. Worst part about FH2 was seeing that dude's head take up half the car.

Well, don't get too excited until you see the options in the flesh -- you might not really like any of them. It would be nice to have one be a helmeted fire suit, but I suppose that would look odd in the cutscenes where your avatar is out of the car.

You just roleplay as the Stig's Australian Cousin.

Sweet! Thanks for the heads up. At first I got a little worried when I saw 3/5 star demo score then I scrolled down to the reviews.

"No PC Demo... 1/5"

Rinse and repeat. Score a game low, that you obviously want to play, because you can't play it yet?? Fans never cease to amaze me.

Edit: Link to the demo for those that want to queue it up.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/stor...

I finally got to this last night, albeit late, after the Rams game, and a bit intoxicated. But this is everything I was hoping would be. It does make me crave a new TV, but it still just a a fantastic presentation, from the graphics to the sound.

It must be because I'm getting old but this was so much more fun than Forza 6. I keep buying Forza games, and every time I stop playing after 2 hours or so. Forza 6, maybe I put in less than an hour.

Never bought a single Horizon game before. So maybe I should start with this.

Preordered the Ultimate edition on the PC and feeling good Now just need to wait until I can preload.

I've always enjoyed the Horizon games more than the vanilla Forza - a bigger variety of cars, more interesting environments, better music (My FH2 radio was always on the classical music channel). It's expensive, though. I have a shameful pile of shame, since I've been finding it harder to get through long form story based stuff (Fallout 4, Mirror's Edge, Deux Ex, XCOM 2). Stellaris was the last game I put significant time into.

zeroKFE wrote:

I know many people don't like drum and bass, but I think it's pretty much perfect driving music, so I'm really stoked to see the excellent lineup for the Hospital Records station.

The first Forza Horizon is actually what got me into that stuff. I'd never really given it a chance, but, like you said, it's perfect driving music. BPM has since became my favorite XM station and I'm pretty stoked about the soundtrack to this game.

If you buy the physical version. Do you still get a Windows copy?

Balthezor wrote:

If you buy the physical version. Do you still get a Windows copy?

I'm pretty sure I remember reading someone saying no, crossbuy only applies for the download version from the windows10/xbox store or if you buy a code for the game from a retailer which is apparently a thing for this. I guess.

Because in the case of the disc version it's not actually linked to your account. You can still sell the disk so there's no way for them to verify you own it on the other platform.

The only way they could do that is if you could put the Xbox One disc in an optical drive in your PC, but I don't see that happening any time soon.

Serious question here: I know that Forza Horizon 3 runs at 30fps. But, to me, it feels like a 60fps game. Has anybody else experienced this? Or, especially for FPS sensitive folks, been bothered by the games's presentation?

I gather that the game maintains an extremely consistent 30fps and has a very sophisticated motion blur filter.

I'm not hypersensitive to fps issues and I'm usually perfectly content with a good 30 fps presentation, but I can usually tell the difference between 30 and 60 fps. Without specifically knowing otherwise, I would have sworn that FH3 was a 60fps game.

Anyway, it impressed the heck out of me.

They certainly do a lot of work to make it feel a little better than other 30fps racing games. That said... it still noticeably feels like a 30fps racing game.

Controls still feel just ever so slightly slow, as they always do on any game that requires fast control movements but runs at 30fps. Shooters and racing games in particular all feel sluggish at lower framerates.

The team behind the Horizons games do a better job of hiding it than basically anybody else but they're still just doing what they can to hide the rough edges, not actually fixing the problem.

Approximately zero minutes of this game will be played on the Xbox for me when it comes out. 1440p @144hz here I come.

The "problem" is that it is an open world game. There is no fixing that until Scorpio is released.

Forza 5 & 6 get their 60fps by having a much smaller world to load for each race.

No, they could always sacrifice some visuals here and there to make the game actually run well or use tricks like the Halo 5 devs did to change asset resolution or... whatever. There's other ways. They just choose not to do any of those things. They try to mask it with things like motion blur, which helps on a visual level but does nothing for the controls.

Thankfully we can now play the game elsewhere.

I like Horizon a bit more than mainline Forza. This is 100% because I'm terrible at the games in general and really just enjoy sliding hypercars across fields more than trying to slice tenths of a second off lap times.

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