Video Game / Forza

aka: Forza Motorsport

Where dreams are driven.

Forza^note Italian for "force" or "strength", pronounced with a t before the z (FORT-za), like pizza is a semi-simulation Racing Game franchise for the Xbox brand of consoles and later Windows published by Xbox Game Studios. Created by their internal Turn 10 Studios division as Forza Motorsport, which is aimed at competing with Sony Interactive Entertainment and Polyphony Digital's Gran Turismo franchise, it is noted for an extensive car painting system, performance customization, and a massive car list. It is divided between two series; the original Forza Motorsport series by Turn 10, and the open world driving series Forza Horizon, developed by Playground Games with Turn 10's assistance and more targeted at those who prefer more casual racing games such as Electronic Arts' Need for Speed. Turn 10 also took a dip into the mobile market with Forza Street (2019–2022), a tap racer developed by Electric Square (initially as Miami Street) similar to the likes of Bandai Namco's Drift Spirits, but with some key differences such as corner-braking instead of drifting, and different dynamic camera angles. However, that spin-off wasn't well-regarded, and Turn 10 shuttered the game in 2022.

Motorsport mainly revolves around closed-circuit race tracks in a wide variety of gorgeous environments for players to race at. Motorsport games have a career mode which has players going to various real and fictional tracks around the world to compete in race events, like in other traditional sim racers. Meanwhile, Horizon revolves around a fictitious annual music and racing festival, taking place in open-world maps that are fictionalized versions of real-world environments (except in certain expansions that loosen things up). Horizon games' career mode has players competing in various events around the festival to become the Horizon Festival Champion. Street was more story-oriented than the other two, revolving around an up-and-coming racer climbing the ranks of a racing organization called the "League", with the setting being established in Miami.

Until 2019, the two main series were released biennially from their debuts; Motorsport entries in odd-numbered years and Horizon entries in even-numbered years.

Forza Motorsport by Turn 10 Studios

"Welcome to Forza Motorsport."

"...You and I are being squeezed out, pushed aside and hunted down at every hairpin turn. And yet, there is hope. There is a safe haven. A place where we are free to challenge conventions, push the laws of physics, and drive our powerful, our beautiful machines hard... And it's right there in your living room."

— Jeremy Clarkson, Endangered Species trailer for Forza Motorsport 4

• The first Forza Motorsport (2005) was released for the original Xbox, and it's the only entry in the series to be released on that platform.
• Forza Motorsport 2 (2007) was the first on the Xbox 360, adding a storefront and auction site where people can buy and sell tuning setups, cars, and car designs. The point-to-point races from the first game was removed in favor of full-on circuit racing.
• Forza Motorsport 3 (2009) added an in-car camera, rollover damage, and a Time Rewind Mechanic to give players the option of redoing corners without starting from scratch.
• Forza Motorsport 4 (2011), the last Motorsport on the 360, added Kinect functionality, additional game modes (autocross, track days, et cetera), 16-player multiplayer, Top Gear branding and features, and an "Autovista" feature where you can look at high-res models of featured cars while Jeremy Clarkson talks about it.
• Forza Motorsport 5 (2013) was a launch title for the Xbox One, and is widely regarded as the console's very first Killer App with Dead Rising 3. Improvements over Motorsport 4 include the ultra-high detail Autovista mode on every single car in the game, cloud-based racing profiles - the game logs how you drive, and creates an AI profile on the Xbox Cloud which emulates exactly how you drive, on any track, dramatically improved graphics (especially in texture resolution and car/world lighting), and more realistic tire physics. The game can also simulate the advanced assists available on high-performance cars, such as the Nissan GT-R's high-tech launch control. Also, open-wheel cars make their debut, including vintage Formula One cars and Dallara DW-12s.
• Forza Motorsport 6 (2015) features the new second-generation Ford GT that was revealed at the 2015 North American International Auto Show. The third Forza game on Xbox One (after Motorsport 5 and Horizon 2), it was released on September 15, 2015, which is during Forza's tenth anniversary year. Rain, night driving, and 24-player multiplayer are the new features included in the game, together with 5's technical advancements. Almost all of Motorsport 5's car park (DLC cars included) is available from the get-go, with an outstanding total of over 460 cars, the largest roster since Motorsport 4. The game also supports all shared liveries and vehicle setups made in Motorsport 5 and Horizon 2.
  • In a series first, Windows received a Forza game for the first time with Forza Motorsport 6: Apex (2016). It is a free-to-play game on the Windows Store for Windows 10 which features support for 4K resolutions at 60 frames per second.
• Forza Motorsport 7 (2017) is the first Forza Motorsport title to be on Xbox and Windows simultaneously (Horizon 3 was the first Forza title overall to do so). Featuring the 2018 Porsche 911 GT2 RS (part of Microsoft's new six-year deal with Porsche), it's a showcase title for the Xbox One X, featuring 4K graphics at 60 frames per second on a console. It was released October 3, 2017 and new features include a dynamic time of day and weather system on selected tracks—a feature that first appeared in the Horizon games—and customizable driver suits. The game also marks the return of three fan-favorite tracks from Motorsport 4; the fictional Maple Valley and the real-life Mugello and Suzuka circuits. The game and its DLC were delisted from both Xbox Games Store and Xbox Game Pass in September 2021, meaning that there are currently no Forza Motorsport titles or DLC available until the next game comes out, but Xbox Game Pass subscribers who bought any of the DLC before delisting got a free code (good for two years after the delisting) to own the game permanently.
• The eighth Forza Motorsport (2023), which officially has no number or subtitle, is the first entry to be released on the Xbox Series X|S. It was released nearly 6 years after the previous entry on October 10, 2023, featuring various enhancements such as raytracing, improved physics, tire and fuel management in the pit stop, and dynamic time of day. It was a full reboot for the series (hence the lack of a number), refocusing on the core motorsport experience via new features like a persistent online racing weekend structure and newly refreshed versions of fan-favorite tracks such as Maple Valley Raceway.

Forza Horizon by Playground Games

"Welcome to Horizon!"

"Open your eyes. Listen closely to the sound of my voice. With every word, and every number you move faster and faster. On the count of ten... you will be in Horizon. I say... One. Your pulse begins to quicken. Two. Your friends rattle in the back seat. Three. You're moving faster and faster, the ocean roaring beside you. Four. Your thoughts begin to wash away in a cloud of wind and dust. Five. Colored lights flurry in the distance. Six. The lights shudder; everything lost in a thin blue haze. Seven. You hurtle faster and faster into infinity. Eight. The crowd thunders. Nine. You cross into a larger, more colorful world. On the count of ten, everything you've ever known fades away. You will be in Horizon. I say... Ten."

— Alexa Khan in the opening cinematic of Forza Horizon 2

• The first Forza Horizon (2012) was released as a more "relaxed" entry in the series, taking place in a fictionalized version of Colorado. The then-Spin-Off game followed a mixture of several free roam and street racing titles from over the years, taking influences from games such as Need for Speed: ProStreet (the track day/car show elements), Test Drive Unlimited (free roam with other players in real-time) and the majority of Forza games themselves (the physics engine has been carried across from 4, whilst the customization system and most of the high-end road cars have also been retained). Horizon also introduced off-road racing for the first time in the Forza series, which was expanded in the Rally expansion pack. The first Horizon was provided for free as part of Xbox Live's "Games with Gold" program from September 1 to 15, 2016. This was partly to promote the then-upcoming Horizon 3, and partly because the game and its DLC were delisted from the Xbox Games Store in October 2016. As with other Xbox 360 games in the program, it was made backward-compatible for the Xbox One (but, so far, the only one in the franchise to be so).
• Forza Horizon 2 (2014) takes place in southern Europe (more specifically Southern France and Northern Italy with a mixture of real and fictional towns and cities) and introduces a weather system for the first time in the Forza series. It is also the first multiplatform release in the series, releasing on the Xbox 360 as well as the Xbox One. Playground Games made the leading Xbox One version, while Sumo Digital^note The guys who made the Sonic and (Sega) All-Stars Racing games, and has developers who worked for the now-defunct Bizarre Creations and Black Rock Studio in their team. developed the 360 version using the first Horizon's engine as a baseline. Both versions run at 30 frames per second (like the first Horizon), with the main Xbox One version running at a native 1080p resolution, and it is the only version that has the new weather system, downloadable content, and support for both the Drivatar system and the (since-discontinued) Forza Rewards program. The open world of this game was much less restricted than the first Horizon; whereas Horizon's Colorado mostly restricted players to the roads, Horizon 2^note The Xbox One version of the game at least, since the 360 version not only restricted players to the roads, but even took away access to certain areas such as the docks west of Nice. allowed players to traverse much more of the environment. The Xbox One version of the game also received an expansion pack in the form of Storm Island, which emphasizes extreme off-road racing and severe weather conditions, and added a new, separated open-world to explore. The standard Xbox One version^note with the 10th Anniversary Car Pack included as a small bonus was provided for free during the month of August 2018 as part of "Games with Gold". Like with the first Horizon when it was on "Games with Gold", this was also to promote the then-upcoming Forza Horizon 4. 2 reached its end-of-life stage on October 1, 2018, with the game and its DLC delisted like the first one was.
  • A standalone expansion of Horizon 2 based on the Fast & Furious franchise called Forza Horizon 2 Presents Fast & Furious (2015) was released for both Xbox One and Xbox 360. The expansion takes place in a restricted version of the French side of the game's world before the events of Furious 7, in which F&F regular Tej Parker (voiced by Christopher "Ludacris" Bridges himself) has the player go on the hunt for ten cars by doing events to earn them. While it does take away several features,^note No car customization, no multiplayer on Xbox 360, a shorter (though unique) campaign, fewer Bucket List events, only twelve cars, unable to go to Italy or certain areas in France, etc. it does add nitrous to the series (but only for certain events) and it has its own set of easy-to-earn achievements that goes up to one thousand (!) Gamerscore. The expansion was free for a limited time until April 10, 2015, after which the expansion cost US$10 for those who missed out on the free deal. Eight of the expansion pack's vehicles are also available in a separate DLC for the main game which costs US$5. Both versions of the standalone expansion were delisted from the Xbox Games Store in January 2018.
• Forza Horizon 3 (2016) takes place in Australia, on a map that has Byron Bay, Yarra Valley, the Outback, and Surfers Paradise in the City of Gold Coast packed next to one another. The map is twice the size of Horizon 2's map, and features four player co-op and cross-play between Xbox One and Windows 10. Players now take on the role of the festival boss, and are able to plan it out at their leisure through the Horizon Blueprint, a Level Editor that gives players the ability to create events from pre-made ones and share them with their friends. Drivatars also make a return, and the player can hire their friends' Drivatars to earn them money and fans or fire them if they don't meet up their expectations. Widebody kits also make their first appearance in the Forza series as a whole - with licensed kits from brands like Rocket Bunny and Liberty Walk, and a custom soundtrack feature is also available through the Microsoft Groove platform (or was until Microsoft shut down the service and later even disabled the OneDrive music streaming aspect that was left). There's also a new drone mode that allows players to explore the entirety of the map with an in-game quadcopter, mainly used to help find reward boards and barn finds to mark on the map. As with the first two games, there were also expansions. The first expansion, Blizzard Mountain, was released on December 13, 2016. True to its name, it introduced snow-covered environments and high elevations to the series. Similar to Horizon 2's Storm Island, the expansion is set in a new open-world separated from the main game that features extreme weather conditions. The second expansion, Forza Horizon 3: Hot Wheels, as released on May 9, 2017. It introduces full-blown Hot Wheels stunt tracks in the open world, with corkscrews, loops, jumps, and crash junctions, which are also customizable through Stunt Swap mode. The expansion also brings ten new cars, four of which are Hot Wheels originals (Twin Mill, Bone Shaker, Rip Rod, and a custom Ford Mustang). Horizon 3 received a 4K patch upon the release of the Xbox One X.
• Forza Horizon 4 (2018) takes place in Britain, with Edinburgh as a main city. It introduced dynamic seasons to the series, an online-connected open world (instead of just a separate mode) with 72-player servers,^note although there is an option to play offline and solo with Drivatars customizable avatars like in Motorsport 7 and even (after an update) a proper route editor. Microsoft also announced at E3 2018 that Playground Games is now officially part of Microsoft Studios (now Xbox Game Studios). As with previous entries, it received two expansions. The first expansion, Fortune Island, was released on December 13, 2018. A spiritual successor to Horizon 2's Storm Island, it takes place on an island filled with large thunderstorms, aurora borealis, a hunt for "hidden treasure", and the "longest set of mountain switchback terrain" in what is the largest expansion in Horizon series history. The second expansion, LEGO Speed Champions, was released on June 13, 2019. Itself a spiritual successor to Forza Horizon 3: Hot Wheels and based on the LEGO theme of the same name, this expansion features Legofied versions of real cars, a world built with Lego bricks and pieces, an open-ended campaign, and a radio station called Radio Awesome, which features only one song... "Everything Is Awesome!!" Also, a December 2019 update added a whole new Battle Royale mode called The Eliminator; 72 cars enter, only one wins. In 2020, Horizon Promo came back and new updates added Photo Challenge (take a photo each week that matches one or two requirements) and Horizon Backstage (where some of the Hard-to-Find cars can be obtained at any time by redeeming tokens, which are obtained by completing 50% of each season's challenges). The year would end with another expansion, Super7, which brings back the Bucket Lists from the previous two games, but with an added Level Editor via the Blueprint feature. Also, thanks to more updates, Forza Horizon 4 is technically the first Forza game for Xbox Series X|S, running at 4K/60 FPS on the former.
• Forza Horizon 5 (2021) takes place in Mexico, with Guanajuato City as the main city. It returns the series to North America since the first Horizon, and has the level of environmental diversity that Horizon 3's Australia has, including mountains, beaches, deserts, rainforests, and even an active volcano, all on a map that's 50% larger than Horizon 4's Britain. The Eliminator mode added to Horizon 4 in late 2019 returns, with the game world designed around the mode, which now supports 96 players, and the game has a new Horizon Expeditions that feature story-telling adventures. Plus, a new Level Editor suite called the EventLab allows players to make their own races and minigames with a suite of tools akin to those found in Grand Theft Auto Online and TrackMania. Oh, and the Player talks now, too, and has a wider selection of character customization options than ever before, including the ability to change hairstyles, select prosthetic limbs, and choose pronouns to be referred to by. Additionally, Horizon 5 is a narrative sequel to Horizon 4, with the Player themselves being a returning star from Horizon Festival UK. It was released for Xbox One (likely making it the final Forza release on that platform), Xbox Series X|S, and Windows on November 5, 2021, for premium edition players, and November 9 for standard and deluxe edition players, including those with Xbox Game Pass. Its first expansion, released on July 19, 2022, was a full return to Hot Wheels with more life-size scaled versions of the toy cars and the iconic orange and blue plastic tracks, now high up in the sky on three massive flying platforms with jungle, desert, and tundra biomes.

The games (sans Street) usually feature monthly new car DLC - one free car (usually a new-model-year of an in-game car) available for everyone, and a mix of other cars which require purchase. Forza Motorsport 4 had monthly $7 packs of ten cars (most of which could be purchased on their own). Horizon 1 had $5 packs of six cars. Starting with Motorsport 5, all DLC cars have been available to buy for free in-game upon buying their respective DLC. Horizon 4 shook things up first by releasing two DLC cars every week instead, while adding new cars (between three and eight per update) to win for free in monthly updates since the game launched (37 updates by the end of the game's development in June 2021!). Additionally, each of the main games and their DLC were normally digitally available for four years from their release before they are delisted from the Xbox and Windows stores. However, Horizon 4 broke that trend as a Turn 10 community manager stated that "we're not planning on delisting Forza Horizon 4 anytime soon!" Nevertheless, the online servers for all versions of the first two Forza Horizon games (including the Fast & Furious standalone expansion of Horizon 2) will go offline on August 22, 2023, due to low player counts.

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The Forza Motorsport and Forza Horizon games feature examples of these tropes:

Tropes A to M

• Absurdly High Level Cap:
  • The first three Motorsport games have a relatively modest one at 50, but the rest go rather nuts with Driver Levels; the more dedicated players are very likely to hit at least Level 1000 in the Motorsport series, while Horizon 2's Driver Level caps out at 999. Horizon 3 also caps out at 999, at which point players get a platinum wristband with a star symbol on it.
  • Horizon 4 and Horizon 5 go even further; there's a Prestige-like level system called "Superstar" that goes up to ten, with the first one starting at what would be Driver Level 201. Although the requirement to get to the next Superstar Level goes up by 100 Driver Levels each time a player's Superstar level goes up,^note In mathematical terms, where n is the next Superstar Level to reach, n = 200 DL + 100 DL * (n - 1). this means that the maximum Driver Level overall now goes up to an equivalent of 9999.^note Displayed as 2,999 at Superstar Level 10.
• Adam Smith Hates Your Guts: If any car being sold at the auction house is not found at the auto show, expect it to have a starting bid/buyout price (or both) in the millions.
• Adventure-Friendly World: The Horizon games all take place in one of these, with the Horizon Festival enabling sanctioned road racing and spectacle.
• A.I. Breaker: In Horizon 4, Drivatars will try to take a certain predefined path. On player-created routes, that means the same route taken by the player, instead of the ideal route to the following checkpoint. That means players can set deliberately horrible pathing between easy checkpoints, and the Drivatars will never notice the existence of better options. Thus, the Route Creator allows players to reduce Unbeatable difficulty to a trivial level.
• All Deserts Have Cacti: In Horizon 5, one can encounter and smash cacti in the desert regions featured. Justified as the game is set in Mexico, a place where you'd expect to actually find cacti.
• The Alleged Car:
  • Motorsport 4 features famous Alleged Cars like the Ford Pinto, AMC Gremlin, Chevrolet Corvair, Mustang King Cobra, and of course the DMC DeLorean. However, despite being painfully slow when stock, they all work just as well as any other car, and several of them become Lethal Joke Characters when upgraded and tuned.
  • Horizon 3 ups the ante by including the Reliant Regal Supervan.
  • Starting from Forza Horizon 2, the player can collect "Barn Finds", cars tucked away in abandoned garages and sheds for a long time, with considerable body rust, flat tires and missing pieces. Just from looking at them, it's obvious these cars need serious work before they're roadworthy again.
• All the Worlds Are a Stage:
  • Motorsport 3 and 4 have the Camino Viejo de Montserrat Extreme Circuit, which combines the main Camino Viejo circuit with the neighboring Iberian International Circuit and Ladera Test Track.
  • The Circuit of the Americas, which made its series debut in the sixth game, is a real-life example of a final-exam race course, deriving each of its segments from classic Grand Prix circuits.
  • The Horizon games feature the Goliath tracks that go through the entire game map, acting as a final-exam stage.
• Anachronism Stew: Invoked with the AMG Transport Dynamics M12S Warthog CST in Horizon 3 and 4, which the games state was made in 2554. Clearly, someone used time travel to bring it to the Horizon Festival. Although, that is a thing that happened once in Halo canon, so perhaps...
• And Your Reward Is Clothes:
  • Community Bounty Hunter events in Motorsport 4. They require you to beat a certain player's laptime, which vary between very easy to Nintendo Hard. If you beat the time by the event closure date, you get a car with a unique paint job. Never fear if you miss the event - because someone will make a clone of the paintjob and sell it on the Marketplace.
  • Player badges and titles in Motorsport 4 (avatars and little lines of text under your name in the game lobby) are rewarded for doing certain tasks. Some are easy, like getting a perfect Turn score, or owning ten cars. Some require huge amounts of effort and determination, such as owning three hundred cars, or driving one thousand miles in a Prius.
  • Motorsport 7 introduces racing suits that are unlocked with Mod cards. Before the loot systems were removed, they were winnable by loot.
  • Horizon 4 adds clothing items you can customize your character with that you can win as rewards.
• An Entrepreneur Is You:
  • You can earn plenty of credits solely by selling liveries (Motorsport 2 onwards) and car setups (Motorsport 3 onwards) you have created. There's also the Auction House.
  • Horizon 3 puts you in the role of the festival organizer, allowing you to customize events and expand the festival to your will. Your ultimate aim is to grow the festival to be the best in the world.
  • Horizon 4 takes this idea further; you can buy houses to serve as your home base, ranging from a simple cottage to Edinburgh Castle. You can also buy businesses such as a taxi firm that provide missions for you to complete.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • The rewind feature from Motorsport 3 and beyond. From Motorsport 4 onwards, it can be turned off for bonus credits.
  • In Horizon 4, players will ghost through traffic and other racers (including their friends and those in their convoy) when they enter speed zones and drift zones..
  • Horizon 3 and Horizon 4's versions of the "Horizon Promo" feature have a bunch of these compared to their previous iteration in Horizon 2.
    • Any cars you haven't captured will have a camera icon above the player name of the car. In Horizon 2, this feature needed to be unlocked. Note that in 2 and 3, this only applied to playable cars. Non-playable traffic vehicles will never display a camera icon. Horizon 4's Promo feature consists solely of playable vehicles.
    • 4 has a "Promo Quick-Shot" feature that allows a player to quickly take a picture specifically for the Promo without having to wait for the image to process before being allowed to back out.
  • The 360 version of Horizon 2 allows players to change cars while out on the open road, whereas the Xbox One version does not. Horizon 3 would be the first Xbox One Forza title with this feature, though it has fixed a cost of 10,000 credits (The same as fast-travelling without discounts) per use. Horizon 4 not only brought back the "free-of-charge" aspect, but also gave the player a dedicated option to change cars while looking through the blueprints of a road/dirt/cross-country/drag event (Horizon 3 required that the player either find a blueprint in which the car they want to switch was eligible or make a blueprint of their own), as well as the ability to select their car before starting a Street Scene event (Horizon 3 dumps you straight into the street race with your current car). Horizon 5 also added a car change option for Street Scene events, as that race type was added to the EventLab and custom blueprints could be made for them.
• Anti-Grinding:
  • In Horizon 3, you can only gain three skill points at most from a single skill chain, and it takes 100,000 skill score to earn one skill point.
  • Horizon 4 greatly relaxes this, with one skill point requiring only 50,000 skill score to earn, and allowing up to a maximum of ten skill points at most from a skill chain. This is offset by the fact that each individual car has its own skill tree. Horizon 5 maintains these.
• Appropriated Title: Originally called the Forza Motorsport series, it was officially renamed Forza to accompany the Horizon sister series, thus making each game a legitimate title and not a Spin-Off. However, despite the increasing popularity and establishment of the Horizon series (especially after the critically-lauded Forza Horizon 3 and 4), the Forza Motorsport games are still often referred to as "Forza [number of Motorsport title]" while the Forza Horizon games are shortened to "Horizon [number of such title]" and still get treated like a spin-off by several game journalists. Ironically, Horizon's popularity has eclipsed Motorsport, and saying Forza alone now evokes Horizon.
• Artificial Brilliance: The AI in Motorsport 4 will adjust their behavior based on how you drive. What this means is that if you drive like it's a demolition derby, they will smash into you just as often as you try to smash into them. Motorsport 3 and Motorsport 4 have the "Pressure" system - if you ride on the ass of an AI player, the AI will be pressured into braking later and later in order to try to pull ahead of you. Keep on them long enough, and they will usually eventually miss the braking point entirely and go flying off the track.
• Artificial Stupidity:
  • In Motorsport 3, AI drivers will occasionally spontaneously swerve all over the road and mash into each other, and it's easy for them to get stuck on each other. As in Motorsport 1 (with a few exceptions) and 2, they also did not have upgraded cars, which depending on your car choice, can turn single player "races" into glorified hotlapping.
  • In Motorsport 4, Track Day (hotlapping while AI cars simulate slower traffic) events in Rivals. The AI are painfully slow, reaching single digits in some corners, and they will regularly pull out into your path, sometimes for no reason at all.
  • Occasionally if you hit the rewind feature and then resume the race immediately, the AI drivers either won't realize the rewind has occurred and continue driving from where they left off (often crashing into a barrier, or one another, or even you), or will wildly over-compensate (again plunging head-long into the closest barrier).
  • Motorsport 5 introduced Drivatars, which replaced the old AI drivers with drivers that supposedly mimic real Forza players' driving habits and skills. The system is far from perfect, with the Drivatars still being prone to many of the old AI mistakes, and unless set to Pro or Unbeatable, often many seconds slower than the player per lap.
  • In Horizon 4, the AI will zealously follow the racing line, even if there is a faster route to the following checkpoint. Custom track makers take advantage of this to create horrible racing lines, and make long races at a ridiculously easy difficulty.
  • The Horizon AI is typical of many racing games in being practically perfect at holding the line and braking as late as possible, but not so good at medium-fast corners or close quarter racing maneuvers. As a consequence they often slow up suddenly for turns that are easy with a slight lift, and packs will concertina together, letting the player easily get alongside and sometimes pass multiple cars at once. They won't defend an obvious impending overtake - for example letting the player take the upcoming inside line on a left if the previous turn was a right. This has two consequences; the easiest way to win is get a good start, bully into the lead and make sure to get slowed down for the apex since the AI are all but incapable of launching an overtake unless the player overshoots the corner. The second result is that short, tight, courses are by far the hardest to win on, since more corners involve heavy braking it is much more difficult to beat the AI's flawless braking zones.
• Artistic License: The LNER A3 Flying Scotsman in the "Flying Scotsman Showcase" race in Horizon 4 has the wrong whistle, as it has a deep, low-pitched American three chime whistle, despite being a British steam locomotive that has a high-pitched, shrill whistle on par with other British steam locomotives. This is most likely due to Rule of Cool being in effect or The Coconut Effect (since the former is what most associate Steam Locomotives to sound like)^note That said, the Flying Scotsman did once wear a American whistle during its USA tour, so it isn't entirely inaccurate, even if it was only briefly in America where she wore it..
• Artistic License – Cars: Since braking and reverse are the same trigger, this can result in the car being shifted into reverse while it's still moving forward, and since the trigger to accelerate becomes the brake while the car is backing up, this can also result in the car being put in drive while still backing up. This causes no issue ingame, but car lovers are sure to cringe since in real life those are good ways to stall your engine and damage your transmission.
• Artistic License – Film Production: One of the stories in Horizon 4 has you filling in as a stunt driver. You're basically plucked off the street because you were available and looked like the actor more than any other reason, the stunts are all done in one take, and you don't even know what stunt you're doing until you start the relevant chapter.
• Artistic License – Geography:
  • The Horizon games.
    • The first game takes place in a completely fictionalized version of Colorado.
    • Horizon 2 added real towns and cities, with everything in its correct place accounting for Space Compression, but Nice, Sisteron, and Castelletto (Genoa) represented only around half of the land.
    • Horizon 3 is a less fictionalized map, but it still takes some liberties with the locations of Australian landmarks. Gold Coast and Byron Bay are fine, but the Twelve Apostles are located between the two, and the Yarra Valley is just to the west of them, and they're all within a short driving distance from a rainforest.
    • Horizon 4 follows the design philosophy of 3, presenting a Britain that includes Edinburgh, the Lake District and the Cotswolds all within a short driving distance from each other, although it does include a couple fictional places.
    • Horizon 5 features a larger map that has swamps, beaches, deserts, rainforests, and a volcano within still a relatively short driving distance, but Mulegé (which is in Baja California Sur), Guanajuato (which is in the central state of the same name), and the Riviera Maya (which is in Quintana Roo on the Yucatán Peinsula) are not only short drives away from each other in this game, but the game places Mulegé southwest of the latter two and puts them all together on the same landmass. Teotihuacan is also right next to the region of Tapalpa, Jalisco, which in real life is 600 km away. Talk about massive Space Compression!
  • All the Forza Horizon map expansions are completely fictitious:
    • Horizon 2: Storm Island takes place on a fictional Mediterranean island that gets a lot of stormy weather.
    • Horizon 3: Blizzard Mountain takes place on a fictional snow-covered Australian mountain.
    • Horizon 3: Hot Wheels takes place on a blatantly unrealistic small archipelago connected by giant Hot Wheels tracks called Thrilltopia.
    • Horizon 4: Fortune Island takes place on a fictional island somewhere in the North Sea.
    • Horizon 4: LEGO Speed Champions takes place in the fictional LEGO Valley, which has giant LEGO bricks, pieces, flowers and minifigures, a small city called Brickchester, a desert right next to a temperate forest, a race track, a LEGO airport, a giant skate park for cars, a beach lined with pirate ships, speed ramps, and a lighthouse overlooking a cliff.
    • Horizon 5: Hot Wheels takes place in Horizon Hot Wheels Park, a giant park the floats above the playable map of Mexico.
    • Horizon 5: Rally Adventure takes place in the Sierra Nueva, a fictional part of Mexico.
  • The Bernese Alps track (Motorsport 4) as well as the three urban tracks, Prague (Motorsport 5), Rio de Janeiro (Motorsport 6) and especially Dubai (Motorsport 7). The Jebel Hafeet (and its road and the Mercure hotel) is located in al-Ain, within the emirate of Abu Dhabi, not Dubai. The hotel is not the end of the mountain road - in real life it extends up to the summit. The mountain is nowhere near the city nor an airport.
• Ascended Meme: In Forza Horizon 2 Presents Fast & Furious there is an achievement called "How Long Was That Runway?", a nod to the incredibly long runway in Fast & Furious 6.
• A Taste of Power: Played straight since Motorsport 3, usually with the car featured on the respective game's cover art.
  • Motorsport 3 begins with a practice race in an Audi R8, then makes you pick from a selection of sub-compacts.
  • Motorsport 4 starts with a practice race ("A celebration of speed") in a Ferrari 458 Italia, and makes you pick from a selection of city cars.
  • Horizon starts you off in a Viper, engaged in an impromptu street race with Darius Flynt in his Ferrari 599XX. However, the game switches over to your actual character and car once you reach a certain point. That said, the car in question (a VW Corrado VR6) is actually fairly decent, and modified to the top of its class right from the start.
  • Motorsport 5 starts off with a race through the streets of Prague in a McLaren P1, and then has you pick from a selection of modern sport-compacts (which includes the BMW 1M Coupe and the Hyundai Genesis 3.8).
  • Horizon 2 starts you off in the Lamborghini Huracan, in a short drive from the ferry dock to the Horizon festival's main venue, alongside similar exotics. You then get to choose between 3 mid-level sports cars. The Fast & Furious standalone expansion starts out similarly, using the same car to get to Tej's garage in Nice.
  • Motorsport 6 begins with a race in the streets of Rio de Janeiro in the 2017 Ford GT and then has you choose from a selection of lower-tier Japanese tuner cars.
  • Horizon 3 takes this up to eleven. You start off in a Lamborghini Centenario, before switching to a Baldwin Trophy Truck, before doing a showcase event in a Penhall Cholla, before going back to the Centenario again, before finally giving you a choice between high-performance starter cars.
  • Motorsport 7 breaks the trend a bit by taking the player to the main menu first (something that hasn't been done since Motorsport 2), allowing them to customize gameplay/audio/visual/control settings first. The introductory races don't start until they select the "Forza Drivers' Cup", where they will be thrown into 3 consecutive races; the first is with the Porsche 911 GT2 RS in the outskirts of Dubai, the second in a Mercedes-Benz race truck at Mugello, while the third is in the rain with a Nissan GT-R GT500 at Suzuka. Afterwards, they are given a choice of several championships, with their first car being a freebie.
  • Horizon 4 starts you off in a series of events as it introduces you to its new seasons aspect. The game begins in autumn with you driving up to a waterfall in a McLaren Senna. It then transitions to winter, putting you in RJ Anderson's Pro 2 trophy truck, racing other trophy trucks on the now-frozen surface of Derwentwater. Next is spring with you competing against dirt bikes in a GRC Ford Fiesta. Finally, it becomes summer as you are put back into the Senna, racing through villages on your way to the Horizon Festival. The driver is then revealed to be Keira Harrison from Horizon 3, who then asks for the player character, after which you pick your avatar. After all this, you are given a choice of three slower cars to pick as your starter.
    • FH4 also does this with DLC. The LEGO Speed Champions expansion starts you off with a LEGO version of the aforementioned Senna, then transitions you to a LEGO Mini Cooper that you will use as your starter car.
  • Horizon 5 again hands you four different cars to briefly play with during the intro. First, you take a 2021 Ford Bronco from the caldera, down the volcano, to a Baja dirt circuit. Next, you'll jump into a 2020 Corvette Stingray equipped with the Streetfighter LA bodykit, tearing up the roads in the lowlands before driving head-on into a dust storm. Moving on, you'll get to tear up the jungle in the Porsche 911 Desert Flyer before arriving at a lagoon populated by flamingoes and the Ek’ Balam Mayan ruins, before getting behind the wheel of the Mercedes-AMG Project One as you race across the desert roads towards the festival. You'll finally get shown three cars to start with, but there's a twist: Not only are two of the three cars (Vette, Bronco, GR Supra) ones that you drove earlier during the intro, but you'll actually get ALL THREE of these cars as starters. The only choice you're making is just which of the three cars you'll be spending the first few events of your Horizon career in.
• Auction: The Auction House. Players put their cars up for sale on the auction house, and players bid on the cars.
• Avoid the Dreaded G Rating: Or Everyone rating, at first, for the Forza Horizon series. The first Horizon featured a lot of suggestive dialogue, drug references, and even a few profanities in the game's radio stations and music to garner a Teen rating from the ESRB. However, reflecting the series' shift towards inclusiveness, each sequel increasingly subverted this to the point where this trope is now inverted as the game's dialogue and lyrical content are curated and edited to avoid getting anything higher than an Everyone rating without any descriptors attached.
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • SUVs and pickup trucks. They can toss other cars around like toys, but they're so heavy and top heavy that they tend to plow through corners. Pickups are basically death traps online in Motorsport 3, as they're very light in the back, rear wheel driven, and it's very easy for other players to accidentally or purposely hit it, and cause it to spin out, though the problem is less noticeable in Motorsport 4 because of the better collision system.
  • Small light cars such as hatchbacks are this in the Horizon games. They can squeeze through tight spaces and grip through corners with ease. However, they tend to have a poor top speed, and the courses in Horizon games are more straight and less technical than in Motorsport games. In addition, their light weight means that they get bumped around by rammers in multiplayer.
  • The SSC Ultimate Aero is one of the fastest cars in the world (in a straight line), with 1200 horsepower and torque. Its top speed is higher than the Veyron - but it's rear wheel drive, not all wheel drive. What this essentially means is that you get wheelspin well into fourth gear, making the car nearly undrivable without traction control enabled.
  • The downloadable Hennessey Venom GT manages to trump the SSC by having the same horsepower with slightly less torque, but having a much lighter body, meaning even traction control doesn't help.
  • The maxed-out Mosler MT-900 has a similar problem without traction control. (Though it has so much torque that it still works well on speed trap challenges since it can be left in 5th gear and driven up to speed). However it has a trump card in that it can be fitted with drag racing tyres which tame the wheelspin very effectively.
  • 4WD conversions can make 1000+ hp cars that are a handful in RWD - such as the TVR Speed 12 - into unlikely but very fast dirt trackers, but then leave the handling with boat-like understeer on circuit races. And the top speed is cut drastically.
  • Any overpowered RWD car can easily go from a dominating car in a lower class to an oversteering handful that doesn't stand a chance in a higher class. Especially in the wet.
  • Cowl hood scoops and air scoops in Motorsport 4. They look badass, and reduce weight (being made from lighter materials than steel), but they severely restrict interior vision - the king of these being the cowl available on the 2002 Trans-Am, which blocks all of your vision in the cockpit view, as the cowl is pretty much right at eye level◊. The most notable example of this is the Hot Wheels Twin Mill in Horizon 3, which has two air scoops, one of which is directly in front of the driver's seat. In other words, it is a perfect demonstration of why it was designed as a toy first and a functional vehicle second.
  • The Lotus Esprit V8 has a similar issue; adding a roll cage blocks half the windscreen so you can only see the bottom half of the road.
  • The AMG Transport Dynamics M12S CST Warthog, available in Forza Horizon 3 for those who played Halo: The Master Chief Collection or Halo 5: Guardians. Essentially a civilian Warthog (which means it lacks the military version's 4-wheel steering), it is fast and relatively nimble for its size (it weights 5070 lbs), but unfortunately cannot be upgraded to boost its performance or shed weight (it can accept different sized rims and can fit snow tires though). The 6-speed transmission suffers from strangely short gearing; it will accelerate and a gear change is almost immediately necessary at around 5500 RPM, and the redline is lower than most off-road trucks at 8000 RPM. The M12 CST tops out at around 119 mph, meaning it is ill-suited for races with higher speed vehicles, and is also wider and heavier than most vehicles (though this also means it can push most out of its way). However, it excels at off-road racing in Blizzard Mountain; its high ground clearance, relatively nimble handling and massive tires coupled with a healthy amount of torque means it has no trouble bounding up slopes and across snow-covered plains.
• Awesome Mc Cool Name: Darius Flynt in Horizon. Scott Tyler of Horizon Bass Arena even lampshades that it sounds too cool to be real and suspects that it must be a name change.
• Battle Royale Game: Horizon 4 adds The Eliminator game mode in Update 17. In the mode, up to 72 players compete against each other in a gradually shrinking arena until only one player is left.
• Bilingual Bonus: The DJ of classical station Levante FM in Horizon 2 speaks exclusively in fluent Italian. He complains about the Horizon Festival, as well as the drivers being allowed to tear up the countryside.
• Boring, but Practical: Weight removal and tire compound/grip upgrades, which are likely going to be the most commonly used upgrades.
• Boss Battle: The Showcase events in Forza Horizon series is basically a Boss Race, in 1 is the typical race duel, while in 2 afterwards it's a race against non-standard vehicles usually faster, bigger, or can handle better terrain than the car the player drives, such as hovercraft, a team of offroad bikers, a train, or an aircraft. The Halo Showcase in 4 is an exception, where it's a time-trial event recreating a scene from Halo by driving the Warthog.
• Bowdlerise:
  • Beginning with Forza Motorsport 6, all Chevrolet cars with SS branding have had their SS badges removed (eg. Compare the 1969 Camaro SS in Motorsport 5◊ and Motorsport 6◊) and the SS un-abbreviated to what it stands for, Super Sport, to prevent potential confusion and association of Chevrolet's SS branding with the Waffen-SS. However, the Hot Wheels-branded Camaro SS◊ in Motorsport 7 keeps its SS logo, most likely due to terms in the contract requiring that the car be featured with no alterations.
  • An update to Forza Horizon 4 released on March 26, 2019 censored numerous words and phrases, including some rather innoculous ones like "high" in the phrase "I'm flying high" (not "getting high") in Dreamers' "Fake It Til You Make It" and a mention of God in Chvrches' (ironically-named) "Never Say Die". This is due to Microsoft having to meet ESRB restrictions in order for the game maintain an Everyone Rating.^note It should also be mentioned that the game did not receive any descriptors, especially the "Mild Lyrics" descriptor found in past entries. The worst case was "Die Trying" by Eyes Set to Kill being removed entirely after the update because of the ESRB restrictions.
  • The 1987 Porsche 962C #17 in Motorsport 3, Motorsport 6 and Motorsport 7 replaces the (already defunct) Rothmans Cigarettes references with "Racing". This also applies to Porsche #185 959 Prodrive Rally Raid in Horizon 4 and Horizon 5.
• Boxing Lessons for Superman: The Horizon Speed Zones are a good way to learn how much more speed comes from taking corners properly. The zones always have turns that require braking, usually right before the the start or finish camera and three stars requires almost perfection, braking, turn-in and acceleration. The lesson being that far more speed is lost from untidy turns than can ever be regained again on the straights - even with a ridiculously fast car. It's a skill that serves drivers well in the race events.
• Brand X: Performance parts in Motorsport 4 are a generic brand, unlike Motorsport 3, where most of the parts were "made" by a certain manufacturer, such as K&N making air filters for certain car brands. Motorsport 4 features a lot more niche and unique cars where no real company would design aftermarket parts for them. However, said niche cars often use engines or are actually built from other cars (for example, the Bertone Mantide is just a Corvette ZR1 with a lighter, radically designed body), so the reason why aftermarket companies were removed besides advertising billboards remains unclear.
• Bribing Your Way to Victory:
  • In-game example, the Hired Driver in Motorsport 3 and Motorsport 4. For a mere 50% of your winnings (easily negated by disabling driver aids and increasing the AI's difficulty), he'll almost guarantee a win in any race on any difficultly. The Hired Driver basically drives like The Stig.
  • Motorsport 3 had the Porsche 550, which thoroughly dominated almost every leaderboard. It was part of one of the $5 DLC packages.
  • Car Tokens allow players to pay real money for a car they can't afford in-game. Available from Motorsport 4 until Motorsport 7, where they were removed entirely.
  • The treasure map for the Horizon series; for a bit of money, all billboards and barns will be marked on your map.
  • Although Horizon 1's 1000 Club expansion pack was free, players had to get paid DLC to unlock most of the achievements, especially the relatively quicker-to-get one involving Shelby cars.
• Britain Is Only London: Well averted in Horizon 4, which makes barely a mention of the capital or much in the south of England at all. The feature city is Edinburgh, and the map features large areas given over to Scotland and northern English locations. For example the large castle is Bamburgh Castle in Northumberland. Derwent Dam is in the Peak District between Sheffield and Manchester. Ambleside is in the Lake District. The Cotswolds and the Chesterton Windmill are considered the West Country more than the Home Counties.
• Broke the Rating Scale: This is the case for many of the cars with a rock-bottom Performance Index of 100, particularly the Peel 3-wheel microcars. Because they can't hit 100 mph, or possibly even 60 mph, they outright fail the simulations used to benchmark their PI. ^*This can be exploited by taking a car like one of the Peel's and upgrading it to be more driveable while making sure it can't possibly go above 100 mph. It'll still have a PI of 100, but drivatars in races will use unmodified Peels and other extremely low-end cars that you can easily trounce.
• Bumper Sticker: Can be easily created with the game's vinyl editor.
• The Bus Came Back: After being absent from Horizon 3, Horizon XS, the Horizon-branded rock station from Horizon 2 that replaced Horizon Rocks, returns in Horizon 4.^note with a new yellow logo replacing the orange one it had in Horizon 2, along with a new DJ
• Call-Back:
  • Each one of the Forza games (barring Horizon 1) includes each of the previous game's logos in the manufacturer decal section of the vinyl editor.
  • M. Rossi, from Motorsport 2, 3, and 4, returns as one of the random racers you can find cruising in Horizon 1 driving a red Ferrari F40. They and other AI racers also return for the showcase events in Motorsport 6, in lieu of the usual Drivatars. You can even choose their name as your nickname in Horizon 3. Their racing suit is available as a gear option in Motorsport 7, along with a revelation about her identity.
• Car Fu:
  • There are game types where you get points for mashing the other cars. The Cat and Mouse game type requires you to defend your team's Mouse (a slow car) and take out the enemy Mouse and their Cats (high performance cars), which usually means mashing into the enemy Mouse as fast as possible and trying to flip them over. There's also a more standard demolition derby game type, where you get points for ramming players at high speed.
  • Online play can frequently turn into Car Fu, unfortunately. Motorsport 3's netcode means that a slight bump can cause a car to act like you did a full blown PIT maneuver, and can result in a pileup with every player mashing into each other; the first corner of a track is notorious for causing these pileups. The problem of slight taps sending cars spinning has been fixed in Motorsport 4, but there are usually pileups at the first corner because people drive like idiots. Also taken to the extreme in Motorsport 6, where the first corner can involve 24 cars going through a corner at once. Maybe it's smart to hang back from the pack for a little while.
  • Street races in particular have all the other racers act like you're an undercover cop or something, as they will team up and block you from getting ahead, shunt you off the the road and into other vehicles and obstacles, and go out of their way to ruin your day.
• Car Porn: The series is hardcore car porn. Explicit. Barely legal. Under the counter. Cars so lovingly detailed and portrayed to quote Jeremy Clarkson you'll want to marry the game disk.
• Celebrity Cameo:
  • The DJs of the music label-themed radio stations in the Horizon series are all subscribed to said label.
  • Tony "London Elektricity" Colman and Chris Goss are the DJs for Hospital Records Radio in all the sequels so far.
  • In Horizon 2, Thomas Mackenzie Bell, a.k.a. Toddla T, is the DJ for Ninja Tune Radio, and Hanni El Khatib is the DJ for Innovative Leisure Radio.
  • In Horizon 3, Van Pierszalowski of WATERS fame is the DJ for Vagrant Records, Keith Buckley of Everytime I Die is the DJ for Epitaph Records, and Michael Di Francesco a.k.a. Touch Sensitive is the DJ for Future Classic Radio.
  • Peter Dalton, a.k.a. MistaJam, takes over DJ duties for Horizon Block Party in Horizon 4.
• Celebrity Paradox: Because you have the same names, characters, driving style and many of the same cars in Horizon 3 it comes across as strange where you go from Keira's boss running the festival in Australia to an unknown trying to get on the roster in Horizon 4.
• Character Customization:
  • In the form of car mods and tuning, and with the vinyl editor anything you can think of, from Giles' Oldesmobile to any number of Transformers to the real world equivalent of a Age or Assuloto, can be made up.
  • Actual character customization for the driver is introduced in Motorsport 7. Horizon 4 also allows all the different avatars to have the clothes customized, and even be given different emote animations.
• Character Tiers: A game mechanic, each car is given a numerical value called their Performance Index (PI) ^note PI is calculated by the car's theoretical hotlap time around an imaginary track; claimed to be somewhat like the Sedona racetrack in Motorsport 4, which is then matched to a letter grade; higher letters mean faster classes. Cars can be upgraded to higher classes, and a few can be creatively downgraded to lower classes too, with engine or aspiration swaps or by installing heavy rims. In Motorsport 4, the classes generally go like this:
  • F class - City cars, old economy cars, hybrids
  • E class - Hot hatchbacks, '60-'70s sports cars
  • D class - American muscle cars, '90-'00s sports cars
  • C class - European and Japanese sports sedans, high performance hot hatches
  • B class - Late '00s/high performance sports cars and sport sedans
  • A class - 90s/early '00s super cars
  • S class - Modern supercars, "track day" cars
  • R3 class - Hypercars and road-car-based racing cars.
  • R2 class - Purpose built racing cars which still resemble road cars.
  • R1 class - Le Mans Prototype cars.
  • X class - Modified Le Mans Prototypes. From Motorsport 5 onwards, this class has also included all open wheel cars from the 1980s onwards.
  • Literal example in Horizon, in the form of wristbands.
• Chuck Cunningham Syndrome:
  • After being part of the roster throughout the entire series, Volkswagen mysteriously disappeared from Horizon 3.
  • Volkswagen returned in Motorsport 7, but gone instead are Toyota production cars.
  • Mitsubishi was not included in the vanilla car roster for Horizon 4 due to licensing issue, but later returned in Series 5 as a free DLC car pack. Toyota and Lexus production cars were also absent, but they are slowly returning since Update 17.
  • Horizon 5 sees the return of Mitsubishi, Toyota and Lexus in the vanilla roster, but FCA/Stellantis brands like Abarth, Alfa Romeo, and Lancia were absent from the game. This lasted until an update two years later which saw the return of the aforementioned brands and Fiat.
• Collection Sidequest: The Horizon games have two broad types of collectibles in their open worlds: Bonus Boards and PR Stunts.
  • Bonus Boards are advertising boards that can be smashed for a permanent benefit. The first game had these give a 1% discount on vehicle upgrades, with the upgrades becoming free once you've found all 100. Later games feature a mix of XP boards (which grant a one-time chunk of XP upon being broken) and Fast Travel boards (which reduce the cost of fast travel by 2% per board, with fast travel becoming free upon finding all fifty).
  • PR Stunts are mini-challenges scattered around the world that you can complete, with a par score to try and beat for each. The first game had two kinds: Speed Traps (which record your top speed passing through them) and Speed Zones (which track your average speed between two points on the road). Horizon 3 added Drift Zones (score points for drifting between two points, with more points being awarded for higher speeds and sharper drifts) and Danger Signs (ramp jumps that record how far you can fly) to the mix, while Horizon 4: Fortune Island introduced Trailblazers (which challenge you to reach a destination as fast as you can, often off-road).
• Colorblind Mode: Horizon 5 has options for deuteranopia, protanopia, and tritanopia that can be set independently for the interface and in-game visuals.
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience: Most obvious in Motorsport 4, where the cars each AI driver drives are the same color, when a car's color can be chosen. For instance, M. Rossi's cars are [almost] always red, as close to Rossa Corsa as possible.
• Color-Coded Item Tiers: Horizon 4 has this for both the rarity of items themselves and classes of cars.
  • Item Rarity:
    • Common - Green
    • Rare - Sky Blue
    • Epic - Purple
    • Legendary - Gold-Yellow
    • Forza Edition - Hot Pink-to-Blue gradient
  • Car Class
    • D - Sky Blue
    • C - Yellow
    • B - Orange
    • A - Red
    • S1 - Purple
    • S2 - Dark Blue
    • X - Fluo Green
• Company Cross References:
  • The Warthog could be explored in Forzavista in Motorsport 4 as a promotion for the then-upcoming Halo 4. The Warthog would become properly drivable in the Horizon games from 3 onwards, with 4 having a Halo-themed showcase event.
  • Horizon 5 features musical horns featuring music from other Xbox Game Studios-owned games: The main themes of Halo, Battletoads, Sea of Thieves, The Outer Worlds, Killer Instinct, Ori and the Blind Forest and Minecraft are all available, along with E1M1 and Spiral Mountain.
• Continuity Nod:
  • For as little continuity as the series has, in Horizon 4, while giving you access to the Blueprints feature, Keira mentions that her boss played around with it in Australia.
  • You can find novelty direction signposts in Horizon 5, which feature the locations of each prior game (Colorado, Nice, Surfer's Paradise and Edinburgh).
  • Horizon 5 indicates that the Player Character is the same person as the Player Character of Horizon 4, as most NPCs will recognize them for all of their work in the United Kingdom (the location of the latter). As an example, Haley will remark about your previous race against a train at the start of the "Catch Me if You Canyon" Showcase event.
• Conveniently Empty Roads: Used liberally throughout the series. Even in the dedicated street races; you'll never encounter more than a few pedestrian cars during a race, nor will you find many as you cruise around the map.
• Cool Bike: While they're not actually playable, you get to race against four motocross bikes during the spring segment of Horizon 4's intro. This same segment can be replayed as the Spring Showcase event later on in the game.
• Cool Car: Hundreds of them! And that's before you start loading them with performance upgrades and light body kits.
• Crossover: Like many racing games with licensed vehicles, Forza franchise themselves are Massive Multiplayer Crossover with wildly-different carmakers thrown in. These examples below, however, take this trope more than usual:
  • Forza Motorsport 4 features the Top Gear (UK) test track, and Jeremy Clarkson provides commentary on dozens of cars in the Autovista mode. Most of the Reasonably Priced Cars from the various Top Gear shows are playable. The Suzuki Liana and the Kia Cee'd from Top Gear UK are there, but the Chevrolet Lacetti is surprisingly absent. The Top Gear US car, a Suzuki SX4, shows up as well. The two cars from the now-canceled Top Gear Australia (a Proton Satria Neo and a Ford XG Falcon Ute) are nowhere to be found, however. Motorsport 5 featured very high support from Top Gear: all of the three hosts (Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May) appear in the game.
  • The Warthog from Halo appears as an Easter Egg in the Autovista mode with Cortana (Jen Taylor) providing the commentary for it in the place of Clarkson. A civilian variant of the Warthog reappears in Horizon 3, where it becomes drivable, alongside "The Trials" being one of the songs that plays on the in-game radio.
  • Forza Horizon 2 received a standalone expansion to promote Furious 7. It involves various challenges using cars from the latest film. All the new cars from this standalone barring Brian's GT-R are available through Furious 7 Car Pack for the base game. Motorsport 6 also got its own Fast & Furious car pack, this time featuring ten cars from different films of the franchise. Motorsport 7 also got a car pack based on The Fate of the Furious and includes ten cars from the film.
  • The TV advert for Motorsport 6 showcases the 2017 Ford GT driving through Gran Trak 10, RC Pro-Am, Pole Position, Chase HQ, and Ridge Racer.
  • The Chryslus Rocket 69 from Fallout 4 made its guest appearance in Motorsport 6, and it's drivable!
  • The second expansion for Forza Horizon 3 is a crossover/cross-promotion with Hot Wheels and takes players to a set of islands that are connected by life-sized Hot Wheels stunt tracks. You can also drive a couple of Hot Wheels cars.
  • The Quartz Regalia from Final Fantasy XV appears in Forza Horizon 3 and is available to players who have played either of those games on Xbox One or PC by August 1st, 2017. It returns in Forza Horizon 4 from the game's Series 6 update onward, but it's only available via Forzathon, either via Seasonal playlists, or occasionally through the Forzathon shop. The off-roading Type-D variant was also introduced in the same update, either as an unlockable reward from the regular Regalia's Mastery tree, or the occasional Forzathon reward.
  • Forza Horizon 4 gets a Best of Bond Car Pack that features ten cars from the James Bond films. Players can even view the gadgets used in the films while in Forzavista mode. Moreover, the second expansion is LEGO-themed, including replicas of in-game cars "built" with LEGO bricks and a world with LEGO landscapes, buildings, vegetation and animals. In late 2020, Series 30 also brings the Quadra V-Tech from Cyberpunk 2077, on the day after the latter's launch.
  • Besides Hot Wheels making a comeback, Horizon 5 brings Donut Media into the franchise.
• Creator Provincialism:
  • Not to the same extent as Gran Turismo, but there are a lot of classic and modern muscle cars, as the company is American. DLC had greatly expanded the classic European car selection, adding in companies like Austin-Healey, and adding in cars like the Peugot 205 and BMW 507.
  • Someone at Turn 10 obviously favors Ferrari; they generally have one of the biggest car selections in each game. With the lower car count in Horizon, this is especially noticeable. Justified, though, as Turn 10 has exclusive rights to the manufacturer.
  • With the release of the free 1000 Club expansion pack to Horizon, one of the new achievements that Playground Games added requires that the player earns at least one challenge medal in twenty different British-made cars each. Also, in continuity with the above, there's an achievement for earning one medal each for fourteen different Ferraris.
  • Horizon 4 takes place in Great Britain, Playground Games' homeland.
• Damn You, Muscle Memory!: The Horizon games take place all over the world, so it can be hard to remember which side of the road is the legal way to drive and which side will throw you into oncoming traffic.
• Deadpan Snarker:
  • To be expected with Jeremy Clarkson involved.
  • Dak in the first Horizon very subtly disses the condition of your starter car's engine. All the other celebrity racers you face count as one as well, although they act more and more like dicks about it the further you go, especially Hailey Harper and Darius Flynt, which both reach unbearable levels of condescendence. All three of the radio DJ's count too, though to a much smaller degree. Then as the series carries on they get far more vocal and hilarious, with half their air time being devoted to their quips and Beavis and Buttheading your actions during the festival.
• Defeat Means Friendship: Played straight by Ramona Cravache, Marko Baran, Duke Maguire, and Zaki Malak in Horizon. Averted with Hailey Harper and Darius Flynt (Hailey collapses into a black hole of denial after you knock her out of the running while Flynt just tries to remind everyone that he's still here after you take home the Horizon crown.)
• Design-It-Yourself Equipment: Players can customize both the paint/apply decals, and customize the mechanics of a car. You might get a Dodge Neon with a V10 from the Viper and the AWD system from the Dodge Stealth/Mitsubishi 3000GT, with a customized body kit, and a replica British Petroleum livery painted on top.
• Developer's Foresight:
  • In Horizon 2, your car radio will cut out and be replaced with the same music coming from the festival grounds when you drive near one. Except for Levante FM, which is not being broadcast from the festival.
  • Horizon 3 does the same, and again the classical music station (Timeless FM) is an exception. It also does this if you're playing music from Groove's OneDrive integration feature, implying that as the festival boss, you're in charge of the musical acts at the festival.
  • Horizon 4 is a bit of an oddity, as Timeless FM is actually part of the Horizon Festival—they even brought its DJ Don Thompson with them to the UK—but they don't play the station over the festival grounds. Then again, they wouldn't because most of the young people who go to the Horizon Festival are there for current acts, not stuffy old classical music.
• Diegetic Interface: Starting with Motorsport 3, the game has fully-modeled interiors◊ for all its cars, with appropriate gauges depending on what the car is equipped with - tachometers, speedometers, boost gauges, fuel gauges, accelerometers, clocks, et cetera. In the high end purpose-built cars, you can actually disable the entire HUD and still remain fairly aware of your status - the car's electronic dashboard or wheel-mounted display will list lap times, your position, remaining fuel, RPMs, gear, speed, and so on. In cars like the Lamborghini Reventon, with its fully digital fighter-jet esque dashboard, it goes all the way to Technology Porn.
• Difficult, but Awesome: Powerbuilds in Horizon games, that is, making a competitive car where power goes first, and then everything else. While the idea of a 1600 HP, RWD Mk4 Supra that fits in S1-class in Horizon 4 sounds like a deathtrap, it can be a monster if you learn how to tame it.
• Discount Card:
  • The Horizon games have boards that you can smash to reduce certain costs.
    • In the first game, they reduce the cost of car parts, each board taking away 1% of the cost; find all one hundred of them, and all upgrades are free.
    • From the second game onward, fifty of the bonus boards reduce the cost of fast travel, each board taking off 2% of the cost with free fast travel to those who find all fifty.
    • The second game's first expansion (Storm Island) also has boards that reduce the cost of car parts, albeit not as much as the first game's boards (they only go up to 50% off).
  • The third game has reloadable perks (earned with skill points) that allows players to get free upgrades upon checkout and a 5% discount on new cars (which can be combined with #Forzathon sale discounts).
• Dolled-Up Installment: The series gained such an entry on April 15, 2019, with the rebranding of Miami Street to Forza Street.
• Down to the Last Play: While the game is generally balanced for close racing if you pick the appropriate difficulty level the Showcase Events in the Horizon series are very obviously designed so that the player can't take the lead until the final corner either because what they're up against is faster or had a straighter route.
  • In Horizon 4 the Titan and the Gauntlet especially seem planned to take the player into the hardest sections last. The Titan goes right over the Great Ridge jump, and finishes in the train yard, with the line hidden behind the end of one of the sheds. The Gauntlet leads the player down an increasingly twisty rally stage of a road, making the last few KM the most frenetic of the course.
• Downloadable Content:
  • Mostly just car packs, especially prevalent in Motorsport 4 with its monthly themed car packages.
  • Horizon had a monstrous fifty US dollars season pass.
  • Horizon 1 and Motorsport 5's DLC have been particularly controversial due to the vast majority of the DLC vehicles being cars that were in previous games which were removed in the sequel.
• Dramatic Disappearing Display: In Horizon 5, approaching the finishing line close to another racer will cause the HUD to fade away and for the screen to adopt a Letterbox format. This increases the tension as you fight for your place.
• Drives Like Crazy: M. Rossi, the fastest AI driver in single-player. They will occasionally mash you off the starting line, and use the PIT maneuver on you if you get in their way on corners.
  • Forza Horizon gives you an incentive to drive like a maniac. Crazy stunts like overtaking cars at high speed, drifting, jumping, breaking environment objects, or all of these at once and repeatedly will increase your popularity ratings, which include perks such as more races, some money, lottery to win prizes such as cars etc. The game even gives some titles to some of these actions (Daredevil for zipping past multiple traffic cars in quick succession, Kangaroo for bouncing multiple times quickly, Landscaping for destroying specific types of obstacles, etc).
• Driving Stick: Motorsport 3 and 4 allow the player to set the shifting behavior to "Manual + Clutch". On the Xbox controller, you'll have to hold down the LB button while shifting up or down. On expensive racing wheels (like the Fanatec CSR), this mode will make you use the clutch pedal and the 6-speed H-pattern shifter. Poor shifting will result in near-stalls, engine damage (shifting into first gear at 200mph, for example), or engine lugging. If you don't use the clutch when starting from a standstill (such as at the start or after a wreck), the engine will repeatedly stall, resulting in a painfully slow start, especially in cars with huge turbochargers or tall gearing.
• Dynamic Difficulty: Shows up in Motorsport 4's World Tour. The AI starts ridiculous easy, but the more events you win, the harder they become. In races, the AI will try to drive more aggressively (braking later and turning harder) if you're catching up to them to make up a better lead, but their plan can backfire and send them careening through a corner because they braked too late.
• Early-Bird Cameo: In Motorsport 6, one of the bridges over Le Mans has a Porsche advertisement on it, before the manufacturer would appear in a 2016 expansion.
• Early-Installment Weirdness:
  • Motorsport:
    • This game featured point-to-point tracks, which stand out as future Motorsport games stick exclusively to circuits (with the sole exception of drag strips).
    • The game features a noticeably higher number of original tracks as opposed to real-world ones. In-particular, it features 'Blue Mountains', which is a generic recreation of the real-world Mount Panorama Circuit.
    • Each Performance Index tier is divided into sub-tiers. This was necessary because you couldn't actually see the exact PI value of a car in the first game, making it a lot more difficult to tell when you've maximised the performance of a car within a specific threshold.
    • The first two games had a penalty system in which way it adds additional time to your lap for colliding with opponents and barriers or leaving the track. This feature was removed starting with 3.
  • Horizon:
    • The biggest difference is that car performance indexes are mandatory in Horizon and not so in the other games (the sequels let you bring a car of any PI to a race and the opponent cars will match your PI). Horizon 3: Hot Wheels did bring back the mandatory performance indexes, however, although it will still scale the PI of other racers to match. The same goes for the Seasonal Championships in Horizon 4 and Horizon 5, which also restricts players to certain cars or car types.
    • The second-biggest difference is the prevalence of sponsors for the game's events. All the sequels drop event sponsors.
    • The festival's design theming had a more Design Student's Orgasm feel compared to later installments, which have a more polished, professional feel.
    • The pause menu is just a list of options, unlike the tabbed tile-based menus of the sequels.
    • The game's version of Colorado is 100% fictitious; the locations are inspired by those found in the real Colorado, including a Red Rocks Park-inspired area, but are not in the real state. All the later installments incorporate some condensed versions of real locations in their maps, only leaving the expansions' maps fully fictional. Additionally, the first game is the only installment to take place in the United States; Playground Games have since deliberately avoided using the U.S. for their game worlds as they believe that America has been over-represented in open-world games, with Horizon 5 being the closest to returning to the U.S. since that game takes place in Mexico.
    • Multiplayer was a separate game mode that even used lobbies. Each sequel increasingly integrated the multiplayer into the game world, culminating with the Horizon Life system of Horizon 4 onward.
    • There is no Skill Shop, with the stunt points earned instead contributing to a "popularity rating" that starts at 150 as you try to reach number 1.
    • There are no "Bucket List" challenges, instead of having "PR Stunts" (not to be confused with the PR Stunts of later entries) which are similar in purpose (giving you a chance to drive a preset car in order to accomplish a specific goal) but more formulaic and tied to outposts rather than scattered around the map. Also, the 1000 Club expansion gave each and every single car in the game optional tasks to accomplish, giving players a motivation to try driving every car the game has to offer, something that the sequels don't do enough of, really.
    • There are no Wheelspins, street races are more organized than they are in the sequels, and the festival itself has a more cohesive and structured feel compared to the following games (which go for a looser and more ad-hoc feel to racing).
    • The map itself has significantly fewer off-roading areas compared to future games. (Although the 360 versions of Horizon 2 and its Fast & Furious standalone expansions also have few off-roading areas, this is more due to the technical limitations of the 360.)
    • Horizon Bass Arena is represented with a blue logo, while Horizon Pulse is green. Future games inverted that. There are also no record label stations (especially Hospital Records Radio, which has been in every sequel so far) or classical stations. Amy Simpson (voiced by actress Susannah Fielding) is also not the DJ of Horizon Pulse; the DJ for that station was initially Holly Cruz (voiced by Alix Wilton Regan) instead.
    • The first game explicitly takes place in a specific year (2012, the year of the game's release). Also, it had the fake stars players had to beat in events to try to establish its fictional world. Later games would not mention any specific year and the "beat the stars" thing was dropped in favor of using Drivatars, which were first introduced in Motorsport 5, leaving only the DJs of the Horizon branded stations, the festival managers, and the festival's main mechanics as the only completely fictional characters to appear, which (with the exception of Horizon Bass Arena's DJ Scott Tyler [voiced by Ronan Summers] from the first Horizon and the aforementioned Amy Simpson from Horizon 2 onward, plus the real-life Chris Goss and Tony "London Elektricity" Colman (replaced by Degs in 5) for Hospital Records if you count them) have been different in every game so far. However, Horizon 4 has a multitude of characters again, but they're either working for the Horizon Festival or doing their own thing in Horizon Stories.
    • Fast Travel Anywhere was a paid feature, costing tokens. The sequels made it available to everyone when they earn enough skill points (2, 3) or purchase a specific house (4, 5).
    • There were no map expansions for the first Horizon. Instead, there were a pay-for Rally expansion (which features its own events separate from the main Horizon Festival) and the free side-activity-loaded 1000 Club. Horizon 2 had one map expansion in Storm Island (the other expansion was essentially a glorified Porsche car pack), while Horizon 3 and 4 each feature two map expansions in a special expansion pass.
    • Upgrades could be discounted or even made completely free if one dedicated themselves to smashing all 100 discount boards across the map. The sequels had the bonus boards give out XP ("Influence" in Horizon 4) rewards and fast travel cost discounts (the latter also allowing for free fast travel if all such boards on the map were found), but only Horizon 2: Storm Island maintained the bonus boards for upgrade discounts (and even then they only went up to 50% off). Horizon 3 made free upgrades a renewable skill perk, but otherwise does not ever allow for permanent upgrade discounts. Horizon 4 completely dropped the concept of free or discounted upgrades altogether.^note Although the game's overly-generous amounts of Wheelspins make all that redundant.
    • The first Horizon had only one main Horizon Festival and several small festival outposts. Horizon 2 had the main festival and six smaller festival sites, but the smaller sites were made to be mini-festivals instead of the first game's single-tent outposts (and even then, players hardly spent their time at the main festival). Horizon 3 had four festival sites happening at once, and all of them were treated as main festivals, although the original at Byron Bay is given a slightly higher prominence since it's the first site in the game and the expansions return players to that one. However, Horizon 4 reverses this trend and has a back-to-basics approach to festivals, with only one main festival again and the new houses feature serving the same functions as the outposts and mini-festivals of the first two games. Then after that, Horizon 5 brought back the multiple unlockable festival sites while still keeping the houses.
    • Several Showcase Events in the first game pit the player against non-playable vehicles in basic 1-on-1 races, or a full-grid one-make race against standard vehicles (eg. Manic Mini), both of which are always run on the same routes and circuits as the regular wristband events. Starting with 2, the Showcase Events are always races against non-playable vehicles like planes, motorbikes, or hot air balloons, and are run on custom-made routes that are not used in regular races. Also, winning a showcase in 1 would also award the player with the car used in said showcase. In 2 only the first showcase would award the player with the showcase car (due to it being required for the plot, and the car appearing in the following cutscene as the convoy prepares to depart for Nice), as none of the remaining showcases, nor any showcase in 3 or 4 will reward the player with the car used.
    • The first Horizon was the first and only game in the series to be rated Teen by the ESRB (for Drug References, Language, Suggestive Themes). Each subsequent installment has further and further moved away from invoking inappropriate content; Horizon 2 was rated Everyone 10 and Up (Mild Lyrics, Mild Suggestive Themes, and Mild Violence), Horizon 3 was the first to be rated Everyone but still had descriptors (Mild Lyrics and Mild Violence), and Horizon 4 and 5 both were rated Everyone without any descriptors (although the former got an update to censor more lyrics from songs and remove a couple songs that Playground Games deemed too inappropriate for the rating, much to some fans' chagrin).
    • Real-world companies, several of which are not car companies or car part manufacturers, sponsored the racing events of the Horizon Festival in Colorado. All the sequels cut those out, to the point that billboards feature only fake companies or products; the Product Placement is now only restricted to certain cars added in crossovers with non-Microsoft games, including the Quartz Regalia from Final Fantasy XV and the Quadra Turbo-R V-TECH from Cyberpunk 2077.
• Easier Than Easy:
  • All the games (but Motorsport 3 in particular) have plenty of ways to make things easier on yourself. You're encouraged to crank up the difficulty and turn off the driver aids, though: the harder the difficulty is, the more money you earn. Many driver aids also slow you down, compared to driving without them. Horizon 5 takes this to the logical conclusion with a Tourist difficulty setting for Drivatars, an "Easier than Easier than Easy" difficulty setting meant for young children and players who are complete beginners to racing games, where Drivatars actively slow down when they're ahead so you can easily catch up.
  • In Motorsport 4, once the player reaches affinity level 4 for a manufacturer, they get all upgrades, bar rims, and body kits, for free. Couple this with getting a new free car—which is already upgraded to the top of its car class—every time you level up your driver, means you can save ridiculous amounts of money fairly early into the game. Also, if you've played past Forza titles extensively and redeemed the weekly rewards, your credit amount will raise even further.
• Easter Egg: In Horizon 3, knocking over a specific sign in Yarra Valley featuring an oversized banana is the only way to earn the "Fruit Salad" skill, worth 1,000 points. This is most likely a reference to the big things of Australia.
• Establishing Series Moment: The first Horizon opens with an unnamed driver in an impromptu race against Darius, and then switches to the player character, who has to make it to the Horizon Festival to claim one of the last open spots in the championship. This establishes that the series is a more open and freewheeling kind, compared to the more formal Motorsport.
• Expansion Pack:
  • The Porsche expansion pack in Motorsport 4 re-introduced twenty-three of Motorsport 3's Porsches, added seven new ones that weren't in previous games, added achievements, and added more single-player events. Another two Porsche expansion packs were released for Horizon 2 and Motorsport 6.
  • A Rally expansion pack was revealed for the first Horizon about a week before the game was even out.
  • A free expansion pack for the first Horizon called the 1000 Club added medals for players to win and two cars.
  • Horizon 2's Storm Island expansion pack adds a new open-world which emphasizes extreme rally racing, abrupt and violent weather conditions, and six new vehicles. It can be easily summed up as the Rally expansion pack for the first Horizon turned up to eleven.
  • Forza Horizon 2 Presents Fast & Furious is a standalone example that is essentially a limited version of the full game (or, looking at it another way, a glorified demo with its own achievements that happens to be an advergame for a film as well) with Ludacris guiding the player through various events to find cars found in the film series. It's also the only expansion of the game for the Xbox 360 version of Horizon 2, but Horizon 2 Presents F&F on 360 is entirely self-contained, as none of the twelve cars can be transferred to the main game, whereas on the Xbox One version you have to buy the separate Furious 7 car pack to get those cars (although finding and smashing all twenty reward boards does unlock a car in the main game's garage).
  • Motorsport 6 received the NASCAR expansion two months after the release of its Porsche expansion, featuring 24 cars from 5 teams of 2016 season and Homestead-Miami Speedway.
  • Horizon 3 gets two: the first is a snow-covered mountain in the vein of 2's Storm Island called Blizzard Mountain, with blizzards replacing rainstorms. The second is a unique twist: Hot Wheels stunt tracks that involve loops, crossovers, and other crazy driving conditions. In addition, while it is not an expansion, the Hoonigan Car Pack also comes with its own set of achievements, making that one feel similar to Horizon 2's Porsche expansion.
  • Horizon 4 also got two map expansions just like Horizon 3. The first one was Fortune Island which, like Horizon 2's Storm Island expansion, features extreme weather conditions and lots of off-roading, a large island map (the largest expansion map in the series yet), tons of mountainous switchback roads, and treasure-filled with credits. The second is LEGO Speed Champions, an expansion named after the toyline of the same name with its cars digitally recreated and scaled to life-size, a varied valley map with a desert, a LEGO airport, a stunt park for cars, and the Horizon series' first ever proper racetrack, and its own open-ended storyline with a house that you "build" over time.
  • Horizon 5 has two expansions, being continuations of expansions found in previous games: the first one was Hot Wheels, set in a map right above Mexico, and Rally Adventure which reintroduces pace notes to the series.
• Expy: The Horizon Festival from the two Horizon games seems to draw heavy inspiration from both the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival and Hot Import Nights.
  • Duke Maguire is Horizon's version of Johnny Knoxville, who makes it quite clear he's only there to smash up expensive cars for his new show. He was even threatened to be kicked out from the Festival due to his behavior towards his cars.
  • Open for interpretation, but both reviewers and players have likened the main character to Paul Walker.
  • The Vinyl Editor/Decal Editor is also an in-house expy to MS Paint, which was also developed by Microsoft.
• Every Car Is a Pinto: Averted. None of the cars can explode, despite there being an actual Ford Pinto in the game.
• Exposition Fairy:
  • Alice Hart in Horizon. Every couple of minutes, she'll tell you about the hidden discount signs (even if you've already found all of them) or advise you to blow some cash on a car at the Autoshow.
  • The free 1000 Club expansion pack contains a patch that resolves this issue, with Alice only advising you to buy a car once you've been playing over a set time and are sitting idle. This patch also tracks whether or not you have all the discount signs, and will disable her comments for good if you have.
  • The lady narrator in Motorsport 5, whenever you buy a new car. She's back in Motorsport 6.
  • Both Ben Miller and Ashley in Horizon 2, although Ben is the one who provoked most of the ire from the fans.
  • Tej is this in Horizon 2 Presents Fast & Furious. Either he keeps telling you to switch to an appropriate car or reminds you to use the nitrous boost at the beginning of a race almost every time.
  • Keira Harrison in Horizon 3 and 4, though thankfully she's less talkative than Horizon 2's Ben and has a more pleasant southern Irish voice to boot.
• Fake Longevity: The 360 version of Horizon 2 is a notorious example. To dominate a certain event, you need to finish in the top 3 in each of ten racing divisions. In other words, going to the same race ten times to dominate it.
• First-Person Snapshooter: Several games have a sidequest tasking you to take pictures of the vehicles you encounter. You can get bonuses for photographing certain amounts of cars, and some limited-time events require you to take a picture of specific cars at a location.
• Forest of Perpetual Autumn: One of the fictional tracks in the Motorsport games is Maple Valley Raceway, which takes place in a valley that is mostly packed with maple trees. It's also one of the few tracks in the Motorsport series that doesn't appear to take place during spring or summer.
• Fragile Speedster: Small cars like the Lotus Elan and Mazda Miata offer extremely good handling, but they're tiny and slight nudges can cause them to spin out. On the other end of the size (but not weight) scale would be the Le Mans Prototypes.
• Friendly Rivalry: Unlike the other rivals in Horizon, Ali Howard likes you even before you defeat him (though in the spirit of competition, he won't hold back.) He even invites you to join his street racing league afterward.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation: In Horizon, Alice Hart and the radio DJs sometimes reference how the racing at the Festival is heavily regulated and speaks of instances where Festival participants getting pulled over for illegal modifications, speeding, etc. Yet the player can do things like go over 200 mph on a public highway, crash into traffic, destroy property (fences, tables, signs) without facing any consequences apart from losing their skill chain combo, and the only regulation seen in the Horizon races are what cars are allowed to enter.
• Game-Breaking Bug:
  • Motorsport 4:
    • This game had a bug in the online multiplayer where players may hang up on the loading screen - sometimes up to five minutes, until the game boots them out to the lobby or pukes up a "disc is dirty" error. When this happens, the entire lobby gets stuck in the loading screen until the person causing the delay gets booted out by the game. This was patched in the March 23rd update, but it also introduced a bug that occurs if your car's decals are not visible in a race, which results in your Xbox crashing to the dashboard when you return to the lobby. How often it happens varies by player, from every other race (rendering the game effectively unplayable) to every dozen or so races. However, the bug only seems to occur in the public matchmaking lobbies - private or user-created lobbies don't seem to cause the bug.
  • Horizon 4:
    • The LEGO DLC's brick tracking has a very nasty tendency to break. When this happens, whenever the player meets their current brick milestone for a new addition for their home in LEGO Valley, the event where said addition is added to their home never triggers, preventing them from progressing through the DLC.
    • Between January and August of 2021, one of the Story Star Card challenges, The Magnate (This challenge is progressed via earnings from the player's businesses), stopped tracking income from the player's businesses. It is one of four challenges that must be completed in order to become a Story Superstar, the reward for which is the Ferrari 812 Superfast, a rare hypercar that, prior to the Star Card feature, was available exactly once, from the Forzathon shop during the second week of the game's release for 100 Forzathon points. Any player who didn't complete that challenge before the tracking on it broke were unable to obtain the 812 except via the Auction House. The inability to complete the Story Star Card also locked the player out of obtaining the Forza Edition of the Ford Capri RS3100, which is awarded to the player by completing all the star cards, and like the 812, was previously available exactly once, being released by accident onto the Forzathon shop some time in Series 7 for a very brief period of time. This bug was finally fixed as of the Series 39 Update in late-August of the same year.
    • The Toyota 2000GT's return to the franchise as part of the Series 18 update would cause issues with players and expose flaws in the auto-mod bot used by Turn 10's Code of Conduct Enforcement team.
    • Any players that, prior to Series 18's winter season when the car could be obtained, imported their liveries from earlier Xbox One titles that featured this car using the game's own livery importer function found themselves slapped with a suspension for "time-travelling", as the auto-mod bot was working under the false premise that the liveries were made within Horizon 4 by illegitimately obtaining the car early. All these suspensions were quickly reverted, but due to the suspensions being of the kind that barred the player from accessing or creating User-Generated Content, any player that received this erroneous suspension had their ENTIRE Creative Hub wiped clean.
    • When the Winter Season came, players who, within the first few hours of the season, achieved the 50% season completion necessary to obtain the car also found themselves getting smacked by the bot, and for the same erroneous reason as well ("Time-travelling").
    • Starting from Series 47, completing the Series' monthly Rivals event does NOT award the player with the 6% progress for the Festival Playlist, making it impossible to 100% a Series from that Series on, which in turns prevents the "Encore!" achievement ^note Get 100% completion on a Series from being obtained by any player that either hadn't obtained it in prior Series, or any players that started playing in Series 47. Worse yet, this issue has been placed under the "Won't Fix / By Design" section of the Forza Horizon 4 known issues page on the Forza support website, meaning the achievement has been rendered absolutely unobtainable as a result.
    • Playing the PC version with an installed Nvidia Game Ready driver later than 522.25 can result in crashes occuring after 20 minutes since booting up the game. This only happens after playing for several hours beforehand.
• Gathering Steam: In a racing context, electric vehicles tend to be like this. In comparison to ICE vehicles they have slower acceleration from standstill^note EV's are known for allowing for much greater power from the start, but the lack of gears means you cannot just tune them to have massive torque but better handling at high speeds, which means they tend to pick up the pace mid-race after the ICE cars have got a headstart.
• Gimmick Level: Horizon 5 introduces Rivals events that limit you to driving electric vehicles. This is mostly as a gameplay consideration, as the lack of gears and slow initial acceleration on EV's tend to make them outclassed on hotlaps.
• Green Aesop: Motorsport 4 has hybrids like the dreaded Toyota Prius, and electric cars like the Chevrolet Volt, Nissan Leaf, and Tesla Roadster. There's a player title reward for driving 1,000 miles in hybrid or electric cars.
• Guest Fighter: Horizon 3 and 4 lets you drive a Warthog (appropriately given a manufacture year of "2554"). Horizon 3 also received a Quartz Regalia was given as a downloadable gift for players later on. Horizon 4 brought back both cars along with the Regalia Type-D as a Hard-to-Find car, and the Quadra V-Tech from Cyberpunk 2077 was brought in Series 30.
• Guide Dang It!: Did you know that you can photograph and be rewarded for taking pictures of traffic cars and not just other racers in Horizon 2? Even after obtaining the perk that highlights cars you haven't taken pictures of, traffic is still not highlighted, and the traffic cars are unique and cannot be driven. You will likely not know this unless you noticed the lower resolution images of cars with license plates in the Horizon Promo list hidden in the menu.
• Hand Wave: Blueprints, which let you customize an event's settings, makes sense in Horizon 3 because you're the boss of the festival. While you're a rookie driver in Horizon 4, you still eventually gain access to the Blueprint feature, and it's waved away by Keira saying she's scouting out new event coordinator talent.
• Hard Mode Perks:
  • Disabling driver assists (such as anti-lock brakes, traction control, racing/braking line) and increasing the AI difficulty nets you more cash - disabling every assist and enabling the hardest AI will give you an extra 165% cash on top of the regular winnings in Motorsport 4.
  • Motorsport 7 features racing mods that range from flat credits and experience boosts or bonus objectives to straight examples of this trope. Mods that disable racing aids, force rainy or night conditions or full damage, fuel or tire damage simulation tend to give the biggest boosts.
• Hello, [Insert Name Here]: Beginning with Horizon 3, you can select from a large list of both real names and nicknames, to which characters and the GPS will refer to you as, Fallout 4 style. If you entered your real name to your Xbox Live profile, or tied in your Facebook account to it, then the game will automatically select your real given name for you.
• Hero Insurance: You never need to pay for damage to either your car or the surrounding environment. Lampshaded in Horizon 3 after you complete your first stunt jump: Keira mentions that she will have to hold a lively phone conversation with your insurance provider.
• Homage: The trailer for Forza 6 pays tribute to each generation of racers from Gran Trak 10 to RC Pro-Am to Pole Position to Chase H.Q. to Ridge Racer.
  • The LaRacer@Horizon missions in Horizon 4 have the player help a streamer pay homage to several classic racing games: OutRun, Smugglers Run, Test Drive, Project Gotham Racing, Daytona USA, Crazy Taxi, Sega Rally, Super Off Road and Ridge Racer, reminiscent of both the above linked trailer, and of a Youtuber's similar homages for the previous Horizon entry.
  • One of the stunt driver missions has you as the driver in a tribute to the short film C'était un rendez-vous — both in-universe and out, as the director cites that film as his inspiration.
• Hood Ornament Hottie: The intro to the first game had one of these. Ramona Cravache and Hailey Harper in Horizon count.
  • Lampshaded by Hailey herself: she mentions she already gets thousands of dollars just for unzipping her race suit on photoshoots.
• Hummer Dinger: The Autovista mode for the Hummer H1 Alpha in Motorsport 4 describes its extreme off-road prowess... and then notes that 20-inch deep flooded roads are not something generally encountered on the way to the gym.
• In Name Only: For all intents and purposes, Forza Street is just a Drift Spirits-style mobile racer with some bells and whistles added to make it different than the competition. Doesn't help that this game used to go by another title (Miami Street), but was rebranded for a mass release.
• Infinity -1 Sword: starting from December 2018, any new Horizon 4 player will receive on the in-game's mail a Mosler MT900S. With the proper tune, it can be the second fastest car X class (and by extension, the game), after the 599XX Evolution.
• Infinity +1 Sword: The Ferrari 250 LM in Motorsport 3, Motorsport 4, and Horizon 1. It is by far the best car in its class (B class)... but, with a ten million credits price tag (twenty million in Motorsport 3!), cue much Level Grinding.
  • The price is justified slightly by the fact that the real world car is the most expensive car... in the world. If one goes up for auction, it can cost around ten million pounds sterling. That is a lotta dosh.
  • A much cheaper (at 2.8 million credits) option for Horizon 5 is Koenigsegg Jesko - a Swedish hypercar that can go above 300 miles (483 kilometers) an hour relatively quickly. The Hot Wheels expansion brought in one of its closest rivals, Hennessey Venom F5 - a far more powerful successor of Forza series' mainstay, Hennessey Venom GT.
• Informed Attribute: The mechanic in Horizon implies that your VW Corrado has seen better days and is running rough; none of which shows in-game with the just-out-of-the-showroom paint and perfectly maintained mechanical bits (semi-justified, as Horizon doesn't have Subsystem Damage like previous games)
• Insurmountable Waist-Height Fence:
  • A few, but the most egregious being the low tire walls, which stop you as if they were made of cast iron.
  • The Horizon maps are enclosed by bodies of water and steep hills, things that could maybe be passed using an offroader were it not for the fact that those hills have zero friction, making them next to impossible to climb. The very first Horizon game played it a bit straighter; flimsy-looking agricultural fencing is often the main thing stopping you from escaping the confined of the roads.
• Itasha: Can be done from Motorsport 2 onwards. A nice part of the Forza fanbase even makes Itasha liveries and put them on sale online, although a few times with a very high price tag for a car livery, ranking up to 25-30k credits, but it is very often Worth It!
  • Can actually be used to a player's advantage online; risque paintings or vinyl groups have actually distracted other players ogling them as they drive along, often causing them to crash.
• It's the Best Whatever, Ever!: Completing the final showcase is Horizon 3 gets you the Best. Horizon. Ever. achievement.
• Jack of All Stats: Sporty hot-hatchbacks like the Ford Focus ST offer a good blend of speed, acceleration, handling, and braking.
• Jerkass: M. Rossi, big time.
  • Practically everyone in Horizon besides Dak, the radio DJs and Alice treats the player like crap. Until you beat them, at least.
• Joke Character: Hybrids, which for the most part, are outran by everything else in the game when stock. You can of course, turn them into insane drag racers because of Forza's huge customization, though.
  • Most DLC packs usually include one or two.
  • The May DLC for Motorsport 4 has a Smart ForTwo, a Ford Transit van^note It's the racing version, but it's still a delivery van, and the AMC Pacer X.
  • The June DLC featured the Aston Martin Cygnet. For those unaware, it's a 1.0 litre, front wheel drive Toyota iQ with Aston Martin's signature features on both the outside and interior.
  • The September DLC had the GMC Vandura.
  • The Fast & Furious car pack in Motorsport 6 featured the humongous Terradyne Gurkha LAPV, which is Agent Luke Hobbs's car in Fast Five. It's the heaviest car in the entire franchise, with a listed curb weight of 16,499 pounds, or more than twice that of the former heaviest, the Hummer.
  • Motorsport 6's October DLC featured the Cadillac XTS Limo, none of the cars featured in this franchise have ever been this long. It is even lampshaded in it's official description:
  "Simply put, this is one hulking and fancy piece of machinery that has no business on the track. All the more reason to have it in Forza Motorsport 6 we say."
  • Motorsport 6's January DLC has the Pontiac Aztek. The trailer Lampshades this by gives it an epic introduction, before showing it driving off at a snails pace.
  • The Porsche Expansion for Motorsport 6 adds the 356A Speedster. While it's one of the iconic stars of Porsche's early years, it qualifies as a Joke Character because it's slow (only 60 HP stock) and it has more body roll than a Jeep Wrangler.
  • Horizon 3 adds the Reliant Regal Supervan, the first three-wheeler in the series.
  • Motorsport 7's April DLC included the Honda Odyssey. Yes, that's right, a freaking minivan in a Forza game.
  • Horizon 4 has the Peel P50, the smallest production car ever made with a rock-bottom default PI of 100. The British Racing Green storyline has you drive one in the 5th chapter, with an objective clearly designed as a jab at its extremely low performance (hit the Broadway speed trap at 35 mph/56 km/h to pass).
• Land Down Under: Like France in the second game, Horizon 3 is a mish mash of Australia from tracks in Bondi, Surfers Paradise and the Yarra Valley to a celebration of its cars and culture.
  I knew Australia is beautiful, but now I think it's just showing off.
• Last Lousy Point:
  • The Horizon games all have achievements for fully driving on every road in the game, and it gets worse with each later, bigger installment. Good luck finding all 531 roads in Britain!
  • Also in the Horizon games, there's finding all the bonus boards. This wasn't too bad in the first two games, but 3 ramps up the number of boards in obscure or tricky to reach locations, and 4 will push hard-to-reach boards even further out-of-reach.
• Lethal Joke Character: The city cars are ridiculously fast when upgraded, and handle very well.
  • The car dominating the lower-class leaderboards in Forza Motorsport 4? The Chevrolet Spark.
  • In the right hands, the Hummer H1 Alpha. It may be slower than the other cars, but being twice as wide makes it impossible to pass.
  • The Chryslus Rocket 69 for Forza Motorsport 6. Abysmal braking, acceleration, and handling, but on a straightaway it can reach speeds of 260 miles per hour.
  • 6's July DLC has a Mercedes-Benz racing truck. Despite appearances, it handles well and can be pretty fast in its class, and its large size can be an advantage when going up against smaller vehicles.
  • The Peel P50 (and its DLC-only brethren, the Peel Trident) in Horizon 4 has a selection of car mastery perks that enables its skill multiplier to go up to 8 without a skill song in play. Only the Peels have this perk - even Forza Edition cars, which are made for faster skill point accumulation, can only have skill multiplier boosts that increase their maximum multiplier either to 6 or 7. This potentially makes the Peels the fastest way to farm batches of 10 skill points, needing 62,500 points at 8x multiplier to top out. Of course, you still have to contend with the car's unique physics resulting from its odd design.
  • The Morgan 3-wheeler might look ridiculous, but a seasonal challenge requires you to use it to complete it, as, if tuned well, can succeed in drifting (even better than most JDM) and racing!
  • Horizon 5 allows players to drive BMW Isetta - a tiny 12 HP car made after World War II. When it's fully tuned, however, it can go as far as to beat far faster vehicles such as Hennessey Venom F5 in a full-mile drag race!
• Level Editor:
  • Horizon 3's "Blueprint", while not being a fully straight example, is the game's meat and potatoes, as it lets people create their own races, championships, and Bucket List events to play and share with their Xbox Live friends.
    • The Hot Wheels expansion features a Stunt Swap option where players can modify certain pieces of the track from a set selection of stunt options (ranging from loops, crossovers, jumps, and ditches, among others).
  • Horizon 4, which also has the Blueprint feature, introduces a proper route editor: players are able to create their own circuit and point-to-point races up driving around the map, placing checkpoints, and (for point-to-point sprints) a finish line along the way. They can choose the season they're set in and share the finished product with other players. The only limitations are that the starting position must be those of Road Racing Series, Dirt Racing Series, or Cross Country Series events, tracks cannot be any longer than forty miles, players can't place setpieces like barriers, ramps, or spectator spots, and all user-created tracks must be test-driven from start to finish first before they can be published.
    • Horizon 4's Super7 update added the Blueprint Builder, which combines with the route editor and adds the ability to place custom props and scenery and which way you like, allowing for much crazier custom games. It's only limited for the time-trial esque Super7 games and not for racing, though.
  • Horizon 5 expands the feature with EventLab, which, apart from finally allowing the player add objects like barriers and ramps to player-made racing events, also allows for creation of custom game modes.
• Level Grinding: Getting money in Forza Motorsport 3 was a relatively slow affair, upgrades were expensive, and the player had no choice in what the level-up cars were, forcing them to spend credits to buy them. However, Motorsport 4 inverts it, by dumping tons of free cars onto the player (already upgraded, too!) up to level 50, and after that, dumping six-figure credit rewards on the player every time they level up, up to level 150. Additionally, many cars in Motorsport 4 are cheaper than Motorsport 3, such as the Ferrari 250 GTO being a mere ten million credits, rather than twenty million.
  • Furthermore, in Motorsport 4 you don't earn levels for individual cars anymore by racing with/in them, but for whole manufacturers. These "Affinity Levels" grant you massive discounts on upgrades, starting with 25% on the first level and going to 100% at the fourth Affinity Level. This means that except for third-party items like aerodynamic parts, rims, and tires, as well as new engines from other cars of that manufacturer, all upgrades are free. And on top of that, you earn additional cash for increasing a manufacturer's Affinity Level, which doesn't seem to be capped.
• Level in Reverse: Certain routes of some tracks in the Motorsport games have you to race in the opposite direction of the normal route. These are referred to as "Reverse" tracks by the games.
• Level Scaling: Horizon 2 and 3 lets you choose any car (that fits the class of the event you're playing) with any Performance Index and all the competing racers will drive vehicles that are roughly matched to your own in that same class. This leads to a little Fridge Logic during 3's Midnight Battle races as you can show up to a race driving an S2 car and your opponent's car will scale to yours but when you actually win the car from the race and turns up in your garage, you'll see it was actually a B-spec vehicle.
• Lighter and Softer: The Forza Horizon series is much more lighthearted and friendly than the straight-laced and serious Forza Motorsport series. Also, each subsequent Forza Horizon game has gotten lighter and softer than the one before it; the first Forza Horizon was actually rated Teen by the ESRB, having several songs with risqué lyrics and the Horizon radio DJs had more dialogue that could be considered inappropriate. The dialogue became more family-friendly and the songs' lyrics became more Bowdlerised in each sequel, to the point that after going E10+ in Horizon 2 and 3, Horizon 4 and 5 were rated Everyone without even any additional descriptors, not even "Mild Lyrics". This actually led to an issue where Horizon 4 received an update that censored more songs' lyrics and removed another song from the soundtrack entirely because of its frequent mentions of death (to say nothing of its title, "Die Trying").
• Loophole Abuse: Players were particularly fond of this in Motorsport 3's single-player events. The vast majority of events had no maximum cap on a car's performance index, allowing one to show up to a race featuring French makes such as Peugeot and Renault, in a 1000-horsepower Bugatti Veyron.
• Luck-Based Mission: Track Day events, if you're trying to get a "clean" laps (no contact with other cars, stay on the track at all times, no rewind). The AI cars that drive around the track will brake and swerve with no warning.
• Magikarp Power: The Datsun 510 and VW Rabbit in the third game absolutely dominate with enough modification, although any heavily modified car applies.
• Marathon Level: Endurance races in Motorsport 3 lasted around an hour to two hours. The events were removed from the career in Motorsport 4, though it's possible to create a custom online race lobby for an endurance race, up to fifty laps (be it on the one-mile long Ladera test track or on the ten-mile long Nürburgring). A special event to win a Unicorn car in Motorsport 4 had players join a multiplayer lobby on the Le Mans track in Le Mans Prototype cars, and then required them to do 360 laps. In an online race. ^note Considering the track's current (real life) lap record of 3:17:475, the race would take 19 hours, 44 minutes and 51 seconds to be finished. But since most players aren't professional racers, let alone recordist professional racers, the race could easily become a literal 24 Hours of Le Mans.
  • The final race in the Xbox One version of Horizon 2 takes place in a circuit which circumnavigates the entire map, with the Festival's main hub as start/finish location. It takes around 20 minutes to finish. The "Goliath Circuit" (which opens up when you max out the Byron Bay festival) serves a similar purpose for 3 (though, thanks to the blueprinting function, if you're nuts enough you can add laps to it) and bag several hundred thousand dollars, enough skill points for a free tune on your next ride, and a wheelspin or six for further riches and cars for the auction house.
  • Horizon 4 has four mini-Goliath style point-to-point races for each of the four primary racing disciplines; the Colossus for the Road Racing Series, the Titan for the Cross Country Series, the Gauntlet for the Dirt Racing Series and the Marathon for the Street Scene. Once again, the true "Goliath Circuit" makes a return and is unlocked at Round 20 of the Road Racing Series. Fortune Island adds two other Goliath-esque circuit races in form of the Kraken for the Road Racing Series and the Leviathan for the Dirt Racing Series.
  • Horizon 5 brings back the disciple specific events from 4 alongside the Golliath, and introduces a new event, "The Juggernaut", which is unique for being an extra-long Trailblazer PR Stunt rather than a formal event.
  • The December update for Motorsport 7 takes this to ridiculous levels with the ability for players to lengthen any race up to 1000 laps or a full 24 hours!
• Market-Based Title: The volcano in Horizon 5, which is modeled after the real-life Popocatépetl volcano, is called Gran Caldera; apparently, the developers thought "Popocatépetl" was quite a tongue-twister.
• Mickey Mousing: The title screen of Horizon 4 syncs its seasonal change to the music.
• Model Museum: Many games in the franchise allow you to admire any machine you own in your garage with Forzavista, allowing you to open doors, turn on the headlights, look under the hood and more.
• Money for Nothing: If you have VIP status in the Horizon series, you'll often be swimming in wheelspins. As a result, you can end up with more money than you know what to do with, even if you have a large garage of cars.
• Multi-Track Drifting: There is nothing (besides common sense) stopping you from tuning the four-ton Hummer H1 Alpha to be used as a drift car.
• My Rules Are Not Your Rules:
  • In Horizon various CPU characters use cars which are only available in the Limited Collector's Edition, which can't be available for the player if he/she doesn't have it: the Lamborghini Sesto Elemento, the Pagani Huayra, the Koenigsegg Agera, the RUF RT 12 R and the Audi R8 GT Spyder are these cars. Thus, if you have the Limited Collector's Edition and have redeemed the codes, this trope will be then subverted.
  • While games prior to Motorsport 7 were suspected of playing with the The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard trope, this game makes it VERY obvious, at least on Unbeatable difficulty, that the AI is getting some very illegal assistance.
    • The Homologation system, which not only imposes the usual PI limit, but also imposes, on a division-by-division basis, limits on maximum engine power, maximum tire width, as well as the specific tire compound that must be used. On Unbeatable, turning on the telemetry for an AI car will occasionally show them making way more power than is legally allowed by the division's Homologation rules, so if you're wondering just how the AI is out-dragging and out-running you on the straights, blame this cheaty measure.
    • In races with fuel consumption and tire wear, the AI NEVER NEEDS TO PIT. Their cars will be magically and automatically have their tanks topped up and tires changed while they're racing.
    • During Free Races against the AI, some cars will somehow make more power than stock even when tuning/upgrades are prohibited, as demonstrated in this video, whereof all the AI cars that were actually racing (of the six AI cars, two of them were glitched out and went nowhere), two of them adhered to the prohibition and had stock power/torque figures, while the other two were, despite the tuning/upgrade prohibition, making multiple times the amount of power they had stock, though it is hilarious watching these rule-breaking cars struggle to slow down or even turn properly.
  • In Horizon 4, the AI can not only drive cars that the player cannot have in their garage, but they can also break the rules in races with a defined PI class.
    • AI-only cars: The AI can drive the Horizon Story versions of various cars (eg. Make a blueprint and set car theme to 50s, and PI class to C-class, and the Chevrolet Bel Air from the LaRacer@Horizon story can be a possible opponent), which as per the name, appear in the various Horizon Stories and have upgrades that are not available on the regular version of the same car (eg. The HS version of the Austin FX4 has a Racing V12 swap that isn't available for its regular counterpart).
    • Breaking PI rules: In a race with a defined PI class, bringing in a car at the low of the PI range will force the AI to bring in some cars from the lower PI class, and thus not legal for the event, to diversify the grid.
  • In the Motorsport reboot, championships in Career mode's Featured Tours limit the player to certain vehicles or a specific car specific to the Series the tour was introduced in. Despite this restriction being placed on the player, in these championships, and only these championships, the AI is able to use cars that shouldn't be allowed, such as using non-hybrid cars◊ in a championship that focuses specifically on cars with hybrid technology or being able to use Subaru, Ford and Peugeot branded cars in a championship that forces the player to use a Lancia (and will typically be the only racer driving such).
• Mythology Gag: In Horizon 5, the festival dedicated to tarmac racing is named "Horizon Apex", a subtle nod to the "Forza on PC" showcase game Forza Motorsport 6: Apex.

Tropes N to Z

• Nerf:
  • In Horizon 2, it was a bit too easy to take your Lamborghini off-roading, which resulted in a select few modern supercars dominating races. Horizon 3 adjusts the handling physics so that it is much more difficult to handle cars not designed for off-roading through open fields, which adjusts the meta towards Jack of All Trades cars and keeping a decent variety of vehicle types in reserve.
  • Skills received a nerf in Horizon 4. In Horizon 2 and 3, they were on big grids and were applicable to every car. In 4, they were scaled back into car-specific Car Masteries, which only apply to that car, and are on a smaller grid. That means that not every car will have, for instance, an upgrade to higher multipliers.
• New Game Plus: Although not technically one, once you reach Driver Level 200 in Horizon 4 and Horizon 5 you enter a special Superstar mode which works similarly to Call of Duty's Prestige mode. You go back to Driver Level 1 but your wheelspins will slowly become of better quality as you go through the Superstar ranks.
• The '90s: One of the Rivals mode events bears the same name as this trope. It's description talks about pivitol moments such as the arrival of the internet and the Y2K scare. The event itself is a drag race with any 90's car of your choice.
• Nitro Boost:
  • Debuted in Forza Horizon 2 Presents Fast & Furious, but only used in certain events.
  • Forza Street has one, albeit permanently.
• No Communities Were Harmed: Though played straight in the first Horizon, the second game is a bit more indecisive. Some places such as Nice, Sisteron and Castelletto (Genoa) are based on real places, but Montellino, Saint-Martin and San Giovanni are fictional. The third game averts this, including real-life locations such as Gold Coast, Surfers Paradise, Byron Bay and Coober Pedy. All the Horizon games' map-adding expansions play this completely straight.
• No Fair Cheating / No Fourth Wall: If you use the rewind function once too many times in a race in Horizon 3, Keira will radio to tell you to stop cheating.
• No Name Given: Your silent protagonist in Horizon. Lampshaded by the other competitors, invoked by the radio stations; they point out your character doesn't even register his name into the events he's entering.
• Non-Indicative Name: Acknowledged in Horizon 3 with the Twelve Apostles, which there are only eight of them (formerly nine).
• Noodle Incident: When the player (as the Stig) is driving a BMW in the second stage of the Top Gear Story on Horizon 4, there's a chance you'll hear this:
  Chris Harris: That’s the last time we leave Stig unattended. Am I the only one who remembers Budapest?
• Obvious Rule Patch:
  • Horizon 4:
    • The Eliminator game mode received one around a month after it debuted and changed how long a player can stay outside of the safe circle before they're eliminated by the environment. To elaborate, spending any time outside of the circle causes a "Timeout" bar to fill up, and the bar stays filled even after returning to the circle. The bar goes from empty to full at a rate such that players can spend no more than a certain amount of time outside of the circle, throughout the entire session (again, the bar doesn't drain), before they're eliminated. The time limit starts off at 60 seconds, then drops to 30 seconds after the circle shrinks to its final, smallest size. However, 30 seconds is also the amount of time between the announcement of the final race to the finish, and said final race actually starting. This meant that players that make an educated guess as to where the finish point would be, could leave the circle and start heading in that direction, using the 30 seconds they have to give themselves a tremendous head start, though at the cost of scuttling their chances of winning if they guess the wrong direction. This tactic, as demonstrated here is practically mandatory if a player wants to fulfill the conditions for both the "Pacifist"^note Survive until the final round with the starting Mini Cooper S and "Heads Up"^note Win a game of Eliminator without using any Car Drops achievements in the same session, as they'll be stuck with their starting Mini Cooper for the entire round. This tactic was squashed by reducing the maximum amount of time needed to fill the timeout bar at the circle's smallest size from its original 30 seconds down to a mere 2.5 seconds!
  • Horizon 5:
    • After the first major patch, enabling Auto-Steering and/or Assisted Braking would place a cap on EXP and Credit payouts after a certain race distance^note Make a custom route from the Las Jardenes Circuit starting line, turn around and go southwest on the highway until the roundabout, loop around, and go northwest back to the start/finish. Set for 25 laps and you'll have a rough estimate as to the cap for whatever races these assist are used on. This was an attempt to stop players from letting the AI drive their car for 50 laps of the Goliath for them, and in a 9-10 hour span, earn millions of EXP and credits for each attempt.
    • Festival Playlist objectives that require a player to finish and/or win X amount of Y race type do not count races if the event was created via EventLab and said event's custom route distance is below a certain threshold, a direct response to players in 4 simply making minimum length routes (after sending the drivatars off into the middle of nowhere) for fulfilling this type of objective. Players quickly found a way around this by keeping the route length above the minimum threshold, and instead used Instant Win triggers to immediately end the event, something that would count towards completion of the objective. In response to this tactic, the restriction was made stricter for Treasure Hunt tasks that require a player to complete or win a race (usually of a certain type), often in a specific car or series of cars. Using any EventLab event, even one that would normally count towards the "finish and/or win X amount of Y race type" objective", would cause the task to outright bug out, as while the first part of the task is completed, the treasure chest itself will never spawn, preventing the player from completing that week's Treasure Hunt task.
• Oddball in the Series:
  • Horizon 2 is the only Horizon game to feature road trips between festival sites. They are replaced by convoys in Horizon 3, which players can start and stop at any time. It's also the only Horizon with a male Horizon Festival director (Ben Miller), the only one so far that is held in two countries (France and Italy), the only entry to automatically save game clips for doing certain stunts such as lots of drifts, and the only Horizon entry to have not received Xbox One X enhancements.^note Horizon 3 received 4K enhancements in an update (it already had HDR support as it was released with the Xbox One S, and it was released for Windows 10 PCs anyway). Horizon 1 was made backward-compatible on Xbox One and also received Xbox One X enhancements for 4K resolution support. Horizon 4 was made for the Xbox One X, rendering at 1080p/60 in Performance mode, and rendering at 4K/30 with graphical enhancements in Quality mode, along with HDR support on both S and X regardless. And two years later, the game got ported to Series S and X.
  • Horizon 3 is the only Horizon game not to have only one central Horizon Festival site, with festival sites in Byron Bay, the Outback (near Coober Pedy), Yarra Valley, and Surfers Paradise. As a result, it's also the only Horizon game not to feature any Horizon Festival going on in the "satellite photo" of its map screen, since all four festivals are constructed as you progress through the game.
• Old Save Bonus: The Forza Rewards system was this. From Forza Motorsport 3 until Forza Horizon 4 each game rewarded players with cars and weekly bonus credits depending on what previous games they've played^note Progress was tracked from all Forza games except the first Forza Motorsport on Xbox, Forza Motorsport 2 (outside of earned gamerscore), and the Xbox 360 versions of Horizon 2 and the Fast & Furious standalone expansion. and how much they've completed them. Players claimed their Forza Rewards weekly on ForzaMotorsport.net (today Forza.net) or the Forza Hub app. This system was discontinued for Forza Horizon 5 and beyond, and fully disabled on May 5, 2022.
  • Forza Horizon 5 has a more standard set of rewards, in the form of starting the game with the cover art cars from each Xbox Live-powered Forza game you've played. It can also inherit a nickname from a Horizon 4 profile, skipping that step in character creation.
• Only One Name: Horizon 3's mechanic Warren apparently has this trope applied to him according to his Forzavista commentary on Aston Martin.
  Warren: The name's Warren. Um... it's just Warren.
• Ooh, Me Accent's Slipping: Ronan Summers plays the implicitly American DJ Scott Tyler. Years of living in the UK have reflected on him, however, and he ends up slipping up on some occasions, such as how he pronounces Fortune Island as For-TUNE Island.
• Open Secret: The Street Scene in Horizon 4. Jaimin insists that none of it is sanctioned by Horizon and that Keira must not know about it yet it's openly discussed by the Radio DJs (usually before a Verbal Backspace). Naturally, once you win the Marathon, Keira calls you to "not" congratulate you.
  • It's not so secret when some seasons offer Street Scene Championships, which are presented to you by none other than Keira herself.
• Overdrive: Any player looking to get the achievements for completion of every event in the game will experience this, especially in Motorsport 3 and Motorsport 4. The endurance races in Motorsport 3 and the two-stage championships in Motorsport 4 are enough to drive you insane.
• Palette Swap: Not as many as Gran Turismo, but still a fair few. Several examples:
  • Toyota Aygo, Citroen C1 and the Peugeot 107. All the same apart from the front bumpers (although the Aygo does have a different rear end as well).
  • Alternate market versions of the same car (e.g. Infiniti G35 and the Nissan Skyline 350GT, the Toyobaru twins). Besides badging and steering wheel position, and maybe some unique engine swaps, nothing else is different.
  • A common complaint about the car list is how often several manufacturers will have the same race car with the same stats, but be classed as separate models because of the livery. Holden is the worst offender, with a few road cars and many race cars with identical performance factors and price, but different paint jobs.
  • The player's character in Horizon 1 has the exact same animations as the driver in Motorsport 4, albeit while dressed in a neutral fashion rather than full racing attire.
  • Forza Horizon featured the Ford SVT Raptor Halo edition in one of its DLC packages. It's a bog standard Ford SVT Raptor with Halo decals (The UNSC eagle logo) and a camouflage pattern - something which anyone can design on their own and apply to the standard car. It wasn't even the free DLC car, either.
  • The NASCAR Expansion Pack for Motorsport 6 features precisely 3 cars - which are almost completely identical anyways outside of superficial bodywork - painted in a variety of colors.
  • Some of the Hoonigan cars are palette swaps of other cars (mostly Fords), even between themselves.
  • The Subaru BRZ and Toyota GT86 share the same stats and even customization parts: the differences are OEM paint colours, engine swaps (in some games) and that the BRZ is LHD while the GT86 is RHD.
  • Every LEGO car, sans the Mini and Porsche, is based on the original car, and shares the base stats. However, they have different upgrades: LEGO cars, for instance, don't allow Forza spoilers or different rims.
• Pass Through the Rings: Autocross events in Motorsport 4. Cones are set up to form gates along the track, and you pass between them as you go along the track. Hitting the cones results in a +5 second time penalty to your lap. The cones are set up to form slaloms and create extremely tight corners, making them excellent ways to test a car's handling and stability.
• Patchwork Map:
  • The first Horizon's Colorado has hills and mountains next to fields and farmland next to deserts and mesas.
  • Horizon 3 features a rainforest next to the fertile Yarra Valley, which in turn is next to the outback. If you look off into the distance, you can also spot snow-capped mountains. Truth in Television for once, although the Space Compression exaggerates it to an extent.
  • Horizon 5's rendition of Mexico features eleven different biomes, ranging from jungles, rainforests, beaches, and hills, all the way to canyons, deserts, and a snow-capped Popocatepetl. Again, this is Truth in Television mixed with slight exaggeration due to Space Compression.
  • Averted with Horizon 2 and 4, which take place in entirely in Mediterranean and Oceanic climates, respectively.
• Peninsula of Power Leveling: In Horizon 4, players could earn influence (the game's equivalent of XP points) by streaming or watching the game on Mixer. It didn't take long for players to abuse this system by hosting 24/7 streams of the game on Mixer to easily farm influence without playing the game. As Mixer has been shut down, this is not possible anymore, though.
• Perfect Play A.I.: Because of the way the Drivatar system works (that is it inherits cars driven by other players and assigns an AI to them), be prepared to encounter opponents in Horizon that have flawless grip and insane acceleration off the line. They still match your PI but they can be ridiculously hard to beat (and nigh-on impossible depending on the event).
• Photo Mode: Included in all games since Motorsport 2. The games let you take pictures (adjusting focus, aperture, all that jazz) in-game and upload them to the Forza website to download. Motorsport 4 introduced the Big Shot, which lets you take massive 4K resolution shots, then upload them directly to your Forza website profile in all their 30+ megabyte BMP glory. The Big Shot was also used in the first Horizon.
• Play Every Day:
  • Or rather every weekend. The Forzathon events in Horizon 3 are week-specific challenges that are held over the weekend where you can win things like extra XP, credits, Wheelspins, or even bonus cars for completing certain tasks (such as three-starring a specific Danger Sign jump). The cars particularly encourage you to participate in these events as much as possible as once the event ends you either have to get it through the Auction House or hope it turns up again during another Forzathon. Occasionally these are also held in smaller timeframes during the week as well so you're encouraged to sign on regularly.
  • Horizon 4 expands on the Forzathon concept, introducing daily and hourly tasks along with bringing the weeklies back. Exclusive cars, however, appear on a weekly basis instead of just the weekends, and the obtainable cars per week are rotating, so if you lose the chance of obtaining a car, you'll have more opportunities in the future.
• Primal Fear: Better get over that fear of falling hundreds of feet, sealed inside a car, into the open ocean because it's a constant presence in the Hot Wheels expansion of Forza Horizon 3.
• Production Foreshadowing: The last car to be added to Horizon 4 is the Mexican-built VUHL 05RR, a nod to the setting of 5.
• Production Throwback: The goal of earning fans by winning races and completing stunts in Horizon 3 is an idea straight from Blur, a game with which Playground Games inherited many of its developers from.
• Product Placement:
  • Obviously parts, fuel and tire companies are advertised, however Forza has been supported by several manufacturers over the years and have had numerous free car packs. Motorsport 2 was supported by Nissan. Motorsport 3 and Motorsport 4 were backed by Hyundai, with the free pack in each game normally having an upcoming model and a racing variant along with it. Motorsport 4 was closely linked with BMW, and the new Viper. Horizon 2 had a free car pack to promote the 2016 Mazda MX-5.
  • Also, every second expansion of the Horizon sequels are this as a cross-promotion, with Horizon 2 having a Porsche expansion and a Fast & Furious standalone expansion, Horizon 3 having a Hot Wheels expansion, and Horizon 4 getting a LEGO expansion.
  • Horizon 4 promotes that the Horizon Festival is (or was, considering it's unavailable) streamed through Microsoft's former streaming service Mixer.
• Pseudolympics: Season 4 in Horizon 5, occurring in February 2022 and coinciding with the 2022 Winter Olympics, is themed around a "Horizon World Cup". This sees the seasonal challenges revolve around using cars from six countries (USA, Germany, UK, Japan, Italy and France), with player preferences being tracked and a bonus at the end being granted to the most popular country.
• Pun: There's a challenge in Horizon 2 called "Train in Vain" where you race against a train. Guess what song plays during that challenge.
• Racing the Train: The Horizon series has commonly used this trope as one of their Showcase events.
  • This began in Horizon 2, where the player had to win a race against a freight train using, depending on whether they're playing the Xbox 360 or Xbox One versions, a Chevrolet Corvette or a Lancia Fulvia, respectively.
  • Horizon 3 once again sees the player racing a freight train, this time using a Chevrolet Camaro.
  • In Horizon 4, this Showcase event tasked you to race an Ariel Nomad against the legendary Flying Scotsman. The remixed version, "Nine and Three Quarters", puts you in a tuned Ford Anglia.
  • Horizon 5 would once again pit the player against a freight train, except this time, the train would occasionally detach its cargo to gain more speed. To compete against this, you're given a Lamborghini Countach.
• Ramp Jump: Horizon 3 adds these as PR Stunts. Lampshaded in that the ramps are marked with bright conspicuous flags as a safety measure.
• Real Life Writes the Plot:
  • During Autovista, Clarkson will every now and then address his own opinions on the car - for better or worse. A good example would be his take on the Ferrari F50.
  • Horizon may let you find one of only six Shelby Daytona Coupes rusting away in a barn, but don't think for a second you can actually buy a concept car. Instead, they're now unicorn cars.
• Reality Is Unrealistic:
  • One of the complaints a few reviewers had about early titles in the series was that some of the cars did not sound like they would in real life. However, those cars sound exactly like they do in real-life. The audio engineers even went and sampled the individual components of those cars' engines on electric motors so they could fine tune individual engine noises as players modified their vehicles. However, this is not necessarily how those vehicles sound in Hollywood films.
  • Every game allows racing front splitters and wings to installed to most cars, regardless of how rare and/or unlikely the car would be.
  • In most games, the prices of the cars don't seemingly match their performance. This is because Forza prices each car based on its real-life value, not its raw performance. Hence why many classics that are statistically nothing special have huge price tags - in reality the Mercedes 300SLR, Auto Union D-Type, or the Ferrari 250 series are worth millions.
• Recycled In Space: The basic game engine, modification system and car models from 4 are re-used in Horizon, only in an Coloradan open-world setting.
• Recycled Soundtrack: "We've Had Enough" by the Alkaline Trio appears in both Motorsport 3 and Horizon 3. Also, "The Trials" from Halo is on both Horizon 3 and Horizon 4.
• Rice Burner:
  • Some people do up their cars like this.
  • Painting and selling cars was such a major part of the Motorsport 2 community that it got turned into an entire section of the game in Motorsport 3, complete with leaderboards.
• RPG Elements: Like its inspiration, the series is basically RPG with cars:
  • Each race in career mode gives you experience as well as money. At certain levels you are gifted what should be an appropriate car...
  • The third and fourth Motorsport games also have manufacturer levels, which give cash and increasing discounts on aftermarket parts. In the fourth Motorsport game, you can (eventually) get all manufacturer upgrades for free!
  • Exaggerated in Horizon 4: Horizon Life grants you experience for everything where progress can be tracked, be it racing through any discipline, rivals, online adventure, the Eliminator, maxing out PR stunts, completing stories/businesses, taking photos or creating liveries, tunes. Some cars are locked until you reach a certain level on a discipline.
  • Motorsport (2023) will have individual levels for each individual car in your garage, and upgrades are restricted to the level of a given car.
• Rule of Seven: Horizon 4 does this with the Series 30 update: the main feature is the "Super7" expansion, which has two new reward cars: The Austin Seven and the Triumph TR7. The update also brings seven new cars: at first Playground announced on their monthly livestream six of them (the seasonal rewards and the two cars mentioned before). The last one? It's the Quadra V-Tech from Cyberpunk 2077, with emphasis on the last two digits.
• Samus Is a Girl: Motorsport 7 reveals that M. Rossi's first name is 'Maria'. Although she had a generic male model in Horizon, her gender had otherwise never been mentioned.
• Scenery Porn: The Fujimi-Kaido track in Motorsport 3; cliff faces, rivers, waterfalls, and none of this is in the skybox. You can actually look alongside the track and see some rapids with water flowing over them. They even put in a small scenic overlook so you could stop and gawk at it all.
  • Forza Motorsport 4. Bernese Alps. Whoa.
  • Forza Horizon 1's rendition of Colorado. Beautiful mountain vistas, desert roads, and all the fireworks above the Horizon Festival at the center of the map lead to a whole lot of Scenery Porn.
  • Motorsport 5 has pretty much this trope all over the freaking place. Prague? Bernese Alps? Yas Marina? Le Mans? Oh yes.
  • Horizon 2's Xbox One version is shaping up to have the best graphics seen so far in the series, with its amazing rendition of the French Riviera and Tuscany. Just look at the E3 trailer!
  • While there's no denying that Horizon 3's rendition of Australia is outright majestic, with the coastline, Surfers Paradise, the Outback and the forests, special mention goes to the sky, continuously recorded in location with a 12K camera.
• Scunthorpe Problem: Rigidly enforced by the Xbox Live language filter.
  • The storefront will block out any searches for obscenities, as well as come down hard on anybody who dares post pornographic designs and vinyl groups as well as ones bearing a Nazi resemblance. However, the system refuses to acknowledge the word 'Honda' as anything but a nasty curse word.
  • The games can be spotty at best when trying to download or upload content with it sometimes triggering a problem and sometimes the same, Internet safe wording getting through. It gets worse if you try and upload something, if the game catches something amiss It will call you out on it.
• Seasonal Baggage: The four seasons become a major part of Horizon 4, in which they cycle every real-life week. In addition to the visual differences, the four seasons also have some subtle and not-so-subtle effects on gameplay. For example, Rivers will be frozen in Winter, fast-flowing in Spring and shallow in Summer. Seasons return in Horizon 5, but in a more subdued manner that takes the more varied landscapes into account.
• Sequel Escalation: The Horizon series ups the ante with each installment. In the first Horizon, you're just a driver, the Horizon festival has just one site. In Horizon 2, you're a distinguished individual, the festival takes place in southern Europe, and there are multiple sites. In Horizon 3 you are in charge of the Horizon festival, rather than being a participant like in the last two games, and the expansions take you to a snow-covered region and a set of islands with Hot Wheels tracks built all over them. Horizon 4 makes you a rookie once more, but now the game is all about the Horizon Life, introducing seasons, character customization, and purchasable properties. Horizon 5 picks up from where you left off in 4 but now also includes expeditions, a further fleshed-out creator suite and a much more hectic game world with regional weather conditions and more multiplayer events.
• Shout-Out:
  • One of the opponents you encounter through the series is M. Rossi. Does that sound familiar to you? (before Motorsport 7, that is)
  • The "Out of Time" achievement in Motorsport 4 is to reach 88 miles per hour in a DeLorean.
  • The loading screen for Drift events has a white-and-black Toyota AE86 drifting through a corner.
    • In Horizon 4, the purchasable skills for the AE86 references a lot of Initial D memes, from "Hachi-roku" to "Eurobeat Intensifies" and "Nani?!". Moreover, you can install a set of yellow foglights to it. In Horizon 5, Jaimin will give a shout-out to Initial D fans after you earn an accolade that requires you to earn several Ultimate Drift skills with the AE86. The name of the accolade in question is also called "My Initial is D".
  • Buying a Ford Falcon XB will give you the "Last of the V8s" title.
    • Finding it in Horizon 3 has the game's mechanic gush over it, all but calling it the car from Mad Max. Once it's been restored, the body kit option immediately turns it into Max's Pursuit Special.
  • Where else have we seen a quiet, nameless guy, good with cars and owns a cool jacket and driving gloves other than Horizon?
  • Yet in Horizon, you can challenge the CPU drivers driving around Colorado by tailing them. Tokyo Xtreme Racer and Wangan Midnight, anyone?
  • One of the special edition Aston Martin cars is a Le Mans prototype, bearing the number of 007. As well as this, when you first find the Aston Martin DB5 in Horizon, in addition to damage from years of neglect, the car has bullet holes in it's door, and the comments made about it go exactly as far as they can without actually saying the name of it's most famous owner... Which is more amusing when the 4th sequel would feature the very same model that made it famous.
  • One of the achievements in Horizon 2 is called "The Train's in Vain". It references one of the songs in the soundtrack.
  • When listening to Bass Arena in both Horizon games, after being reminded about what station you are tuned into, you can sometimes hear someone say "All your bass are belong to us!".
  • Motorsport 5 has a rivals event and achievement for doing a 10 minute lap of the Nürburgring named "I could do that in a van!" after Sabine Schmitz's Badass Boast on Top Gear.
  • Horizon 3 has an achievement called This. Is. FORZA!
  • Another Horizon 3 achievement is titled "Tonight We Ride", which is the tagline of the 2015 Need for Speed reboot.
  • Horizon 3 has special events called Forzathon that give prizes for competing in certain kinds of events, one which was based around Halo had car horns offered with the task having a title based on something from the games. However the final task which gave the player their own Warthog is called "Looks more like a Puma".
  • The nickname feature in Horizon 3 and 4 are full of these. You have Bort, Big Boss, El Pollo Diablo, Dom and Maverick and Goose for examples.
  • In Horizon 3 the second showcase is called Freight Expectations.
  • The barn found Mini Cooper in Horizon 4 is name dropped as a stunt car that bungled the sewer chase scene in The Italian Job (1969). Similarly, another barn find is a red 1983 Audi Sport Quattro that's been shot-up - implied to be the one from BBC series Ashes to Ashes (2008).
  • One set of story missions has you helping a Gamer Chick vlogger reenact her favorite racing games, reminiscent of one specific trailer for Motorsport 6 that depicted the new Ford GT driving through various racing games in each generation of gaming.
  • Occasionally when in the lead and second place manages to overtake you they will suddenly go up to plaid speed and be completely impossible to catch, ala the cheating AI in RC Pro-Am. Expect to be pipped by this right at the end of a race where even if you can react rewinds will suddenly be switched off.
  • One of the horns added to Horizon 4 with the Fortune Island expansion is the infamous "Wololo" cry of the Priest from Age of Empires I.
  • The description for 1969 Dodge Charger R/T in Horizon says everything:
  Whether you are looking to do your best Dukes of Hazzard impression or just to burn rubber, this Mopar muscle has you covered. With plenty of jumps to find in Forza Horizon you’ll be screaming “yehaw” from the canyons to the plains.
  • Some engine swaps are implicit shout-outs, both to movie cars or real-life ones: in Horizon 4, an RB26 can be installed into a 1968 Ford Mustang 2+2, or you can slap a Ferrari 458 engine into a Toyota GT86 .
  • The Horizon 4 rendition of the Toyota Supra MkIV recovers some of the customization pieces from the FnF editions of previous games, and some of the car tree skills don't hide the influence of the franchise to the car's popularity.
  • A variant of the Flying Scotsman showcase is named Nine & Three Quarters, and the weapon of choice you are given? An old blue Ford Anglia.
  • Some of the Accolades found in Horizon 5, such as "The Holy Trinity",^note Own a 2013 McLaren P1, 2013 Ferrari LaFerrari, and a 2014 Porsche 918 Spyder "I Don't Have Cars, I Have Family",^note Own a 1969 Dodge Charger R/T, 1995 Mitsubishi Eclipse GSX, 1998 Toyota Supra RZ, 1993 Nissan Skyline GT-R V-Spec, and a 1997 Mazda RX-7 and "A Wild Challenge Card Appears!".^note Complete a Challenge Card in Freeroam
• Show Within a Show:
  • Duke Maguire hosts a series called Krash Max, which is referenced often in Horizon.
  • Horizon 4 and Horizon 5 offer players the chance to take part in shooting for a film series called Vanguard Force.
• Silliness Switch: The second expansions of Horizon 3 and Horizon 4.
  • The Hot Wheels expansion for Horizon 3. The main draw of the DLC is a Joke Level which brings on an Unexpected Gameplay Change - driving on Hot Wheels tracks is more akin to Trackmania or the Grand Theft Auto Online stunt races. Vehicle customization to min max top speed and horsepower because of the long straights and lack of traffic is heavily encouraged, and the Hot Wheels vehicles serve as Joke Characters that can be brought back into the main game. Where it really gets silly is how the presence of Thrilltopia changes the behavior of your team and radio announcers, who have always been fond of lampshades, snark and quirky behavior, but the fantastical premise of the DLC takes all of these traits into seventh gear and turns the Horizon Festival into an affectionate World of Snark.
  • The LEGO Speed Champions expansion in Horizon 4 continues this trend, taking place in a valley filled with Lego bricks, pieces, minifigures, animals, and structures, features Lego versions of three real life cars, and adds new radio station dedicated solely to playing one infamously catchy song.
• Skill Gate Cars: SUVs end up as this in Horizon, since their poor handling makes little difference when most cars are piling into the walls on every corner whilst their large size and high weight work great for ramming, commonly used at low level as well as being the best vehicles off road. However, at higher or average levels, most people in smaller cars than an SUV can duck through their inside around a corner whilst the SUV driver is incapable of doing anything about it.
• Sliding Scale of Linearity vs. Openness: The Motorsport series is a 3, while the Horizon games are a 6.
• Slippy-Slidey Ice World: The Blizzard Mountain expansion in Horizon 3 and the entirety of Horizon 4 (including its DLCs) during the winter season.
• Slo-Mo Big Air: Since the third game in the Horizon series, going off some jumps will trigger this effect. The reason why this applies to "some" jumps is because you're more likely to see this during showcases, stories and expeditions than when you're driving about in the open world. This is also disabled when playing Online in both the open world and during races.
• Socialization Bonus: Some cars (denoted as unicorns in earlier games or hard-to-find cars in later entries) can't be bought or obtained by playing through the game, and can only be obtained either by wheelspins or special events. If you want to get a certain car immediately, you can either A) wait until the next opportunity to unlock that car, or B) hope that someone decides to sell that car through the Auction House... and that you'll be able to afford it.
  • A straight example in Horizon 5's gift drop mechanic, which lets people gift cars to random players. Series 2 (in other words, Christmas) plays with this mechanic to encourage everyone to gift cars to each other: once the game's community gifts a certain amount of cars, everyone will get a Santa suit and a Peel P50. This would be repeated with Series 28 (Also Christmas), only everyone got an Aston Martin Valkyrie instead.
• Soundtrack Dissonance:
  • Subverted with the Timeless Radio, as the music can, in the right mood, fits with the action (or craziness) in Forza Horizon 3 and Forza Horizon 4. Especially when driving around or racing with classic cars, and, for the latter, "Hall of the Mountain King" turns out to be fitting for the Flying Scotsman Showcase Event.
  • "Satellite" by Starset is a melancholic and/or sad song for a light-hearted (or intense) racing game.
• Spiteful A.I.: Getting ahead in a race. Here come the drivers ahead and behind to box you in so you cannot take the lead. Getting a good drift or skill score? Here comes some traffic to make you lose it all. Just want to get to the next event? Here come some troll drivatars to grief you all over the road. It's so bad that you can pull over to collect a high skill points score and AI cars will go out of their way to make you lose it all, or you can have a smash in free roam (thus this is only done for giggles), rewind to avoid it and the cars will move to try and make you crash.
• Streamer-Friendly Mode: Horizon 4 has a "Streamer Mode" that removes all the in-game radio stations except for the Hospital Records station, prevents music from said other stations from being played as ambient background music when the radio is turned off (i.e. only Hospital Records tracks will be played as ambient background music), and also prevents any music from being played during loading segments for a race or in the post-race results screen when the radio is turned off (whereas with Streamer Mode off, shutting the radio off does not turn off the music during those segments). However, this option has to be manually re-enabled on each cold start of the game.
• Subsystem Damage: Forza splits your cars into sections; bodywork, engine, gearbox, brakes, steering and suspension. Damage to each section reduces your car's performance accordingly.
  • For instance, a shunt in the rear will damage the rear bumper and can usually be shrugged off. However, changing down a gear at too high a speed will over-rev and ruin the engine of the car, severely limiting top speed and acceleration.
  • Somewhat flawed, as many cars can be rammed by the wheel well or front quarter panels, but will be registered as direct hits to the front bumper, despite there being no damage done to it.
  • Some DLC cars, presumably due to rushed programming to get the car pack ready in time, take this even further; the driver's door may be hit, but the game counts this as a ruined rear bumper.
• Suspiciously Similar Substitute: RUF to Porsche in Forza Motorsport 4. Whilst initially seen as a Replacement Scrappy, RUF is one of few manufacturers to be fully sponsored through the game, as shown by the various billboards with the RUF logo. Even with the arrival of the Porsche expansion pack, the developers still add to RUF's car selection with their more famous cars such as the CTR "Yellowbird" as downloadable content.
  • The inclusion of both Porsche and RUF makes it only the second game in history - the first being Test Drive II: The Duel - to feature both manufacturers. The reintroduction of Porsche in Horizon 2 makes it the third game to do so.
  • The first game had the Blue Mountains course. It was an exact replica of Australia's Bathurst circuit, albeit with more lush scenery.
  • When Toyotas were absent from the franchise, the BMW Z4 '19 and the Subaru BRZ were seen as substitutes of the 2020 Toyota GR Supra and the Toyota GT86, respectively.
  • Unlike previous games, Horizon 4 does not feature any Rolls-Royce vehicles. However, Series 26 brought the 1991 Bentley Turbo R, which can also be seen as a performance variant of the RR Silver Spirit
• The Taxi: One of the Horizon Stories in Horizon 4 sees you drive British black taxis for a woman named Isha.
• Technology Porn: The Autovista mode in Motorsport 4 and Forzavista mode in Motorsport 5 is this.
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: According to Jeremy Clarkson's Autovista for the Mercedes McLaren SLR the designers couldn't even agree what the car sounded like. (The Germans say it's like a Messerschmitt, the Brits said it is like Spitfire.)
  • This is pretty much taken exactly from the review he did of the car on Top Gear, but without the additional [paraphrased] line of: "Personally, I think it sounds like the God of Thunder... Gargling with nails!"
• Teleport Spam: A non-intentional, hilarious side effect of players joining with terrible connections. Cars with poor connections will start phase-shifting across the track wildly, suddenly appearing in the sky, partially submerged in the ground, or inside someone's car.
• Temporary Online Content: When a game reaches end-of-life status, which occurs exactly 4 years after each release, the ability to buy the game, as well as its DLC, on the Microsoft Store is removed.
  • The paid "Fast Travel Anywhere" feature in Horizon 1, due to it being unlocked via tokens (on a per-save basis) rather than via a permanent paid DLC, is completely unavailable to any save games created after the game reached end-of-life status in late September 2016, which removed the ability to purchase the game, its DLC, and its tokens.
  • To coincide with Porsche coming to an Xbox One Forza title (Horizon 2), albeit as DLC, two Porsche models that were last featured as part of the Porsche DLC for Motorsport 4, the 2012 911 GT2 RS and Cayenne Turbo, were gifted to all players who logged in during the first week of the DLC's release. Due to the game not having an Auction House, these two Porsche models are unobtainable to anyone who didn't log in during that specified time period. For reasons unknown, however, one pack for Horizon 2, the Playground Select Car Pack was either re-listed in late February 2022, or was never delisted in the first place.
  • Horizon 3 has a not-insignificant amount of cars locked behind Forzathon events, such as any Porsche model that's not part of the actual Porsche DLC, and even two barn find rumors that are only revealed after completing their specific Forzathon challenges. As of February 2019, the only challenges available are from the Into the Horizon event, which will expire in 2099, meaning older challenges will not be rotated in, and any cars that were locked behind said challenges are now only obtainable via the auction house, assuming someone is willing to part with their cars.
  • Horizon 4 has this with their Hard-To-Find cars: many weekly challenges, ranked adventure rewards or Forzathon Shop rotations allow you to get some cars (with one of them usually debuting) that can't be obtained in the autoshow, wheelspin, the Backstage or by leveling up in Horizon Life; after that week or seasonal rotation, you can't obtain it ^note Except with the time travel glitch, at the risk of a temporary ban. If you miss on a car, you only two hopes are that Playground let you win the car again soon, or the Auction House, where the rarer the car, the more expensive it is to get. Oh, and the list of HtF keeps growing each month since the game's launch, so it means that more than 100 cars are on rotation!
  • Both the Quartz Regalia and the Regalia Type-D have been made unobtainable outside of the auction house as of late 2022 due to licensing issues. The regular Regalia was removed as a Backstage Pass reward, and the spot on the Regalia's skill tree that previously unlocked the Type-D now instead unlocks the Toyota Supra RZ.
• Theme Music Power-Up: Horizon 3 adds the 'Skill Song' mechanic, in which random radio tracks will provide double skill points while they play.
• Time Rewind Mechanic: There's an option during the races when you make a bad maneuver that the game allows you rewind your move until a point you can make the move again. Of course, you can disable this option for more game points.
• The Rival: M. Rossi will eventually become the rival of any decent Forza player. Horizon 1 meanwhile is packed to the gills with ready-made rivals from Ramona Cravache all the way up to Darius Flynt.
• Those Wacky Nazis: The Auto Union Type D, a downloadable car in Forza Motorsport 5. It also appears in Motorsport 6 alongside Mercedes-Benz W154, another DLC Nazi race car. Motorsport 7 also adds a street-legal DLC Nazi car in form of 1939 BMW 328.
  • No Swastikas: The Nazi references were all wiped out from these cars' descriptions. Also, despite having an extensive paintjob system, the storefront will block any designs bearing Nazi-related imageries. In an indirect example, the games from Forza Motorsport 6 onwards scrub the SS branding from Chevrolet Super Sport cars, likely to remove any association with that other SS.
• Unintentionally Unwinnable:
  • When the ''Lego Speed Champions" DLC was initially released, players could auction off or even delete the Lego cars from their garage, even though there is a Brick Challenge associated with each car, and are thus required to complete them. To prevent players from locking themselves out of completing all the brick challenges, all the Lego blacklisted from the auction house and the option to delete the cars from the garage was also removed. Any players that did not re-obtain the cars they had sold off or deleted prior to this update will need to open a ticket with support and request the cars they are missing.
  • Going to Lego Valley or Fortune Island in Horizon 4 inexplicably removes the completion mark from the weekly photo challenge in the Seasonal Playlist if you already completed it. If you're outside Great Britain when the season rolls over the incomplete status stays, locking you out of 100% for that season (and thus making the entire monthlong series impossible to 100%) even if you already got up to 100% before leaving the mainland.
  • While the Horizon games from 2 and onward let you enable fuel consumption, tire wear, and simulation damage in the difficulty settings, none of the races are designed with that in mind, meaning ones that involve large jumps and/or crashing through large amounts of destructibles and street furniture can damage the engine enough to slow you down significantly while the AI drivers can speed ahead of you unfazed. One notable example is The Goliath in Horizon 5, which is so long that you're guaranteed to run out of fuel partway through the race.
• V8 Engine Noises: Apparent in both Horizon 3, Motorsport 7, and Horizon 4, due to sound recycling between similar engines as individual engines no longer have individual recordings.
  • Horizon 3 assumes that the 2014 Nissan GT-R GT500 car has a V6 engine like the GT3 car, even though the car actually has an inline-4, due to Super GT changing its regulations prior to the 2014 season mandating the use of such an engine for all entries for the GT500 class^note This is to bring it in line with the German DTM series, which ALSO had a rule change in 2014 mandating the use of turbocharged inline-4 engines, with both of these changes having been done as part of the creation of the second-generation "Class One" touring car class, with both Super GT (For its GT500 class) and DTM fielding these cars in 2019, though DTM abandoned this scheme in favor of GT3-class cars in 2021, while Super GT is expected to end the use of Class One-spec cars after the end of the 2023 season. The initial demos and E3 builds for Motorsport 7 make the same mistake, but the later demos and the final release product rectify this mistake.
  • One particular trailer for Motorsport 6, specifically the one showing the 2017 Ford GT driving through various classic racing games, has the car emit a V8 engine note, even though it's powered by a twin-turbo V6. Forza Street makes the same mistake as well. On a similar note, the Ford SVT Raptor of the same model year in Horizon 3, also emits a V8 engine note despite being powered by a twin-turbo V6.
  • All the returning Toyota models in Horizon 4 are guilty of this trope. With 5 exceptions^note Toyota Supra MkIV, Lexus LFA, Toyota Celica GT-Four RC ST185, Corolla SR5, and Celica GT, each of the returning Toyotas use an engine soundbank from a vehicle that already exists in the game^note the 2000GT shares its sounds with the Jaguar E-Type, the Celica GT-FOUR shares its sounds with the 2018 Civic Type R.. The exceptions simply re-use their engine soundbank from their previous Horizon appearance, though the LFA's bank gets a couple of touch-ups here and there and the Supra MkIV uses its own soundbank.
  • The Mercedes-AMG GT R Black Series and the 2023 Chevrolet Corvette Z06 both reuse the sound from a lower-trim model (The GT R for the former, and the E-Ray for the latter), even though both cars' respective engines has a major change to its internals, namely the use of a flat-plane crankshaft as a opposed to a cross-plane crankshaft. The former should, realistically speaking, sound closer to a turbocharged McLaren V8 engine, while the latter should sound more like a naturally-aspirated Ferrari V8.
• Vanity License Plate: Similar to the Bumper Sticker, it's very easy to create one. Horizon 3 adds actual rear license plates that can be customised. (On a side note, some cars in Horizon 3 have a New South Wales license plate that looks a lot like California's. The mentions of New South Wales are stripped from those plates in Horizon 4, however). These plates come in either US-Spec^note Narrow plates, as used in most American and JDM cars or EU-Spec^note Wider plates, as used in most European cars variants, but some cars (usually racing cars and all LEGO cars) have no license plate options available.
  • Notable mentions are that James Bond's Aston Martin DB5 is the only drivable car with a front license plate, the Evo VIII can equip both license plate styles, and the VW ID R uses a vinyl as a license plate.
• Variable Mix:
  • Forza Motorsport 5's in-game soundtrack is an orchestral soundtrack that varies to fit different situations, that is, it becomes louder and more pompous as the player performs better during races or is in close combat with other racers.
  • Forza Horizon 4's intro theme, "Sunrise" by Fred V & Grafix, is split up into four parts, which play one-by-one depending on which season is currently being previewed to the player.
• Villain with Good Publicity: Not a "villain" per se (it's a racing game, after all), but Darius Flynt in Horizon is the most self-centered and vapid of all the serious competitors you face. He is, however, an amazing driver, something the fans keep supporting.
• Virtual Paper Doll: Later Forza games give you some control over your driver's appearance. Sometimes, it's as simple as selecting their racing suit; other times it lets you pick different tops, bottoms, accessories, and more.
• The Voiceless: Until Horizon 5 came along, Horizon's player character kept their mouth shut through the entire game like in almost any other open-world racing game series.
• Wearing a Flag on Your Head: Some liveries are based entirely around nation flags - for example, a racing livery for a Lotus based on the flag of the United Kingdom.
• Weird Crossover: The Horizon series, while not as grimly realistic as the Motorsport series, is still fairly grounded in reality. So for Horizon 3's first expansion, Blizzard Mountain, it's a trip up to a snowy peak to do some racing in cold-weather conditions like blizzards and icy lakes. Seems pretty normal, yeah? The second expansion, you ask? How about life-sized Hot Wheels plastic tracks?
  • Not to be outdone, Horizon 4 tried its hand at twisting up player expectations with a LEGO-themed expansion.
  • Horizon 5 went back to Hot Wheels for its first expansion and dialed the intensity of the use of that property up to eleven.
• What a Piece of Junk: The 1946 Ford Super Deluxe Wagon which debuted in Horizon 3 and had appeared in every Horizon game since. While very pretty to look at, sporting elegant postwar styling and wood paneling made from actual wood, going off its appearance it would seem to be a heavy, sluggish behemoth that would be more suited as a family car than one for competitive racing but it is capable of doing burnouts and has a surprisingly respectable top speed of 142 km/h (88 mph) while fully stock! Its large size and heavy weight also make it very easy to drift in and give it an advantage during races that are primarily downhill.
• What the Hell, Player?: In Horizon 3's Blizzard Mountain expansion, running into snowmen (which adds 1000 skill points to your current combo in addition to the points from Wreckage) will have Warren rip into you for doing that, and to let it sink in, the smiley face on the snowman's "head" instantly turns into a frown when struck. These snowmen return during the Winter season in Horizon 4, and they too have heads that go from a smile to a frown when hit.
• Wronski Feint: If an AI car is riding on your ass and they only start to overtake you right before a turn, it'll go flying through the turn from breaking too late, often slamming into a wall. This happens frequently in multiplayer when dealing with rammers - if you see someone aiming to smash into you, just go wide at a turn and smash on the brakes, and the rammer will go flying through the turn and smash into the walls of the track.
• You All Look Familiar: Parodied with Frankie Beaumont in the first chapter of "Stunt Driver" in Horizon 4 and in the Horizon 5 Story "V10". In the former, stunt coordinator Mike Steele is less than impressed with the player, claiming that they're not that similar looking to the actor they're standing in for, Frankie Beaumont. The group then looks over at Beaumont, who has the exact same character model.
• Zip Mode: The Horizon games have a fast travel system. In the first game, you can travel to certain points, with the option to travel anywhere only unlockable with a real-money purchase (which is no longer available after the first game and its DLC's delisting in 2016). Horizon 2 and 3 let you travel anywhere by paying in-game credits, and the cost can be reduced by smashing billboards around the map. 4 and 5 further restrict this by binding fast travel to player-bought houses and festival sites unless the player purchases one specific house that allows them to fast travel anywhere.

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