Blog: Progression pathways in FH6

Forza Horizon Forza Horizon 6 FH6 Discussion
, , ,
1

Meet the Three Pathways of Progression in Forza Horizon 6

Wristbands, Stamps and Horizon Play. Whether you prefer to race, explore or compete in multiplayer modes, Forza Horizon 6 has a progression path for you.

With the return of the iconic Wristband system in Forza Horizon 6, we wanted to ensure your progression felt natural and rewarding for everything you do in the game.

While the Wristbands are central to your journey through the Horizon Festival, obtaining Stamps and filling out your Collection Journal will represent all the discoveries you’ve made throughout your travels in Japan.

These progression layers are fundamental to the campaign mode we’ve built in Forza Horizon 6, however for those of you who enjoy racing or drifting in online multiplayer, or battling it out with the wider community in our selection of new and returning game modes, we also have Horizon Play, and it too features its own progression.

These live alongside the standard player levelling and prestige system you’ll recognize from our previous games, representing your overall dedication to playing Forza Horizon 6. In addition, Wheelspins also return; however, you will only be able to obtain these once you’ve qualified for the Horizon Festival. To maintain the integrity of the progression at the heart of this game, we’ve rebalanced Wheelspins, and especially Super Wheelspins, to be rarer to earn throughout playing the game and more rewarding when you do spin them.

With those details in mind, in this blog, we’re going to take a closer look at the three main types of progression paths that await you in Japan.

Wristbands

Wristbands are your ticket to be invited to new events at the Horizon Festival, and as you earn new Wristbands, you will get to participate in races with higher car class restrictions.

Official events of the Horizon Festival include Road, Dirt and Cross Country Races, each with specialized car themes, as well as Time Attack Circuits, Drag Meets, PR Stunts and Bonus Boards. To receive your first Wristband, you will need to complete the Horizon Qualifiers and the Horizon Invitational.

Remember, after a race has been completed for the first time, the Race Customizer will be unlocked for that specific event, allowing you to use any car in your garage on subsequent replays, as well as customize the experience in other ways.

Once you’ve accumulated enough progress, a new Wristband Event becomes available. These include our classic Showcase Events and new Horizon Rush obstacle challenges – you must complete them to obtain your next Wristband.

In total, there are 7 Festival Wristbands to earn in Forza Horizon 6. The Gold Wristband is the most coveted of them all, as that will allow you to enter Legend Island and compete in special new events, including our longest Goliath race yet!

Stamps

Everything you find in Japan earns you progress towards your next Stamp.

That includes things like collecting and customizing cars, photographing murals, and smashing mascots. It also means finding landmarks, joining Mei on her day tours of Japan, completing Street and Touge Races, earning additional income at the Raku-Raku food delivery job, and so much more.

Collecting Stamps for your Collection Journal unlocks Barn Find Rumors and new homes to buy around Japan. Once you’ve obtained your first Stamp, Mei will introduce you to her grandparent’s long abandoned Estate, where you can build and decorate directly in the open world to create the home of your dreams.

There are 7 Stamps to obtain in Discover Japan, and these are inspired by Japan’s rich stamp collecting history. Japan has a long-standing tradition of recording one’s journey. Collecting stamps is an extension of this culture, carrying a deeper meaning than just collecting souvenirs. It is about the joy of obtaining a physical 'proof of visit.’ The process of filling up a stamp book itself serves as a ‘visualization of memories’ – a reflection of the history and scenery encountered along the way.

For more details on how Wristbands and Stamps are at the heart of your campaign progression in Forza Horizon 6, check out this blog.

Horizon Play

The Horizon Festival is an exciting place to explore solo, and it’s even better when you’re with your friends. Whether you’re driving together on the map, racking up cooperative LINK Skills, playing through Horizon Festival and Discover Japan events in coop, participating in any of our Shared World Meetups, or building custom races together in CoLab, there are plenty of ways to enjoy Forza Horizon 6 with others by your side – including Horizon Play.

Horizon Play is our suite of game modes designed to be fun and competitive. These include The Eliminator: our open-world battle royale mode; Hide & Seek: a game of chases where the Hider must stay hidden from their opponents; Touge Showdown: two-player head-to-head championships with three races; and Spec Racing: a new mode where everyone is racing stock cars and the only differentiator is pure skill.

Horizon Play Game Modes
Horizon Play Game Modes3840×2160 1.16 MB

In addition, there are standard free-for-all Horizon Racing and Horizon Drift modes, and if you have preferences in the cars you are driving, then custom matchmaking is the place to be. In Custom Racing you get to set the car class and race type, while Custom Drifting allows you to choose the car class and drive type.

Horizon Play also introduces its own levelling system. You’ll earn XP by simply playing in Horizon Play game modes, obtaining a new Badge for every 10 ranks you achieve – up to Level 100. You’ll unlock additional Badges by completing a set number of each type of Horizon Play game mode and earning Skills.

There is also some crossover with your campaign progress too. Each Horizon Play level you achieve – up to Level 25 – grants you Horizon Festival Points towards your next Wristband. There are also additional rewards you can obtain from engaging with Horizon Play that will benefit your campaign progression.

Moreover, we’ve given Horizon Play its own Leaderboards. Series Standing Leaderboards are available for each game mode and display the top performing players for the current series. When a new Festival Playlist Series begins, these leaderboards are reset.

We can’t wait to see you all racing, drifting and battling it out for fun and fame in Horizon Play when Forza Horizon 6 Early Access begins later this week.

7 Likes
3

Superb!!! I’ll use all 3!!

4

Ok this looks… potentially… great, but I have a ton of questions.

• Is Horizon Play exclusively open matchmaking?

• if yes to the above, is there any chance these tools could come in a single player and convoy only version as well, with reduced or removed progression?

• do we get to choose the races in custom racing or are those dictated for us in all modes?

• if we do get to choose the races in some modes, can we choose EventLab creations?

I have many more, but in the interest of hopefully receiving a response, I’ll keep limited to that for now.

2 Likes
5

Do you mean open world, or open class or invites?

6

I mean can we play any of the modes exclusively with our friends (in a convoy), and/or by ourselves vs drivatars, or do these modes all have to be played with randoms?

I get that some of the modes require open matchmaking to function, I’m mostly referring to the custom racing mode.

7

With the Race Customizer, you can play those races and customize them and either play alone or invite a convoy of players.

8

Yeah but race customizer is just for single race competitions, at least that’s how you’ve presented it so far, so please correct me if I’m wrong.

I want to be able to race a multi-race championship with that same flexibility by myself or with friends only. I don’t care whether or not I receive progression for it.

1 Like
9

This sounds great, I can’t wait to try it out. :automobile:

Now we just need an updated car list!!! We’re 3 days away from early access and still don’t have a complete, official car list.

10

Ok I’ve reread this a few times, and I have to ask: Is Horizon Play just new lipstick on the same old pig?

It seems exactly as functional as the old online PvP.

I guess the Spec Racing and Touge Showdown are new, but they aren’t exactly revolutionary ideas or empowering players with expansive endgame here. It’s better than nothing, but not by a lot.

Race Customizer is also presented like it’s something new, but it’s just a rename of blueprints.

This is massively disappointing. The needle needed to move a ton when it came to endgame, but this is just handing in the same work twice with a different title and a paragraph added. Not to mention that open matchmaking PvP was not anywhere close to what needed the most attention.

Maybe there is more to come. After all, this blog post was about progression, not endgame. But endgame should have been priority #1 after the last two iterations.

2 Likes
11

End game is the island, collecting everything and doing whatever there is to do. Maybe the island gets new things after some time we don’t know. You will know something on the 15 or 19th.

1 Like
12

That’s not endgame, that’s just game. It may come at the end, but it’s still just the final unlock in an improved progression system.

It’s just 3 races, content that can be completed in a grand total of 15 minutes. It’s not that I don’t appreciate the content, but it doesn’t constitute endgame.

Endgame isn’t a perpetual supply of new content. Endgame takes the content that’s available and mixes it up in a way that makes replaying it more interesting and engaging. EventLab has a ton of potential, but is severely hampered by the fact that the curation process is horrible. and making stuff yourself is hours of work for minutes of fun. “Race Customizer” suffers from a similar issue, just less extreme, the setup time is in poor balance with the actual race time. It also doesn’t have as much potential.

This is why I continually bang the drum about custom championships. The setup time is only marginally longer than for a single race, while providing exponentially more race time. On top of that, the championship format is much more interesting, engaging, and variable, even when inputting from a static content pool. You don’t need to win every race to win the championship, and the permutations are staggering, creating a near infinite source of endgame. You add in the ability to add EventLab creations to custom championships, and the endgame potential is multiplied again.

Proper endgame fleshes out the game in dramatic fashion, and an open world racing sandbox like Forza Horizon is just begging for these endgame solutions. It would add so much power to the player and the community to keep enjoying the game and building fun, interacting with each other, and building fandom, long after the campaign has run it’s course.

Not everyone would want to engage with it, and that’s ok, but the added depth and longevity would quell that dissatisfaction that many feel towards the franchise, even for many who don’t realize this is the solution.

7 Likes
13

So Horizon Play is the new Meta Showoff that used to be Open? Will there be some kind of CoOp Championships like Tour?

4 Likes
14

Yeah, I’m super confused about the live service aspects of the game. Weekly Forzathon activities are gone, there’s no ranked mode for racing, we just level up infinitely and unlock rewards every so often? I must be missing something.

15

In the wristband races it says once completed once you can enter again in any car.So if you come 2nd,or 3rd or whatever you can manage,can you use one of your tuned garage cars to get a better result?