As Series 16 vanishes into history

 Well, not quite.

I’ve given up on online racing for the moment. I’d still like my gold badge for doing 1,000 races, but the whole process was so depressing (literally, not metaphorically) that I had to stop and don’t know whether I’ll ever bother going back.

Series 16 is effectively done. All the cars are unlocked. All the Fords were repeat screenings. The Renaults were repeat screenings, but from other Horizon games.

Series 17 has four new cars. Sorry, two. The Nissan 400Z and some antique from 1965 which is re­mi­ni­scent of the Cosmo. The other two are repeats – the Toyota MR2 GT and the Mitsubishi Galant. Until this morning, I’d only ever raced the MR2 GT once in Horizon 4. I think the Galant is a decent dirt racer, but I’d probably opt for the Subaru Legacy. Cue two types of declarations because of this: a.) hysterical fan­boys declaring how marvellous this all is; b.) hysterical fanboys demanding to know why some equally shrug­worthy cars aren’t being included.

Overall, Series 16 was a disappointment, which may stem from the departures from PGG. In other words, the series was chucked together to fill in a gap by using cars already in the game or cars from older Ho­ri­zon titles (the Renaults; I like the Renaults). And thus there were no repeats of the exclusive cars that are missing from my garage. Quick rewind…

Back in August 2022 when we were trying to get the 300 SLR, one of the weekly chal­lenges was refusing to trigger. One solution was to click on the reset button, which I did after some vacillation. What I got back was a save game that was seven months out of date. Support would not return the missing exclusives, which meant that I’ve been gradually recovering them over the past six months (and many are still missing from my garage).

And this is the main reason for me why Series 16 was rubbish. If there are exclusive Fords, I have all of them.

We were promised something big for Series 17. The car park props for Eventlab? Probably. Second expansion? Probably not.

Ah, yes, the second expansion. My ongoing guess is that the departure of Mike Brown and co. threw a spanner into those works. I don’t think it was a large spanner, but rather the spanner of transition. In the absence of anything definite, it’s the best guess I’ve got. It’s possible that there have been issues with the development of the second expansion, but this is Idle Speculation™. It all depends on how far the ex­pan­sion had got before Brown and co. departed. But early 2023 to me is the end of April (and should perhaps not be later than the end of March).

There’s also Forza Motorsport, the promotion of which may be stifling any mention of the second ex­pan­sion because Redmond wants everyone to focus on the shiny new game. There’s also that Fable game which may also have some impact on the current development of Horizon 5.

It would help if PGG were properly communicative with the rest of the community. I know from long experience that game companies tend not to be forthcoming, but it’d be nice if they said, for example, that there have been technical difficulties with the second expansion or that they’re in transition between old and new regimes (/they can’t get the staff). Instead, we have no clear idea what’s going on apart from some departures.