FH6, Series 2, Week 1

It was easy enough to determine the location of the treasure chest from the picture (beach east of the spaceport).

I did the new Hokubu car meet. Don’t see the point of this feature, which seems to have been added because a few vocal sorts were mistakenly believed to speak for everyone. Clearly most players are wary of these things.

The weekly. Well, that was a little embarrassing. I’m so used to having the car that I didn’t consider that I could get it from doing the Street Runner seasonal. In truth, the Delorean’s so cheap from the Autoshow that buying it was no great bother. The tasks for the weekly were no great bother, either.

I think the Delorean was also eligible for the photo. Another stupid phrase ticked off my bucket list.

For the drag race, the target time was 21 seconds, which I just managed to do in the 911 Turbo 3.3. I’m sure some people willingly do these drag meets, but this feels like another forced engagement task on the playlist.

I managed to one-shot the Deep Forest SZ in the stock Opel Manta. Got a very good WS, but missed out on getting a Zenvo. I had to build the Manta a little to get the TB. Rubbish WS and missed out on the Jaguar XJ220.

I got a BMW M5 (2005) from doing Rivals, but otherwise rubbish from the SWS.

Luckily, I had the right sort of Mustang (GT350R in S1 class) for Touge showdown and managed to win the first two races. I think we were both in stock cars, with mine being marginally better specced than his, and my iffy driving skills being slightly better than his iffy driving skills. Actually, I wanted to win both races to avoid the tedium of doing a third one.

I dealt with Hide-and-Seek by roaming round without the faintest clue as to what I should be doing. One of my teammates caught the hider.

Street Runner seemed to be a modern-rally seasonal in that the eligible cars and their class offer almost no scope for building them. I did the first race in a stock Sierra Cosworth before upgrading the car a little, which improved its performance.

For What’s the Hatch? it was either the nose-heavy 1983 VW Golf GTi or nothing. The races had to include the Highway Circuit, which was tiresome rather than fun in a D-class car. However, I got the M-Sport Fiesta from a post-race WS.

Finally, the Trial for which I used the Renault 5 Turbo, an old favourite of mine from FH4. I was already aware that this was slow to get going, but I managed to do it twice with the same results, viz. loss-win-loss. I then tried it again after lunch, but the opening of the race was a mess, and I was forced out of a checkpoint early in the race. When I tried to restart the Trial, nothing happened, and then it happened a little longer, and I decided to do Sunflower Scramble over 15 laps against the Unbeatable drivatars partly for the practice and partly for the reward. I completely won. In fact, I took 1st well before the end of the first lap. Anyway, when I tried the Trial again, I came 1st in Sunflower (team win) and Bamboo (team loss), and came 2nd in Ine (team win). Job done.

Nonetheless, I got the feeling that some players were ramming into corners believing that they were clearing a path through the drivatars for the rest of us. Not so, children.

Drift zones

All three-starred. Someone on the forums posted a drift tune that they wanted testing. It was a bit overpowered and took a bit of skill to keep the car under control, but I managed to three-star the awkward on-road DZs. I actually rebuilt and re-tuned the car, and after many attempts managed to do the remaining dirt DZs, which in their own way are just as big a bunch of pains as Hakone Nanamagari. This is all a massive relief as I predicted it would take me years to achieve this. I’ll also predict that it’s a feat I can’t replicate.

Repeated rewards

What? This is how they thought to address FOMO?! Why couldn’t PGG have incorporated events for reward cars as permanent options on the map that once one, can’t be done again? But if I’m, say, a year late to the game, what chance do I have of getting the exclusives that have already been and gone? This was the problem with the 2017 Alpine A110 in FH4. I eventually got two of them, but I’d been playing the game for a very long time before that happened. I had to wait till all the exclusives were in the Backstage Pass before the FE DB11 became available. Ditto the Ferrari F8 or some of the Extreme E vehicles in FH5.

There are, I think, better solutions. For example, all events with cars as rewards remain live until they’ve been completed so that if someone starts playing the game next year, they won’t be wondering whether they’ll ever see this car or that one. It might make players feel a bit overwhelmed, but if they remember that they may be in this for the long term, it’s less of an issue because there will often be something for them to do when they may not feel that inspired by the rest of the game.

I’m less keen on exclusives being put in the Autoshow and simply bought. A possible proviso here would be buying the car on lay-by, which means that once you’ve earned enough credits from races (excluding wheel spins), the car is yours. If players can simply buy cars from the Autoshow, they may not feel incline to compete for them.

Perhaps the best solution is for all series to be live until they’ve been completed so that new and existing players can do the various tasks. I don’t just want exclusive cars given to me, but at the same time, I’ve paid for the content and expect to be able to acquire it.

The grind

I’ve slowly been trying to work my way through my garage, but have only got as far as the BMWs. Partly, this is a consequence of needing to do three laps of the Colossus or a lap of the Goliath which between them easily vacuum up an hour. My third race is often 15 laps of Legend Island Circuit for the sole purpose of getting a maximum amount of credits. I might be more inclined to do my usual five laps round circuit races if I felt the rewards were worth it, but they’re not.

According to my stats I’ve earned about CR40 million, but right now I have CR11 million in the bank because of the amount that I’ve spent on cars and houses. I assume that with the advent of Series 2, there will now be a completely new selection of roadside cars (actually, no; same cars as usual; I was expecting some variety). This leads me to consider buying cars and then racing them until I’ve covered the initial cost and the cost of any upgrades, while also making a decent profit or I’m just running to stand still.

It has become clear from FH6 just how important wheel spins were for making money in previous Horizon games. It’s certainly worthwhile doing HSPs because – for some reason – I typically get a wheel spin afterwards, but the amounts are all too often utterly pitiful, and so far I’ve still had too few cars.