Forza Horizon 4 was one of the fifty games announced at Microsoft’s E3 2018 press conference a couple of weeks ago.  Other than the dynamic season changes and that its taking place in Great Britain, we haven’t heard too much in what we can expect when we get our hands on it on this fall.  Fans of the series know that the main crux of the series is to drive and race everywhere while unlocking new vehicles for your playground paradise.  Judging from what we’ve seen so far, Forza Horizon 4 aims to keep that signature gameplay intact.

Destructoid.com had a sit down meeting with Playground Games art director, Benjamin Penrose, where he revealed that their will be something brand new to the series:

One of the things that’s brand new is that we’ve added a feature called Horizon Stories. They’re really cool little bite-sized pieces of narrative-based gameplay that will center around certain activities involved in you owning businesses, interacting with certain people. For example, in one of them you’ll have a chance to own a taxi company. However, driving a taxi in the real-world is very different from the sort of action in Horizon games, so you can kind of imagine how that ends up. There are a whole bunch of different things like that. There’s one where you’ll also be able to be a stunt driver… We even do have a story where you take on the narratives that are associated with other racing games, and one of those is based on Crazy Taxi. You can imagine how that ends up as well.

The new feature, called Horizon Stories, is an obvious nod to other racing games, Crazy Taxi in particular.  Adding in open-world activities is an ambitious move for a racing game, but Forza Horizon 4 is the perfect game to implement this with.  Drivers already roam across a massive landscape looking for races, vintage vehicles, challenges, and stunts.  Some gamers were wary that the series would continue the same formula with nothing new to add.  However the more we hear about this game, the more its sounding like it’s taking major steps to make this the definitive racing game.

Forza Horizon 4 releases on October 2, 2018 for the Xbox One, and PC.  If you pre order the Ultimate Edition you will get Early Access a few days earlier starting on September 28.

You can check out the gameplay reveal trailer here: