Introducing Horizon Stories

Canonically, the Forza Horizon ride-alongs have always been one-person journeys. Just your nameless, faceless avatar of a driver careening all over the road. For all intents and purposes, the cars themselves are the protagonists of these games, not the person operating the vehincles.

For the first time ever, Forza Horizon will have passengers. In a behind-closed-doors meeting with developer Playground Games at E3, studio art director Benjamin Penrose confirmed that there will be new open-world activities in Forza Horizon 4, and one of those involves taxiing customers around as quickly as possible.

"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," Penrose said.

He continued "For example, 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."

Playground isn't shying away from the obvious inspiration. Penrose elaborated "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."

Horizon Stories sound neat on their own, but series fans should be elated at how these might vary the open-world activities. The last couple Forza Horizon titles had the same handful of things to do: Danger signs, speed traps, drift zones, bonus boards, etc. Taking some time to spiritually play Crazy Taxi seems like the exact sort of supplement Forza Horizon players will find perfectly suits this franchise.