The big news around DLC for Forza Horizon, however, remains the rally expansion.
“Yeah, everybody here now is totally heads down on rally,” says Fulton. “And they have been for maybe about a month or so, maybe six weeks, because obviously work finishes on Horizon in advance of it coming out. And that work really continues right the way up until December when we put the pack the pack together and release it on Xbox Live.”
“We’re trying to put together a really enthralling rally package. I think there’s an opportunity to go much deeper into that pure rally experience; that’s maybe something we didn’t have the chance to do in the broader context of Horizon itself but we identified that pure, one-car-on-a-rally-route, really intense rally experience that you can get if you go deep into rally is something that I think a lot of people are going to respond to and really look forward to.”
“Now I’m not sure of figures, right off the bat, but I know there are, I think, seven individual rallies within the pack. Each event is broken up into multiple stages so you get that stage by stage experience in each rally, and that’s really what we’re trying to do there. We’re just trying to go a little bit deeper [into that] rally experience that you get from just having one car on a really narrow, intense, undulating route.
“It’s not going to be part of the open world, because obviously we’re changing quite a lot of the world and that’s going to make synching up between people who have and don’t have the pack difficult. So instead you’re going to choose to enter the Horizon Rally Championship. That’s going to take you off into a separate mode in which you get to experience the new routes and the new terrain that we’ve built.”
To persist with the food metaphors, with a great deal of the team at Playground originally coming from Codemasters we put it to Fulton that this is the crew’s bread and butter.
“Yeah, it’s something lots of the team have done before,” laughs Fulton. “I think that’s probably why we were quite passionate about it to be this first expansion pack that we’re talking about. And also I think that rally has that quite evocative feel; there are lots of people out there who are rally fans and we felt that we could offer them something within the Horizon would that would really be worth them spending their time on.”