For those unfamiliar, this cloud-based software analyzes the way that your friends and other players drive in the game to create AI Drivatar representatives that appears in your races even when they're not online. Horizon 2 for the Xbox One the makes use of the Drivatar technology that debuted on Forza Motorsport 5. This one twist takes a boring but necessary element of online gaming and makes it interesting. Rather than stare at the list of names, which is now tucked into a corner of the screen, you can walk around the other players cars, check out their custom graphics, and take a look inside while you chat them up and decide what you want to do.
Horizon 2 has Car Meets, which are a blend between the ForzaVista feature of the Motorsport series and online lobbies. Historically, game lobbies were lists of other players' gamertags and ranks that you were forced to stare at while you waited for the race to start. Playground Games has even managed to fix annoying multiplayer lobbies. And because the races inhabit that same open world, most of the terrain data is already loaded by the time you get there, so the load screens that I did see were minimal and brief. Horizon 2's world is totally open, so you could drive from Nice to Montello without a single loading screen. Forza Motorsport 5 allowed me to hop around to some of the best race tracks on the planet, but asked me to sit and stare at a loading screen for minutes at a time between races. Perhaps the thing that I like best about Horizon 2 is the lack of loading screens. It's not just bigger it's also more immersive. The result is more time doing things in Horizon 2 and less time getting there.
With a lot of area to cover, it can take while to get from end to end, so Horizon 2 has the drivers take "road trips" between multiple racing hubs that are scattered across the map and where a variety of championship racing events take place, rather than asking you to head all of the way back to the central Horizon Festival Hub as in the previous game.
Horizon 2's open world features a day/night cycle, dynamic weather, and almost no loading screens. The game's dynamic day and night cycles are joined by dynamic weather - basically, it rains every now and then - that adds to the atmosphere of the game and affects the handling of the cars therein. This year's Horizon Festival takes place in the South of France, spilling over into Italy, on a sprawling map that is three times larger than the Colorado area in the first Horizon title. Anna is one of the best reasons to leave your Xbox One's Kinect plugged in. I love that I can play this game for hours and never open a single menu. The number of commands that you can give Anna are a lot more limited than Siri or Google Now - basically, you can only ask for directions to places, events, hubs, and road trip starting points - but the execution is instantaneous. Don't touch the menu button - just say "Anna, nearest event," and in seconds you'll have driving directions to the next fun thing to do. Let's say you've just finished a race and want to quickly get to the next event.
Anna is your voice-activated digital assistant. One of the most clever new additions to Forza Horizon 2 only manifests herself if you're playing on an Xbox with the Kinect sensor plugged in. Forza Horizon introduced an excellent in-game GPS navigation system that had me begging for a real-world counterpart.