Festival Expansion & Upgrades
As you progress through the Horizon Festival in Forza Horizon 2, your reputation grows, and with it, the festival itself. Expanding and upgrading the festival sites is crucial for unlocking new event types, accessing more diverse car classes, and ultimately, becoming the Horizon Champion. This section details how to achieve these expansions and what benefits they bring.
Unlocking New Festival Sites
The core of festival expansion revolves around earning enough Wristbands. Each new wristband tier signifies a significant milestone in your Horizon career and directly contributes to unlocking new festival locations across Southern Europe. You'll begin at the Nice Festival and gradually open up more vibrant hubs.
- Nice Festival (Starting Location): Your journey begins here. Focus on completing initial races and challenges to earn your first few wristbands.
- Castelletto Festival: Typically unlocked after earning your Green Wristband. This picturesque coastal town offers new road racing and cross-country events.
- Sisteron Festival: Generally available once you achieve the Blue Wristband. Nestled in the mountains, Sisteron introduces more challenging off-road and rally-style events.
- Saint-Martin Festival: The final major festival site, usually unlocked with the Purple Wristband. This location often features a wider variety of high-performance events and showcases.
To unlock a new festival site, simply continue to participate in championships, complete Bucket List challenges, and engage in various activities to accumulate XP and earn new wristbands. Once a new site is available, a prompt will appear on your map, guiding you to its location for activation.
Festival Site Upgrades
Beyond simply unlocking new locations, each festival site can be upgraded to enhance its capabilities and offer additional features. These upgrades are tied to your overall progress and the number of fans you've attracted to the festival. While the game doesn't explicitly label "upgrades" in a menu, they manifest as new event types and car classes becoming available at existing locations.
How Upgrades Manifest:
- New Championship Tiers: As your wristband color improves, higher-tier championships become available at all active festival sites. For example, once you earn a new wristband, you'll often see new championship icons appear on your map at Nice, Castelletto, and Sisteron.
- Expanded Car Classes: Early in the game, you're limited to lower-performance car classes. As you progress and the festival "grows," events for A, S1, and S2 class vehicles will start to appear more frequently, and eventually, become the norm. This allows you to use your more powerful vehicles in competitive races.
- Showcase Events: These unique, often spectacular events are a direct result of festival expansion. They typically unlock after reaching specific wristband milestones and are crucial for advancing the main storyline. Keep an eye out for the distinctive Showcase icon on your map, usually located near a festival hub or a major landmark.
- Bucket List Challenges: While not a direct "upgrade" to the festival site itself, the variety and difficulty of Bucket List challenges increase as the festival expands, offering more diverse and rewarding activities across the map.
Strategy for Efficient Expansion:
- Prioritize Championships: Completing championships is the most direct way to earn XP and progress through wristband tiers. Aim for gold medals to maximize your rewards.
- Mix Event Types: Don't stick to just one type of race. Engage in road races, cross-country events, street races, and even online modes to keep your XP flowing and prevent burnout.
- Complete Bucket List Challenges: These offer quick bursts of XP and often introduce you to new areas of the map, helping to fill out your progress bar for the next wristband.
- Explore and Discover: Finding new roads, speed traps, and bonus boards also contributes to your overall XP and helps you progress towards festival expansion.
By actively participating in all aspects of the Horizon Festival, you'll naturally drive its expansion, unlocking new opportunities and cementing your legacy as the ultimate Horizon Champion.