If you’ve never played a Forza game before then you’re probably extremely confused that you can’t find a manual save option in the game’s menu.
This is because the Forza Horizon games and Forza Horizon 4 in particular care more for immersion than simple game mechanics.
However, the answer to How to save your progress and save is quite simple.
Forza Horizon 4 automatically saves your progress based on certain in-game actions you do. To force an autosave before you wish to quit simply follow these steps:
- Open your Menu Screen
- Click on Settings
- Change Difficulty settings from whatever you have currently set.
- Click Accept
- Click on Settings again
- Return Difficulty settings to what you had originally.
- Click Accept
- Go back to the Menu and Press Exit to Desktop
And voila! No more worrying about losing your progress, the game will automatically save your data if you follow the steps we’ve mentioned above.
However, if you’re still uneasy about exactly what to do we go into further detail throughout this article.
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How does Forza Horizon 4 save your progress?
Unlike many other games, Forza Horizon 4 does not provide an option to manually save your game.
Instead, the game solely utilizes an automatic save system that saves your progress after you do anything in the game.
Rather than shuffle through various save states, or save buttons, you have to revisit them over and over again. The game essentially cuts that feature out.
It just saves your progress for you when you complete a race, go inside your home, enter a different location, initiate an event, enter or exit a menu, or obtain certain achievements.
How to save your progress in Forza Horizon 4?
Although we’ve already explained everything you need to know above to save your progress and exit Forza Horizon 4, we felt it necessary to give just a little bit more detail to aid players that might still be facing some issues.
In order to save your progress in Forza Horizon 4 you must do the following:
Open your Menu screen
After you’ve completed whatever activities you wish to participate in the game you have to press Esc if you’re on PC or the Start button if you’re playing PlayStation or Xbox.
After you do so, a menu that looks similar to the image we’ve displayed above should appear.
If you remain on the Home tab of the Menu then you should have various options in the form of bubbles available for you to select.
Two of which will be critically important for this guide, are Settings and Exit to Desktop.
Click on Settings
This is pretty much self explanatory, but you can probably see a Settings option when you open the Menu. It should be one with an orange gear next to it.
You have to click on this button in order to open up the section of the Menu that we will utilize in order to save your progress in the game.
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Enter Difficulty Settings
Now comes the whacky part of this guide. You have to enter the Difficulty settings from the Settings Menu. Within this section, you will be given the option to change the difficulty of your game currently.
The automatic save system of the game works in such a way that once you change the difficulty of your game and accept it then it automatically saves your game.
In this way, we hope to change our settings to induce a save.
All you have to do is simply go to the Difficulty settings and change it from whatever you have set initially to something else.
You could change it to be easier or harder, but it does not matter. What matters is that after you’re done you’ll press Accept to initiate the autosave process.
Press Accept and Exit the game
The only thing left to do now is to Press Accept once you’ve changed your difficulty settings or Press Enter if you’re on a PC. This should prompt your game to autosave.
Once that’s complete, go ahead and revert the change you made to your difficulty settings by setting it back to what it was originally.
So if you changed it from Average difficulty to Above Average, you can go back and change it to Average once again. And once you accept the game will save your progress once more.
This will ensure that you’re still playing on the difficulty you want once you start the game again.
You can exit the game by clicking on the Exit to Desktop button on your Menu screen.
Or if you’re on Xbox then simply press the Xbox Home button and close the game’s application.
Or if you’re on the PlayStation then press the PS button and close the games application.
Why does Forza Horizon 4 not let you manually save?
There could be several reasons why the creators of Forza Horizon 4 chose to remove your ability to manually save within their games.
Perhaps most apparently would be their choice to stick with the lineage of game mechanics that they had been attempting to establish through multiple entries in their critically acclaimed series
But we believe that the reason might be due to the following:
Forza Horizon 4 is an Online game
Although this might seem obvious, but if you’ve just lost progress to an automatic save system that doesn’t work then this answer doesn’t pop up immediately.
Forza Horizon 4 is an online video game, and thus has multiple players connected to a singular server of the game whilst they play.
This means the players actions actively shape and change the world of Forza Horizon 4 that the other players interact with, and if such changes were left up to the choice of the players then we’d begin to see various exploits pop up regarding that system.
The most notable of which would be save scumming. In this form of exploit after utilizing certain resources or making certain choices in-game, players would reset their save file to a previous one.
This would either undo the negative effect of a choice that they made in-game or retrieve any resources that they used up in-game, allowing them to perpetually gain an infinite supply.
Such methods have been used in many other online games to completely break the economy, structure, and competition of those video games.
So as a preemptive measure Forza Horizon 4’s creators made sure to apply an autosave that eliminates your and others’ agency to engage in such tactics within the game.
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Manual Saves break immersion
Another reason why Forza Horizon does not like to use manual saves is that it takes away the player’s immersion in their game world.
It’s a well-known fact that the more times you force your players to stare at a menu, rather than continue the action of the game, the more likely the players are to feel like they are playing a video game rather than experiencing real racing environment.
Forza Horizon 4 prides itself on this marriage of realism and fun, and the game oozes immersion as you sink deep into the fun racing mechanics and various challenges.
However, if you had to save the game every few minutes just to ensure that you could continue to enjoy the game then that would completely break the ebb and flow of things.
This is why to preserve the immersion of the player’s experience the game opts to utilize an automatic save system that periodically saves the player’s progress without them being bothered.
And that’s all you need to know about how to save and quit your game in Forza Horizon 4. If there is anything that we might have seemed to miss then let us know in the comments.
Till next time! Ciao.