Yup, and it's easier to show off cool looking close ups in screenshots than effects that show a living realistic world. Especially effects like rain/fog/water get butchered by you tube videos anyway. The coolest 'effects' in real life are fog pooling in valleys, evaporationg of rivers and lakes, clouds rolling up mountains, fine powder snow blowing accross the road. Driving up a mountain in rain, then emerging above the clouds into the sun is awesome. Seeing heavy rain speeding towards you as a wall of water in those sudden heavy summer thunderstorms always gets your heart pumping. It's probably pretty hard to make that look realistic, sometimes it doesn't look real in real life :)

Anyway you said 3x the map size in the IGN interview. Sold. That was my only complaint for the first 1. Longest point to point stretch was only a mile more than the 24h Nurburgring. The last race in FH1 was just over 10 minutes, plus the AI got stuck half of the way, never saw them again. That was the most disappointing end to a great racer. A full lap around the map race should be at least 30 minutes. Would be cool if it could be an hour like in TDU, that was epic. Or a map like Euro truck simulator, hours to drive from Italy to northern Scotland.

#4 looks like an ingame screenshot mode thats been touched up as is usual with forza games, the rest are absolutly not in game