Forza Horizon 4

[Steven88]

I've bought this for my laptop, plugged in my PS4 controller which worked straight away and played for an hour on high settings without my laptop turning into a jet engine. Now i've come to realise I need to get a second SSD seeing as i'm down to 60gb free, 80gb install is ridiculous.

[Steven88]

Time flies when i'm playing this, I must have spent two hours just trying to get over a million skill points in one go from drifting and crashing into things etc. Got there once then crashed into a fucking tree so had to start again, eventually I did it. I only wanted to do it because someone on my friends list had 900k.

[Blue Jam]

Been speeding past the speed cameras yet? That's fun.

[Steven88]

Been speeding past the speed cameras yet? That's fun.

Yes i've done quite a few, i'm having to do a lot again now i've got faster cars to get 3 stars, the speed zones can be quite hard.
Trying to control the Peel P1 at 160mph is pretty amusing, I want to try modding the Reliant as well tomorrow. There is so much to do it's almost overwhelming, its the first Forza i've played since the first Horizon so it's improved a lot since then.

My laptop (plugged into a 25 inch monitor) has played it flawlessly which i'm pretty impressed with, I hope it will cope with the new game, it seems to meet the recommended specs but not the ideal specs.

[Famous Mortimer]

I was quite impressed with how tricky the "business" missions are, or how exactly they're calibrated with my skill level, as I can just about get three stars on them if I don't make a single mistake.

I've never played a Forza game online because I assume every race will have multiple expert players in it and I'll never get within a mile of them. Nice relaxing offline play is fine for me. 1981 Ford Fiesta XR2 too.

[Poobum]

Online is good for Forzathon live, that's collaborative and a good way of earning some extra points for the rarer cars. I can't remember if you have to be online to use the auction; was quite annoyed how long it took me to check that out and realize you can get all the showroom cars dirt cheap.

[Famous Mortimer]

Every now and again, there's some insanely good deal on the auction house, like some player with millions just sold a duplicate hypercar for peanuts, or whatever.But it's where I buy almost all my cars from (apart from the aforementioned Ford Fiesta, just because I wanted to play as a teenage boyracer from the 80s).

[Famous Mortimer]

Online is good for Forzathon live, that's collaborative and a good way of earning some extra points for the rarer cars. I can't remember if you have to be online to use the auction; was quite annoyed how long it took me to check that out and realize you can get all the showroom cars dirt cheap.

Forzathon Live is a good laugh, you're right. And watching the FailRace channel has forced me to get better at cornering, doing daft slides is just about alright for most races but doing a corner and catching up massively to the AI in front of you is pretty nice.

So, part 5 comes out early next month? If I can find a good deal, I might get it early, but I'll most likely wait til the first "half price, with a ton of in-game currency" deal.

[Chedney Honks]

You can get a month of Game Pass and play it for virtually nothing.

[Steven88]

Is Fortune Island worth £15?

[beanheadmcginty]

The Lego DLC is better than Fortune Island if you ask me.

[Famous Mortimer]

They're both excellent fun though, and you might be able to get a deal on them, especially as the new one is out in less than a month. $100 for the deluxe version! Bollocks to that.

[BeardFaceMan]

Yeah the dlc regularly goes on sale, you should be able to get a 2 for the price of 1 deal without too much of a wait. Getting excited for the new one, looks like it's over a 100 gig download on the xbox, should be a monster. Anyone know if 5 is on the Ultimate Pass or just the Xbox Pass? I don't know if my xbox is dying but games play and load so much quicker on my PC and I don't even have a decent one, it's older than my Xbox One.

[Steven88]

I'm in two minds on whether to buy the new game, i've done 100 hours on Forza 4 with no problems but this week it has been a complete cunt, the frame rate keeps dropping and the game is stuttering every so often. I dropped the quality down to medium and it was doing the exact same thing, fuck knows what the problem is.

[Famous Mortimer]

Depends if you're going to do online races against other people / stuff with your mates, I suppose? I presume it's something to do with their servers, as I've been getting that "can't connect to the online game, click X to play offline" thing pretty much every day this last week.

[Steven88]

Depends if you're going to do online races against other people / stuff with your mates, I suppose? I presume it's something to do with their servers, as I've been getting that "can't connect to the online game, click X to play offline" thing pretty much every day this last week.

I assumed it was my laptop acting up but it makes sense for it to be the servers, i'll try playing offline tomorrow see if it makes a difference. I had no issues whatsoever until Monday so there is no reason for it to be my laptop.

[aunt mildred]

^

There's a few things to try, make sure there's no background stuff running while playing like antivirus etc., defender is a bit shit for this if it wants to do a full scan so you could disable it before playing and enable it after as a test but play offline with wifi off if you do this test. As it's a laptop make sure the fans are unobstructed and dust free, if it's overheating it will throttle down, I would monitor the gpu/cpu temps while playing (hwinfo is good for this). Finally try different gpu drivers, if you've updated recently roll back. If you or windows hasn't updated them since it started stuttering you can rule this out.

ETA: as FM said there's a good chance it could be the servers too, so completely offline with wifi off would test this.

[Famous Mortimer]

A few more connection issues for me today, but not as many as before.

I'm up to Expert now, and winning pretty consistently, but I still feel like I've got more to learn. Watching Youtuber FailRace has got me really thinking about every corner, about positioning and all that. I've not even touched Lego Island yet either, or done any of the drag racing content (I assume you'll need to be in manual to do that, and I'm a strictly automatic racer).

Both this and FH3 have just been so much fun to play, though. My old favourite racing game was Project Gotham Racing 4, because the handling felt so good and it had an excellent learning curve for my style. FH is just the best, though.

[BeardFaceMan]

As far as I can remember you can do the drag races in automatic, that's how I roll too.

[BeardFaceMan]

Paid to get early access for FH5, it crashes every time i play it on the pc with every setting on its lowest. Pissed off about that, loading times are taking an age on the xbox.

[Wonderful Butternut]

Paid to get early access for FH5, it crashes every time i play it on the pc with every setting on its lowest. Pissed off about that, loading times are taking an age on the xbox.

Worked fine for me for the past couple of hours. It lagged a little bit in the pre-race 'cutscenes' because it's trying to hide a loading screen, but fine in actual gameplay on High settings.

However, the flatbed truck you use in VW Beetle mission has no cockpit cam, therefore I'm awarding the game 0/10.

[BeardFaceMan]

It's playing fine on my xbox, takes a while to load the game and to load races but it's otherwise ok. I was playing FH4 on my PC last week, not all the settings were the lowest and it played fine, in fact i put over a hundred hours in on the pc version, never had a problem and the load times were lightning fast compared to xbox. FH5 just doesn't want to play nice on pc for me, it loads fast, it looks and plays great but I haven't been able to get past the initial story bit without it crashing.

[aunt mildred]

It's not your PC, there's loads of reports of it crashing on PC. Looks like you've got to wait for a patch which defeats the object of paying extra for early access. If you got it from steam I would ask for a refund.

[BeardFaceMan]

Ah that is shit. Luckily I'm using the Ultimate Gamepass so no refunds needed, and at least it's playable on xbox. I have one of the first wave of Xbox One's so I think it's about to shit the bed which is why the loading times are so slow, I generally play xbox games on pc now if I can.

Edit - quite a bit not working on xbox, actually. Can't seem to stay connected to a session, the Horizon Arcade stuff isn't working, the marketplace isn't working, the Forzathon shop isn't working, not sure if this is all stuff thats only going to go live on the full release or what. When it does work it's pretty great though.

[Famous Mortimer]

Looking forward to giving it a bash (when all the teething problems have been sorted out). I was very slightly worried they were going to have your car go barreling through a favela, but it looks like they've smartly decided to avoid that.

[Huxleys Babkins]

I think you need to unlock all of the festivals to get access to Forzathons, weekly challenges, etc.

[BeardFaceMan]

I think you need to unlock all of the festivals to get access to Forzathons, weekly challenges, etc.

The Forzathon stuff is unlocked, when I click on the shop I get an error saying it can't download the content. If I try and buy the treasure map I get a marketplace error. Still having to play in solo mode too on the xbox because I can't connect to a session.

[Wonderful Butternut]

The connection to any of the multiplayer stuff is intermittently crapping out. I'll live with that early on whilst I'm playing through early storyline until I have a plentiful supply of money and cars. Presume they just didn't have their servers setup to deal with the load early on. But at this stage it's only dealing with early access players bombarding it, so it'll probably prolapse entirely on the 9th.

Still not having crashing issues on PC.

The FFB is much improved over FH4 for people with wheels, it's nearly giving me useful information on what the car is doing.

[BeardFaceMan]

Looks like the servers have finally shit the bed, they're down completely on the xbox now.

[Malcy]

Ah that is shit. Luckily I'm using the Ultimate Gamepass so no refunds needed, and at least it's playable on xbox.

What's the cost of getting early access if you already pay for UGP? I thought you had got early access by pre-ordering.