Forza Horizon 4

[Famous Mortimer]

The gameplay isn't appreciably different from FH 3 or 4, though, so all these complaints could have been levelled at them too. This might be the first Horizon game you've played, but if it isn't, then I'm not sure what you expected? There are lots of series where I didn't like an earlier game so I just never bothered playing the similar-looking later ones.

[Chedney Honks]

I'm a big fan of the series and I own them all except FH5, which I'm renting through Game Pass. If you only started playing FH4 a couple of pages back, I understand why the accumulated criticisms may not resonate for you just yet.

The Horizon games are great fun to dip in and out, they look fantastic, but they're progressively shallower and structurally more cumbersome. FH5 is just what I expected, but with more performance issues than before.

It's perfect for Game Pass, nice quick bursts, transient and disposable.

[brat-sampson]

This was my first proper foray into a Horizon game, after playing 4 for maybe half an hour just to try out The Graphics after I upgraded my card a couple of years ago.

[Famous Mortimer]

I'm a big fan of the series and I own them all except FH5, which I'm renting through Game Pass. If you only started playing FH4 a couple of pages back, I understand why the accumulated criticisms may not resonate for you just yet.

Hundreds of hours on the series. Not saying I'm an expert, but I think I understand them pretty well.

The Horizon games are great fun to dip in and out, they look fantastic, but they're progressively shallower and structurally more cumbersome. FH5 is just what I expected, but with more performance issues than before.

How is 5 shallower than previous instalments? You go to a country and do lots of races and challenges. You make a stupid outfit for your driver and give them a fun victory dance. You buy every car you've ever wanted and tweak it for whatever sort of racing you like.

The "there are too many icons on the map" criticism has come up a few times. Map // filter // turn off icons (whatever the top option is). I agree there are a lot (when I'm doing a new seasonal race series, for example, I'll usually turn every non-new thing off) but it doesn't seem like a lot of work to get it looking the way you want.

[Chedney Honks]

It's great that you continue to enjoy the series as much as ever from one iteration to the next. Personally, the sparkle has worn off somewhat, for the reasons I've explained. Both of these opinions are OK. Have fun with it.

[Chollis]

It's not 'too much content' rather than 'too little structure'. There's no sense of progression, nothing at stake, no reason to improve your skill, no motivation to improve your times, nothing to see or do in hour twenty that you couldn't see or do in hour two. Doing stuff only creates more of the same stuff, like the Radiant quests in Skyrim. And if that flat layer of mulch isn't enough, then you can do the user-generated events, which offer more of the same.

The levelling system represents the series perfectly. A meaningless number goes up because people like to watch numbers go up. Your reward is to unlock perks to make the numbers go up faster. It becomes noise, like everything else. It attempts to mask the fundamental weakness of the series, in that there doesn't feel like much point to any of it, but the numbers and dramatic sound effects only highlight how superfluous it all is.

I only started playing FH4 for the first time a few days ago but a lot of this chimes with my initial impressions. I feel a bit like I'm just driving from one icon to the next, complete the race and then on to the next icon. They all seem to be exactly the same difficulty regardless of what or where it is. I don't really know why I'm doing them, do I have to do all the stages of the Cross-Country/Road/Dirt events to progress to a new Season, and is that just doing the same things again but in Autumn instead of Summer? Am I building towards a main event at the Horizon Festival or something? All seems a bit muddled. I haven't even been to look at tuning or upgrading my car because I get random new cars thrown at me all the time and none of them last very long before a new one turns up, but that might just be because I'm so early in the game. A lot of shiny numbers flashing in my face and I have no idea what any of them mean really (except the currency), what the levelling system is or how it works.

Admittedly a lot of this might just be because a) it's very early and b) i'm not paying enough attention and could do with reading up or just playing more, but I do agree that it's lacking structure and a sense of progression. Perhaps I just prefer the linear structure of the Gran Turismo-type games where you'd start off with a lil shitter, win races to get money, use that money to upgrade it or buy new wheels before you could start with the next tier of races.

[Chollis]

Also, about podium finishes. Should you finish every race 1st? Does any top 3 finish mark the event as "completed" and you just get less money/influence? I'm trying to find the right difficulty setting at the moment because I'd like to be close to the pack for the whole race, makes it a bit more interesting. At the moment I'm breezing everything but when I turned it up there was usually 1 AI driver miles out in front and I'd be finishing 2nd. Maybe that's OK.

[Wonderful Butternut]

I think any result in a race counts as completing it. Winning vs. not winning is just money/XP and progress towards accolades

Also for Seasonal Championships you need to win the championship, usually at a specific drivatar difficulty, to win the prize (almost inevitably a car) from it.

[Thursday]

It's just earn XP however you like until you do all the main "adventures" in this one. The more big spectacle one's which aren't really something you can fail anyway.

Completely get why it's the way that it is, I enjoy that it's that a way to a degree, it just doesn't leave me wanting to put dozens of hours into it.

[Zetetic]

Perhaps part of the problem is that it tries to sell itself as being built around achievement but it's far more enjoyable as a self-directed ramble through bits where you enjoy the experience itself, whether that's messing around with cars or particular types of races. Just a weird tension between what it's vocally pushing the player to do, versus the kind of play it actually facilitates. The lack of structure might not be a problem if it helped players be more comfortable with that.

I think the biggest design failing is that the player-designed stuff that's promoted by the interface is overwhelmingly dreck, designed around "guaranteed wins" for people who've rotted their minds rather than anything interesting to play. Which is a shame, because in FH4 at least, the tools and environment could combine to produce some fun and interesting races. I'm creatively barren and feel like I've been able to put together a couple.

[BeardFaceMan]

The thing that gives this game shelf-life for me is challenging your own/your friends scores/times, there's not much incentive to keep playing other than that.

Going to have to give this a break for a bit, I think. There's nothing worse than spending 10 minutes trying to conquer a speed zone challenge only for it to not pop. It's happening quite a lot too, there are lots of accolades for doing certain challenges in certain cars and most of them are not registering, doing clean lap times are not registering. I had to smash over 200 cactises in order for the season challenge of smashing 100 to pop, not to mention I still can't access the Forza shop. I'll wait until a new big update/bug fix appears before jumping back into this, I think.

[BeardFaceMan]

Well, this just got a nice big update, and it's still shit. The Forzathon shop is there now but that's about the only difference. I'm fed up with playing The Eliminator, doing a head to head race and losing because it hasn't registered I'm at the finish point, me and a guy were just sat there honking out horns at each other for 2 minutes waiting for the timer to run out as we drove in circles around the finish point. Not to mention the accolades are still not popping. Shame, I was having fun with it until I wanted to do specific things.

[Huxleys Babkins]

Some challenges are fixed, some of them are still broken. Tried to get the Forzathon points for a clean Rivals lap and it still didn't work. Did the classic sports car jump and it did. Managed to have 1 other person to do an Arcade event, but the difficulty doesn't scale so we didn't win.

Think I'm going to write off getting many of the season 1 rewards as a lost cause at this point, spend a bit more time on the offline stuff.

[Famous Mortimer]

I decided to fart about on Lego Island on FH4 for a bit, my mate in Australia wants to team up on 5 but it's a bit of a pain synchronizing times. Does seem a bit strange that pretty much from the off, none of the other racers are also driving lego cars, but so be it.

[Wonderful Butternut]

I'm not having problems with completed races or challenges registering, at least for general progression or seasonal rewards anyway. Although I'm not doing any online play at the moment. That could be the reason.

[beanheadmcginty]

That Porsche 918 they gave us for free to celebrate 20 years of Xbox is ridiculously overpowered. I can win pretty much everything with it and do all the stunts.

[BeardFaceMan]

This has actually got worse for me since the update. Can't do seasonal challenges any more, no matter what distance I get for the danger sign it always shows me as being 1m short of the objective.

[Huxleys Babkins]

This has actually got worse for me since the update. Can't do seasonal challenges any more, no matter what distance I get for the danger sign it always shows me as being 1m short of the objective.

If you're playing on console, try properly quitting the game from the guide and check for updates before relaunching. I think the "always 1m short" thing is some sort of anticheat prank thing that's triggered when the client version doesn't match what the server is expecting.

[BeardFaceMan]

If you're playing on console, try properly quitting the game from the guide and check for updates before relaunching. I think the "always 1m short" thing is some sort of anticheat prank thing that's triggered when the client version doesn't match what the server is expecting.

That does seem to be working now, at least. Still annoying that the car-specific accolades aren't popping, they're the ones I enjoy trying to do. It's working for me on PC now as well, I should try playing on that and see if they pop.

[Famous Mortimer]

I keep thinking I should get 5, then I think "well, I've still got the rest of Lego Island to go, and I can try and do all the FH4 challenges in an S2 car" but really I want to wait til I can get it for a decent price. Come on, bugs! Do your work for me!

[Famous Mortimer]

One of the things I've noticed from doing some of the team adventures to get certain unlocks is the rest of "your" team is more likely than not to try and ram you off the street, like they're so used to doing it in solo races, don't understand the concept of teams, or both.

[BeardFaceMan]

Yeah that's annoying, miss one checkpoint because some twat rammed you and do a rewind and that's a guaranteed last place and a quit.

Also, I saw a lot of people using the McLaren Senna for the seasonal trial this week, you're supposed to get that car as a loyalty reward for playing FH4 but I don't have it, did anyone else get it?

[Famous Mortimer]

I'm downloading FH5 as we speak, so I'll let you know. I suspect, though, that as I had 4 on Steam and am using 5 on Gamepass, that I won't get it. I did log onto 4 using my XBox account though, so you never know.

[Famous Mortimer]

I didn't get the loyalty reward either, presumably because the two different gaming platforms didn't share the information with each other.

But it looks chuffing lovely, and I think I'm going to have a lot of fun with it. Hopefully the bugs get sorted sooner rather than later.

[beanheadmcginty]

I got the loyalty Senna last week. It was quite subtle about telling me. It was just one of those little "this car has been added to your garage" prompts while I was driving along one day.

[Famous Mortimer]

Sorry - I just got it too, after completing my first race.

[BeardFaceMan]

Bugger.

I think I've done the meat of the game now so it's a bit of a pisser that so many of the accolades are bugged (not to mention the connection and AI issues). I seem to spend most of my time in loading screens now, waiting to change car, waiting to download a tune,waiting while i fast travel, waiting for races to load, feels like I do more waiting than actual playing now. I think I'll see out the season and then give it a rest until the first dlc comes out.

[Famous Mortimer]

Every now and again, after a race, the game will remember I've done a bunch of stuff and award me for stuff I did 20 minutes ago. But it's really nice to play, and no gameplay bugs so far.

[BeardFaceMan]

Yeah I've no complaints about the actual gameplay, it's a lot of fun to play, I've been playing it a lot, that's why I have most of it done (I love the one danger sign you jump off where you land and tear down the side of a mountain). The only thing I haven't got too deep into yet is the stories because it's even more loading times and unskippable cutscenes.

[Blue Jam]

Just started a Forza Horizon 5 thread:

https://www.cookdandbombd.co.uk/forums/index.php?topic=91201.0