I’ve owned, played, and generally loved every forza title since FM3 on the 360. I played the original FM on a friends xbox and fell in love with the game back then, but the mess that is fh4 has ended the honeymoon.
My first ultimate edition was fh3, zero regrets there. After fh1 and 2, fh3 was easily the high water mark for the series. Zero regrets there. But the same could be said for FM5,6 AND 7 I think. 5 was mediocre as a rushed launch title, 6 was amazing imo, and 7 was… well we all know how that launch went. I know theyve been updating 7 and making changes, but the damage is done. And fh4 is the final nail in the coffin to me for both these series. The single player content here was VERY thin compared to fh3. The multiplayer, ugh. Dont get me started.
But the biggest reason that forza horizon and motorsports titles have recently gone from a series I preorder, and play for 100s of hours, to now not knowing if I’d pay 30$ for them 6 months after release, is communication. We have Krystal on here passing feedback along to the dev team, but what has the dev team told us in 2 months? “Look over here, drift island dlc” what about the class based rivals? " Hey check out the new rims we added" will you ever do something about wall riders? “Hey guys, check out these new paint options”.
TLDR
I’ve been a serious forza fan of both series for many years, check my profile. But I’m probably done now. I dont cant justify blowing 60 or 80$ on these games anymore. The content just doesn’t live up to past games. And the features and polish just aren’t there. The passion seams to be gone.
FH2, FM6, and FH3 collectively nearly put me off Ultimate Editions. The car packs were continuously disappointing. For the first time in awhile, when FM7 came out I hadn’t preordered a Forza installment. I did break down shortly after release and get it, and not only have I had no regrets there, it ended up having my favourite car pack in the series so far. And I have no regrets about FH4, especially since it’s the most “ultimate” edition yet what with the Expansion Pass being included.
I believe the ultimate edition of fh3 also included the expansion pass. I never had a big issue with buying the ultimate editions before because I uses amazon prime and for 20% off them so I was getting a damn good price. But that deal is dead and gone, and the content doesn’t justify the price anymore. Theres huge features missing in fh4 that fh3 had. Custom championships anyone? Class based rivals? Solo adventure mode? A functional multiplayer mode?(it technically works, but its horrible) what will fh5 look like if this is the direction they’re taking the series? I dont really care to find out.
It’s good you satisfied with the game, I was too for a week or so mb until I had finished up all the solo stuff and started into what I thought would be the long run of multiplayer usage. That ended very quickly.
Ultimate Edition owners even got outraged at having to pay extra for expansions and claimed that it was misleading to call it Ultimate Edition when the Expansion Pass was not included.
Yes, it’s necessary to state FH3’s UE didn’t have the Expansion Pass and the whole reason we do now in FH4 was because people complained a lot.
Unfortunately, it’s as if they wanted to “balance” things somehow. The rehashed cars from FH4’s Car Pass are not bad at all, it’s just that they probably didn’t cost all that much to update, as opposed to making completely new cars from scratch. Even the Agera RS has a wrong part under the front lid which it erroneously inherited from the existing One:1 model.
And the rehashed cars’ quality (or lack thereof) does show in places. Move the camera close to the FXX’s wheels and you’ll notice the visible polygons. The Vauxhall Monaro itself, which was in the game at release, seems to have wrong proportions.
I don’t hate the game itself. I just had a long session yesterday where I raced SUVs non-stop. The lift kits in FH4 are one of the things that make me not even consider going back to FH3. There are small things all over the place that show Playground wants to do a good job. The UE issue I have is more because I paid money preordering the game and feel like having privileges next to the guy who just subs to the Game Pass.
No, it did not. An expansion pass did come out, which was a first for the series I believe, but that was after the Ultimate Edition which only included the car pass and VIP (and a bonus car pack) had already released. A simple look at it and what it includes in the Microsoft Store is quick and easy proof of that:
I thought it did, but I looked it up and right you are. I can see how youd be dissatisfied with tmultimate editions of the games you pointed out too. Just the car pass, and double credits from vip dont justify 100$. I’m pretty content with the car packs in fh4 so far honestly. The bond pack, hoonigan pack, drift cars, and the weekly packs are a ton of new shiny cars to try out. I just wish I had some more content to use them in. I’m actually glad my ultimate edition doesn’t include the expansion pass now that you pointed it out. Because I sure wont be buying it unless the game is brought up to par with previous entries.
I was really excited for FH4, especially as I loved FH3 and 4 being set in Britain. Initially FH4 has felt very much like a shallow, unfocused backwards step, together with some frustrating changes. FH3 just clicked straight away for me. FM7 is fairly good in its current form, but still has some bizarre menu/ui decisions with so many after race screens, when they could have all been consolidated into one. Then there is the frustrating car homologation implementation.
However, FH4 has over time started to click a bit more for me. I’ve started to enjoy some of the business/story parts and the odd bit of the multiplayer seasonal events. I also like the new driver view brought across from FM7. I do wish they’d make the audio of the cars have some more substance to them in terms of bass and wow factor, at present it sounds flat (though the ambient sounds are great). I also think its a shame they didn’t include even a little bit of the iconic parts of London. Project Gotham Racing nailed that years ago.
Also FM7, is at least impressive in that it runs 4k, 60fps & HDR. And despite the ui and homologation irritating me, theres still a very good racing game in there.
Ive not hopped back into fm7 in many months but I do hear they’ve made lots of positive changes. It was pretty good that last time I played too, so maybe I should go check it out again.
I also agree that fh3 clicked immediately, and was engaging the whole time. I liked collecting my friends drivatars, having a crew of drivatars to caravan around with, and the sheer number of races was staggering.
Jump to today, and theyve stripped away half of the races, 90% of the rivals events, multiplayer is a rover red rover, ride my porsche along the wall bumper car bonanza with teams. I just cant force myself to enjoy that.
I just leave a mixer window open on my PC, so when I do hop on to check out the seasonal forzathon shop I at least get a bunch of wheelspins to be disappointed with lol. That takes 5 minutes, and then I’m over it for a week again. This game could be so great if the devs would get off their high horse of radio silence and TALK to us.
I preordered the ultimate edition. I wish I hadn’t. Not long since release and I’m already bored, and haven’t played in a week. I’ve even stopped mixer-farming for the past couple of weeks. I’m not interested in getting hold of the rare cars, or completing weekly/daily/seasonal challenges. The whole thing just feels a bit sterile and not very engaging. I might log in to have a look at the expansion, but there’s a very real chance I’ll just uninstall it totally and await the next decent looking game on the calendar, which is probably Cyberpunk in late 2019!
TBH it’s not that I may not “buy” another Forza… I subscribe to the Game Pass, so I’ll get the chance to play them whenever they come out even if I don’t buy the UE in the future. And then, Forza’s “number of players” keeps growing. Which makes threads like these completely redundant.
The UE has been a terrible deal so far. Worse than the VIP in FM7. Analyzing the UE itself as a product and not the game, we got shafted, since many of the cars we’ve got are cars that should’ve been shipped with the retail version of the game and for some reason (perhaps not ready in time) were added to the Car Pass. FD cars are useful to clear Drift Zones with but terrible otherwise. Bond Cars are pretty cool but many of them are rehashes of cars we already had (DB5, Z8, 2CV).
Fortune Island is gonna have to be pretty damn amazing (like, Blizzard Mountain tier) to make up for this mess. And I suspect it won’t.
I wouldn’t be surprised if we didn’t get anymore Forza’s, but rather expansions and updates. They’ve already said they don’t plan to make more Motorsport games, but simply keep working on Motorsport 7. I actually really like this idea. Instead of focusing on creating a new game, focus on adding in more tracks, cars, features etc. particularly in Motorsport, that makes more sense.
Now, the same could work for Horizon. “But what about new locations?!” Ok, hear me out.
Give us “gumball” expansions. Instead of creating a new game, give us expansions that seriously expand the map in “gumball” expansions. I think this would be so much fun. Create a story around a gumball type experience that we would fly our cars to the US, or Japan, or wherever they choose to expand to. I think this would work in an amazing way. I’d much rather see PGG focus on making the existing Horizon better than creating an entirely new game. Keep working on adding new cars, more story series, updating physics, exhaust noises etc. I’d gladly pay $60 for an expansion that includes Japan along with updates physics, cars etc. They could focus on those things instead of starting from scratch. I think it would make an overall better game and experience for us.
Somewhere in the UK there’s a PC owned by a Playground Games dev with WIP remastered versions of Colorado, France and Italy, ready for release with Microsoft’s new cloud-based streaming service due in 2025.
Ah, maybe I misunderstood what I read. I hope they go the route of just continuously updating. I’d much rather see their resources go towards giving us new tracks, and simply always improving the game instead of developing something new from scratch. There is really no need for new Motorsports games. All it ever is is a new UI and a couple features.
I think its great they continue to update as they currently do. However for FM7 it does need a new UI overhaul and I’d also like to see a far better class system implemented without the constant need for homologation. So I’d like both. Constant updates and a new one. And for FH5 I’d like a more immersive driving experience (audio overhaul) with a far more focused sense of progression. Again I think that will likely only happen with a new one.
It will be interesting to see if the next FM and FH have captured and addressed the main complaints to date.
