Well, I’m not an expert on Horizon, I’ve played them all but casually compared to motorsports, you sound like you’ve a better understanding of it than I have. I can only state what my experience is from this to the last one and more especially motorsports, which had easily beatable ‘unbeatable’ AI. Again FM didn’t use hacks for the AI, and it wasn’t very good, so maybe that’s PGG’s workaround? As I said though the organic AI is far more competent in this.
To reiterate though, I personally would like unbeatable to AI to run at Alien pace. See what line choices they make, braking points, turn in and exits as it would be a real challenge and something to learn from and improve.
I’ve seen AI running fast in this, but they appear to have a huge straight line advantage and greater grip in corners. PGG have also said they’re looking in to it so there must be something not working as intended.
I agree about the challenge.
One of , if not the biggest disappointments with FM for me personally was the slow AI in FM. It promised the speed of competing against the top players in the world without the need for griefing on line. Sadly it was yet another broken promise
AI still has the same characteristics as previous games, slows down considerably on dirt and offroad turns, and when you have enough acceleration to pass them early in the race and block the racing line and their pace slows and it’s a done deal. Just their pace is generally faster.
What’s different is they now break from the racing line on turns if the player is in the way, taking the inside with their late breaking and sharp turn losing little speed. So if you are mid pack, the AI interferes with your turns. It’s an impossible turn that player cars are just not capable of. I have learned to move to the inside when braking to block them when I’m mid pack, a smoother line has no advantage then.
AI also still can have accidents such as bumping into each other or lose traction when near the player, but once they are too far, I think the calculation changes and they just become objects moving along the racing line at a certain speed with other calculations turned off.
Yes I’ve noticed the AI is quicker on road races. Especially the starts. I’ve been able to beat many times on dirt and CC. Don’t think I’ve been able to gain the time back from starting mud pack on road. That’s not to say it’s not possible as it clearly is. It was just something quite easy to do in previous games
I also wonder if the AI is more aggressive by design or just that it can’t race in close proximity I.e Bowie knife 99
The very first thing I noticed about the AI in this was they appeared to be racing each other- again you’d never see them overtaking each other in FM let alone wipe each other out
They only appear to be racing each other on corners around the player because they will split to both sides of you. AI further ahead or behind you still turns in a train, they have no process other then follow the line at a programmed speed. All the action processes only happens around and near the player.
100% this is what it is going in. There’s not a computer in anybody’s home that could process that amount of chaos at instant speeds. It’s one thing for an AI to run a perfect lap in rivals. It’s exponentially larger for 10 or so racing against each in a chaotic circumstance. Cloud will maybe one day be able to process it but realistically it’s still a way off and would be cost prohibitive at this point.
Ironically despite all I’ve said in this thread my ideal Unbeatable would be a little slower than this beatable but the player has to get everything right on their side for it to happen, not absolute perfection but somewhat close.
I don’t want something like FIFA’s Ultimate difficulty which is made intentionally to be ridiculous, even the worst team/players in those games get their stats upped to the max 99 if you were to play against them on that difficulty.
I can’t see what PG’s solution could be in a short space of time beyond simply making them artificially slower though, while I won’t claim to know coding I can only guess with how long the drivatar system’s been in the franchise now that it would be too complex and time consuming mid-game to alter their behaviour and how their difficulty is increased as you go up the levels, so a flat nerf to the values dictating the latter would be the next best solution.
So a few things here. First of all, when I used the word “impossible” then, I figured that the hyperbole was implied. To be honest I don’t pay any attention to Rivals other than for Playlist or accolade tasks. It’s just not a game mode that interests me at all. But I feel fairly safe in saying that the people setting competitive Rivals times, and someone like yourself in particular, don’t represent your average or even above-average player. You’re a very skilled driver who’s running these tracks over and over with optimized tunes to shave off those extra tenths where you can. A solid time for you may not be practically obtainable for your average player who’s just trying to complete a given Playlist task with the cars they already own. I don’t think it’s reasonable to hold the entire player base to that same standard.
There’s also a more general question of just how applicable a Rivals time is to something like your average Trial race. If you start in 7th place in a car with great launch speed, and you can manage to get clear of the AI right at the start, then you may be able to set a comparable time. I’ll assume that was the case in the screenshot you posted. But what if you get unlucky and start out in 12th, behind 5 human players of various skill levels and 6 AI players which are more likely than not drunkenly weaving all over the place? You may not be able to have that same clean getaway, no matter how good your car is. We’ve all seen over the past few games how differently the AI drives depending on whether there’s a human player in front of them or not. If you can get around them quickly, then they’ll drive much more slowly and can be picked off by your teammates more easily. But if a couple of them get a clean break, then they may wind up being uncatchably fast for most of your team, even if you yourself can still chase them down by the end.
Here’s what I do know though. The PI system is ostensibly designed to measure the overall performance of a vehicle and to provide rough comparison points between vehicles of similar types. If I start a singleplayer race in a car with a PI of 620, then I should have a reasonable expectation that all of the other 620 PI cars in that race have been balanced out to be similar to my own. Maybe some of them have a bit more acceleration or top-line speed or cornering ability, but it should be fairly close overall. Instead what I see are AI cars that are able to take impossibly tight lines through corners while maintaining unrealistically high speeds, that rocket out of corners as if they have a nitrous boost, and that somehow manage to create a 4-second gap to the field all of 30 seconds into a race. And this is all on Expert, mind you, not on Unbeatable or even Pro. Something is not right here.
Expert is definitely tougher than previous Horizon games, I’d say at least as hard as Pro in FH4 and FH5 but is beatable with fairly limited practice. In fact I’d say Expert is reasonably fair/balanced from what I have played so far but I haven’t got to the higher classes yet, its Pro and Unbeatable though where the real nonsense is even in Class C/B unless you happen to stumble upon a particularly strong car by luck. One of which is the stock Porsche 968 that is particularly good at Tokyo Railway Sprint against Pro drivatar at least.
Isn’t that ultimately the point of any game having difficulty levels though PD? For success to require more from the player as they go up? The nonsense way the difficulty is implemented in FH is something we all agree on but fundamentally even if we had fair AI tied to the same physics as us the higher difficulties should all go a pace beyond an average player should they not? Otherwise there would be no point having them.
At the end of the day the AI’s nonsense has been around for years now, we can pick it apart and say it does this and that, that’s unfair, that’s not something a human player can do etc and yeah it’s all correct, but if someone is still determined to go up against them in the knowledge of all that the only practical thing to do is take care of the things we have control over as best we can to improve our chances of overcoming the crap, as much as people are trying to do it with that stupid bowieknife stuff the AI aren’t sentient, they’re going to do their crap regardless of how the player feels about it or how much they notice it happening.
People such as the reply I got above you and likely others who’ve been reading my posts will try ignorantly twisting everything as me denying they cheat and do the absurd things, but I’m saying what any individual does before + during the races affects how often that will result in straight up impossible to win ones, as Zip’s and Bobo’s races prove it won’t completely eliminate them but on the whole the better those two things are executed by a player the more their proportion of races they win vs those where nothing can be done are likely to end up more leaning towards the former.
I’d like to think I can still be somewhat of a reference point for most players too, as kind as you were with what you said about me strip everything back and I am still really nothing more than an auto user, just seeing how far it can theoretically stretch to.
The AI in this game or any other Forza game does not use the same physics or PI system as the players, don’t really think it’s debatable and perhaps it’s too much to expect it to.
So with that in mind it’s how do the devs make a scalable, consistent AI? Simply using the AI from
Previous games won’t work as they’re using the new ‘built from the ground up’ Forza tech engine.
No idea what the answer is, but has been said it won’t be an easy fix. They certainly tried in FM and while it did improve with updates it was never really fit for purpose.
For official festival events they could use the rivals times (not cheat times) to adjust AI speed finish times to speed ranges for each difficulty, perhaps with a variability % in there to keep things interesting. There should be less of a jump to what we have now between difficulties.
They should forget about trying to match the AI grid to your cars PI, say 515 for example and go for top of class 600 as that is the restriction. So if you turn up in a stock car rated at at 515 you will get smoked Vs 600 AI grid. This will give the player an incentive to go away earn credits and then upgrade and comeback to replay and see the improvement and eventually beat the event feeling satisfied with a sense of progression from there driving and vehicle improvement. The game trying to match the grid to your car even if it’s way below the restriction limit makes no sense to me, it feels like you’re racing against yourself.
The rivals data is there to be used for every festival event so why not use it. This could have all been done in alpha and beta stages with a range of drivers of varying abilities posting times for each festival event.
I completely agree that the point of having difficulty levels is to offer more of a challenge to the player and encourage them to develop their skills further. And if we had fairly-coded AI I’d be perfectly fine with the highest difficulty levels being an extreme challenge for average drivers. But the unfortunate fact is that we don’t have fair AI right now, or even consistent AI for that matter, and it feels like the players are getting a raw deal.
Speaking of, it’s kind of shocking to me that a game released in 2026 still isn’t able to properly simulate physics for only 11 opponent cars (and as few as 6 if you’re in something like the Trial). I’m not expecting the same level of simulation fidelity that’s applied to the player car, but surely the minimum hardware requirements for the game should be able to run a simplified physics version for so few opponents. At least enough to have it recognize things like “oh hey, this car is driving through water, it should slow down a lot,” or “maybe that car shouldn’t be able to make it through this corner flat-out.” It’s bad enough that cars far away from the player seem to run on rails, but even the ones in the “bubble” around the player aren’t following the same basic rules that we are.
@DonBobo81 I like the idea of using rival times but I’m strongly against locking every event to the top of its PI class. That would mean people like me who keep all of our vehicles stock would be stuck using the same dozen or so that happen to be at the top of the class by default. I’ve always liked how the PI system allows you to show up in any level of car and ostensibly have a chance to win that race…when it works right, anyway.
Yeah I do respect your point about the running stock cars thing, (I prefer driving them stock too) but if you are trying to make a consistent decent AI model you need to minimise the variables as much as possible. Also for the festival events if you take a car stock, most of the grid will have some kind of upgrade or detunes anyway, so it’s not exactly a fair fight.
If they made some events Spec races with stock cars that would somewhat address the issue.
It’s a difficult one, and in many ways it’s quite amazing that we have a functioning AI grid at all considering all the cars from class 100 to 999, upgrade options, and different track surface types./layouts etc. You would think with all these advances in AI technologies in recent time AI models in racing games would have improved massively as a result, but I can still get better races from AI from racing games from 35 years ago.
I switched between online racing and single player yesterday and it was very hard to differentiate between the two. Absolute carnage at most corners and no-one taking any account of other cars on track. In fairness, the AI didn’t deliberately drive across the track to block me on the final straight though, which was a common theme in MP.
I guess it could be said that the AI does a good job of replicating the online experience. However, it would be far preferable if the AI was setting some standards. It’s as bad as I can recall in a Forza game for just ignoring the player car. It’s far far better in the latest FM game.
This is same with me. The AI started to become unreasonably unbeatable since FH4. I’ve been playing Forza Horizon since FH3 and I always set the difficulty to unbeatable and I could win the match quite easily with only using controller.
Then the AI became harder to beat in FH4 but I still managed to beat them in unbeatable mode half of the time. FH5 was a different story, the AI became significantly more difficult to beat even when I used the most optimal tunes—it’s like they have 300-500hp more and their driving is unreasonably perfect in every corner, not to mention you have to go through the traffic of 11 cars in front of you. Since FH5, I dropped the difficulty from Unbeatable to Expert.
Now in FH6, Expert AIs are simply unbeatable in some races like cross country—it’s crazy. I also just tried Goliath with Lamborghini Essenza vs Expert AIs, it’s almost unbeatable and requires me so many tries just to beat them. The handling is ridiculously unrealistic, snappy, counter-intuitive as well. The AIs are as bad as they come, they drove like rookie racers—crashing onto me on every corner in every chance they get, they even sometimes pit manuever me and grind my side when cornering. It’s like they don’t have a sense of safety like an expert race driver does—which they should.
At this point, the AIs are pure garbage and playing the game at expert difficulty with controller really hurts my sanity.
