Am I Missing Something?

Forza Horizon Legacy Horizon FH3 Discussion
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This may turn into a rant, so apologies in advance…

So I’ve been playing Horizon 3 for a while now and can’t help but feel disappointed by it, after all the good reviews it got I was expecting something awesome, might just be me, but something about it just feels off, almost like it was rushed, I’m not sure.

The overall driving & physics seem pretty bang on and I have fun driving around for the most part its just other things, I’ve found,

The AI for a start, they’re so stupid, they have no awareness at all that your there, you could be hammering down a road and they’ll just turn into you, then stay there, they make no attempt to move out the way. The ‘Drivatars’ are no better, they’ll be overtaking on the wrong side of the road and just hit you head on, no attempt to get out of the way or serve, nothing. If they hit an AI car or get stuck they just throw up masses of wheel spin trying to go the way they want, regardless of the fact there’s another car stuck in front of them or not.

The races (so far for me) have been terrible, I’ve played all of the Forzas on the hardest difficulty, but this one seems like it has some Need for Speed style catch up system when the difficulty level is turned up. I could be half a mile ahead on the final lap and without fail here’s second place barrelling up behind me using their Fast and Furious power gear or NOS or an extra turbo they’ve found on the side of the road, and they’ll cruise past me on the finish line shouting “too soon junior” and I’m left shouting "noooo Monicaaaaaa. It’s like your not allowed to win. I’m having to rewind and block them on the finish straight to make sure they don’t get passed, despite having a faster car. I know there’s drafting but this is a joke.

If the Drivatars aren’t driving at light speed then they’re just constantly attacking you, I never stop getting rammed out the way or pushed into a wall, it’s like playing online. I’ve never liked the Drivatar system but I’ve put up with it, this time though I find it ruins the game for me

The customisation seems to lack thought in areas, a lot of the parts are just straight from all of the other Forzas, same wheels, same body kits, same wings etc. Other than the obvious, body kits, suspension etc, there is no visual change when adding mods, every car has the same brakes when they’re upgraded. Stripping out your car doesn’t’ actually remove the interior, putting a race exhaust on your car doesn’t change the appearance.
For some reason you can put the same rally engine in every car, why? Why would I want to put a 1.6 Turbo Rally engine in a Skyline? It just makes no sense. Adding superchargers/turbos to cars doesn’t seem to have any effect on the sound of the car. I supercharged an Integra and a Charger, they sounded exactly the same, same goes for exhausts, although I did upgrade the turbos on an R33 Skyline last night and that sounded pretty cool, not sure what it sounded like stock however.

The map is small and roads seem flat and aren’t particularly exciting to drive and there’s far too much traffic. I much preferred the map in Horizon 2, at least there were a few features, docks, industrial areas, airfield, etc, to play around at. Yes, there’s an airfield in this one, but it’s mostly gravel and dirt, so no drifting round planes and through hangers, its just sliding round in the mud. Makes no sense to me. The danger warning jump things don’t really work for me, it’s almost like the physics engine doesn’t know how to make the car behave in the air, they just go kinda rigid, land at an awkward angle and then roll. Same happens on jumps in races.

The steering wheel support doesn’t feel like it works. I set up my Logitech G920 at the weekend, It’s pretty much perfect for me in Forza 6, how can it be so different in Horizon? There is zero feel through the wheel, it feel’s like there’s so much play on the wheel, the force feed back is pretty much non existent, and there’s no way of looking round the cock pit or using the horn, which actually removes the convey feature from the game and the default setting is A for clutch, and clutch pedal for handbrake, whats that all about? I find it hard to believe that this game was developed with steering wheels in mind.

I’ve already mentioned this in a previous post, but there’s nothing to do at the festival, I noticed you can now change cars in the pause menu, so other than buying a car or upgrading a car there’s no reason to visit the festival. I find myself not caring about it, the races would still be there if the festival wasn’t it’s a pointless feature of the game. The last thing I can think of right now is ANNA, she does not shut up and she drives me insane, is there a way to turn her off? I cant seem to find one.

The only thing I find entertaining on this game now is buying and upgrading cars, cruising about, if I can avoid the traffic and taking photos of my cars, so I ask again, am I missing something? I guess this is just my opinion, everyone’s entitled to one, but has anyone else had similar experiences, or want to correct me on any of this?

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Back off the throttle just as you hit a jump. Does wonders for the attitude of the car in the air.

ANNA drives me insane too. I shut her up in FH2 by turning off the Kinect; but that’s not an option this time around. Yes, for the love of God: Let us shut her up for good.

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You can turn “her” off in the audio options you know

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Cheers man, I’ll try that next time,

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No, you’re not missing anything. The Map is smaller than it was in FH2. And Australia is the flattest continent in the world. The AI issues have been around for a while now. Forza 6 had it worst where there was always 1 drivatar that just shot out ahead (by a huge margin) and could never be caught. Supposedly it was “Patched”, but it never fixed the problem and they never tried again to resolve it. The Drivatars are supposed to drive like their RL players. So yeah, most of the RL players spend their time crashing into everything. Makes sense.

Also, many of the best/weirdest/historic/infamous places to visit and travel to were left out in favor of “scenic” locations with no real value other than a photo-op.

I’m reposting what I said in another thread because I feel it has merit here as well.

Here’s a quote about the map size, which they blatantly lied about Another gamer calculated that North to South the map was 2km smaller and East to West it was 6km smaller than the FH3 map that’s 12km2 smaller:

http://www.gamespresso.com/2016/06/forza-horizon-3-will-bigger-better-predecessors/

The Wolfe Creek site would have made an awesome drift/race track.

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Wow CriticalmassZ, That’s a strong opinion! I’m assuming you live in Australia? I don’t know much about the country so I couldn’t judge whether or not they’d managed to capture it correctly. Glad I’m not the only one anyways. It confuses me to think where all the good reviews came from, I mean IGN give it 9.5. Don’t see it myself

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Nope. I’m just big into culture and geography and that extends beyond North America. Australia’s car and bike culture is huge just like the U.S. Only the Mustang never took off there. The Aussies always preferred the Falcon, but Ford and Holden (chevy) used a lot of the same big engines in the cars during the 60’s and 70’s.

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I thought that was just the sat voice, not the ANNA system itself

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correct. I cant shut her up xD

I guess im not seeing it the way you guys do. this is the first Horizon game I actually enjoy and im a motorsport guy and not a horizon guy.
I find the game delivers upon what it at was advertised for :slight_smile: (xboxone)
just my opinion.

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She does shut up completely after you finish upgrading the festivals. She says something about that, like “there are no more fans to be won”, and from that point on she keeps quiet. You can still invoke her if you want, but she no longer jumps in with suggestions.

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not correct… I completed the festivals to lvl 5 many days ago. she still tells me there are races here and there like I’m not aware. ‘‘you have a bucket list near by, should I set the route for you?’’ I answer I can do it on my own… then she keeps quit for a while :wink: but only for a while…

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Seems like ANNA annoys quite a few people then! I can put up with it if I’m honest, its the customisation visuals that annoys me the most, does this bother anyone else?

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I think the drive avatars are more worse than the ai. They dont care about rules, bump into you, are driving on the wrong side and Mess up my skillchain.
I hate the ai most in the drift Zone. Sometimes it Feels like they are intentionally spawning more and more ai cars when i am trying to complete a drift Zone. I am waiting for everyone to pass, but as soon as i Hit the First corner, there are again 3-4 ai cars on both lanes!

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People say this every Forza game and it’s nonsense. They change their lines, they pass, they share corners, they make mistakes, all in response to what the player is doing. I really don’t know what people expect them to do.

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Addressing something said above… the map is much larger than it was FH2.

It might feel smaller to somebody who hasn’t actually driven around it (seriously even the goliath circuit is a longer drive than taking the outskirts around FH2) because on the map it appears more square and less rectangular. However the zoomed out map is in fact more zoomed out than it is in FH2. I call BS on the gamer that apparently found a reliable way to “calculate” that as it’s not even close to a perfect square.

That same post also seems to have the developers confused with people who think only new and different cars can be in each game. Having old - in your words, “crappy” cars in the game, is in fact welcome to most people who don’t want to see their favorite cars they fantasized about when they were kids removed from the game because some pompous pretentious guy labels them “obsolete”.

As for the comment about the A.I., no, obviously they have awareness. Being mad that they hit you sometimes for stopping in the middle of the highway and doing burnouts doesn’t make the AI terribad, in fact I’m surprised you expected any different as there’s not much the code can do to have these cars predict player movement at this point (seriously people spout that every game and it’s cringeworthy).

“…Car culture is probably bigger than that in the US”. No, no it’s not, not even close or getting close, and now it’s hard to take your post seriously.

Nah, people who think it’s terrible aren’t the majority here, so don’t be so confident that positive reviews are unwarranted. Having much fun with this game, they captured the environment of Australia pretty well and added some nice dips and hills to climb, much more varied terrain than the last game and I love it for that.

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The map may be physically bigger but it is a lot less interesting.

ANNA is indeed annoying, as is Keira, who continues to offer me -rubbish- drivatars for my lineup, when I still haven’t been offered friends I’ve been playing a lot with and are actually at a decent level, and I still don’t actually know what my lineup does for me anyway, other than provide annoyingly challenging drivatars in races. Not that that matters, as there is no motivation to win races in this game.

Sure, FM6 went a bit far requiring top 3 in every one of its 600+ races in order to progress, especially with the AI issues early on, but here we’re the boss, and everyone is fine if we lose all the time. I did 210 championships in FH2 to get the “championship events won” statistic to 100%. In 3, I really only care to do Goliath now, and have calculated that I need to do 1,000 laps of it to earn enough credits to buy my last 29 cars, which at least is decent motivation :slight_smile:

I really hope the “expansions” expand the map but lock people out of those areas as they did in the demo, rather than making standalone areas a la Storm Island, because I feel this map needs work. The only real city being in a corner is not a good thing. I hardly ever go there because you don’t just come across it, as compared to the nice spread of towns in FH2. I would love to see more highway action - go for some deforestation! - as well as a longer airstrip that also has the nice barriers at each end, because crashing into those at top speed was part of the fun. As for new areas, mountains west of the pink lakes would be cool, and could maybe just maybe give the roads around those lakes a reason to exist. The corners of the map just seem to have more unnecessary and unused roads than they used to :frowning:

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Expansions to new parts of the map would be cool, its crying out for some more features, or places to visit. I would quite like some actual motorsport events, proper drag strips, drift events, even race tracks would be quite cool, I know that’s stepping on Forza Motorsports toe’s a bit though and horizon is all about the free roam, but the 2 would be combined. I’d much rather race on a track and still have the free roam feature as well