I have discussed the game’s shortcomings, lackings, and downright problems with my friends and other players, I have read thread after thread on both the official forums and on the Forza subreddit (both Forza and the Horizon 4 subreddits), and have read through so many customer reviews I may as well have been reading a novel. The amount of major concerns coming from this game’s player base, compared to the content of updates and official responses from the developers, is disturbing. Perhaps the developers really are EA’s Microsoft-based cousins, but I’d rather think that perhaps they just aren’t as aware of our concerns as they need to be. So, I’ve created this thread to hopefully present with sufficient depth and bring as much attention as I (and hopefully others on this forum who want to add to this) can to Turn 10, Playground Games, and Microsoft Studios. Below are concerns that I’ve seen brought up continuously across Forza-related websites/forums:
The Drivatar AI: One of the most frustrating things about this game is the AI. It has been from the start, and has improved over time, but still the AI behaves like three things: People who have never driven a car before, people whose cars are indestructible, and synchronized swimmers. The last one is the most common, the AI will all drive neatly behind each other in a line, will all know when to slow down, how much they should slow down, and how sharply they should take turns, as though each one has driven the course you’re racing on enough to know everything about it. Some of the AI will pass each other, some will occasionally slip up and wipe out, but for the most part they all drive together not like competitive drivers but like a coordinated team all trying to beat you. The second one is the second most common, and often will mix with the synchronized swimming drivers- they’ll happily slam into your side but will gracefully slip away and carry on at 120 mph without so much as tire smoke. They’ll take hefty impacts with the wall on particularly sudden and sharp turns, but they’ll drive away from it like their vehicle sustained no damage. In multiplayer, specifically on the last Trial with the Mercedes racing trucks, one of the Drivatar AI would actually try to fight the other drivers, knocking against us, trying to push us off the road. That’s the worst I’ve ever seen it and I don’t even know how the AI acted so out of bounds. And finally, the least common thankfully (yet most funny of the three), the AI who just don’t know how cars work. They will either go soaring off into the trees because they didn’t use the brakes on that turn, or they’ll swerve and jink along the road like they’re intoxicated, or they’ll just not figure out that their car is halfway off the road and driving along the dirt. Between you and me, I wouldn’t mind if you “forgot” to fix some of these behaviors, it’s hilarious. But in all seriousness, the AI drives either like they’ve never used a car, like they hate every other driver, or like they’re all ballerinas driving perfectly together.
Multiplayer: Obviously this one is always being worked on, and I’m glad there’s a constant effort to improve multiplayer, but the amount of players who either can’t maintain connections, experience lag they don’t see in other games, or whose games run fine but still have to deal with the teammates and racers who do lag out, disconnect, and otherwise have problems…is problematic. And when we the players are able to play multiplayer fine, the AI either behaves like they all have road rage or just don’t know how to drive, or the rewind function will make us slide out despite that not happening before we used the rewind, or the game won’t realize we unlocked achievements during online mode…really, I don’t have to go on with this one. You can find a whole garden of different varieties of multiplayer issues in these and other forums. It’s safe to say that not enough attention is being given to this…which will start to be a recurring theme in this thread.
The money: Something that shouldn’t be so flawed. As a VIP player, I have an enormous and unfair advantage to accruing money than regular, base-game players. Regular edition players earn significantly less than players with the VIP upgrade. This should not be a thing. It’s a subtle way of enticing people to spend real dollars on fake ones. This is the kind of thing a company so unscrupulous as EA or Bethesda would do. Players with VIP progress at a reasonable rate; I’m at 100 hours into the game and I’ve got almost all the properties, gotten all but a few of the cars I really like, and have only found myself struggling to upgrade cars to sufficient levels in the beginning of the game. I currently have 29 million credits, which sounds like a lot but isn’t enough to actually complete my vehicle bucket list, even after basically completing the game. Players without VIP take much longer to scrape up enough money to buy their favorite cars, to upgrade a C class to a solid S2, or to even be able to play around with finding their favorite customization options without spending significant portions of their credit balance. This is the most accusatory I will be in this post: This is artificial progress. This is wrong, and I and many other players are genuinely disappointed that the developers and publishers of Forza Horizon 4 would drag out players’ progression while offering them a carrot on a stick in the form of the VIP Upgrade so they spend extra cash. Give regular-edition players the same ability to earn credits as VIP Edition players.
Wheelspins: Every player has a whole novel series’ worth of stories of times they’ve been needlessly Scrooged by the laughable Wheelspin system. The balance of nearly-worthless “rewards” to actually exciting rewards is so out of proportion that it’s some kind of joke. To give a hypothetical example: I think the wheelspins have about 12 slots in them, and yet 1 of those will have a legendary item, maybe 2 will have epic items, and the remaining 9 slots will be taken up by common or “rare” rewards that are always either pocket change (give me a break, 20,000 isn’t even enough to buy an engine upgrade on most cars, and racing tires alone cost 10,000!) or junky cars that most players would rather not see in the Wheelspins. There needs to be a complete overhaul of how the rewards are structured in Wheelspins. I’ve seen plenty of wheelspins (including super wheelspins) where there isn’t even a legendary, or sometimes even epic-level item. That’s just cultivating disappointment among players and resentment toward what should be an exciting feature of the game. There needs to be at least a single legendary reward per wheelspin, and enough rare and epic rewards to balance out the amount of common-level rewards. And the monetary rewards just flat-out need increasing. It’s insulting that the lowest number of credits you can win is 10,000. That’s not even enough to significantly upgrade a car (minus tires). That’s not even half of what you usually earn in a five-minute race. We’re talking about a jackpot lottery system with million-dollar sports cars in it…and the majority of the time, players earn pennies from it. These rewards are NOT worth the experience points it took to earn one.
Sound design: Specifically, to no one’s surprise, the engine sounds. Personally, I like the engine sounds. Sometimes I find a stock Honda Civic that sounds awfully loud, or a supercar whose engine sounds like a souped-up moped, but other than that, the sounds are good…except that there’s maybe 40 or so different engine sounds in the whole game. This game has 600 cars. It makes the game very, very boring to hop into your favorite muscle cars, sports cars, and track cars only to hear the same engine sounds every time. Forza Horizon 4 has a jungle of cars, it should be just as much of an exploration, listening to each different, satisfying noises made by every car.
The clothes and emotes: This is the one feature of the game that has received the most universal and intense dislike, despisal, and downright hatred. Please. Please, please. For the love of gaming. Remove them from the Wheelspins. These silly, useless, and often-times corny items should not be included in a lottery full of cars and cash. Seeing a pair of googly-eye glasses and a T-shirt with a pizza on it both sitting next to $500,000 rewards & Shelby Daytona coupes on the Wheelspins is just dumb. It’s insulting enough that the quality of Wheelspin rewards is so inconsistent, putting CLOTHES and DANCE MOVES in it is just a slap in the face at this point. We came to this game for CARS. Not sequined top hats and the running man.
And lastly…glitches, crashes, and save corruptions: Every player knows that most games will have a few unexpected bugs and crashes, but when each major update seems to cause the game to become unplayable for so many players, it’s not unwarranted to ask why the heck this is happening. It took me two weeks of scouring official support forums, talking to Xbox employees, and just my own fiddling to get Microsoft’s Teredo and Xbox Live services to work for me. One of my friends tried every solution I did and still can’t play online. Several other friends, and many other players have been unable to get their game to start since recent updates and are either giving up on the game until another update, or outright wanting a refund. Black screens, audio cutting out, and save files becoming corrupt are a few things from the utter buffet of technical problems that this game has. A game developed with the technical capabilities of Microsoft Studios of all people should not be this buggy.
So there they are. The major problems with Horizon 4 that I’ve seen, experienced, and read about that most players agree on and also experience. Horizon 4 is almost a year old. Some of these things just shouldn’t be problems at this point. A few of these things shouldn’t have been problems in the first place. Hopefully, if the community can bring greater attention to all of this, the developers can sort this game out and give it the treatment it deserves. If you’re just another forum-goer and read through all of this, thanks. Give it a like and push it to the top as our Forza Players’ Manifesto.
