Constructive Feedback & Criticism

Forza Horizon Legacy Horizon FH4 Discussion
1

In the recent Forza Monthly livestream there was a call for constructive feedback & criticism for the game. I see a lot of scattered threads (most of which are quite old) providing feedback on specific features and a pinned features wishlist thread that’s not quite the right place for this, so I wanted to create this thread to try to collect some of this feedback that might not be worth putting into its own thread.

Remember to be polite and respectful in here when providing criticism and feedback (as was mentioned in the livestream, if criticism is rude then the point is often lost even if it’s otherwise good information), and if at possible try to provide some constructive ideas on how to improve things.

I’ll start off with a big one for me. I’m not a fan of the way vehicle exclusivity is handled in FH3 and FH4 (and was in FM7 prior to the car unlocking update). I understand the rationale behind it in terms of giving players something new and exciting to look forwards to each week to encourage them to play regularly, but the way it’s currently implemented with the timed exclusivity feels borderline exploitative by coercing players to log in and play for fear of being punished by being denied easy access to the vehicle with no guarantees it will ever be available again, and the myriad of problems with the AH that I won’t go into here.

Sometimes RL happens and players don’t have time to play one week or get busy with other things and forget, or they simply need a break from Forza. Worst of all, in the case of FH3 all those exclusive cars are now permanently unavailable to new players who enjoy FH4 and want to try out FH3. My understanding is that fundamentally Forza is about enjoying and appreciating cars, and this system as implemented seems to go against that design pillar by artificially limiting what cars players can enjoy.

There’s been quite a few times I’ve been on Discord and it’s disheartening to have new players come in asking how to obtain a specific car, and I feel their pain when I have to tell them that they just have to wait until the devs offer it again at some unknown point in the future, or they have to waste a bunch of time in the AH hoping to find one for sale at a reasonable price. I also have quite a few RL friends who have stopped playing since it feels way too much like work to keep up with the new cars and have moved to other games,

I’ve thought about how both the desire to give players something to look forwards to each week (I know it’s kept me playing both FH3 and FH4 a lot longer than it would have otherwise) without unfairly punishing them if they miss a week or are coming into the game later, and I think something along the lines of how spotlight cars were done in FM7 would be a good place to start.

Each week, the new car is handed out for free. After that week, it’s added to the autoshow so players are still incentivized to log in and get it for free (or maybe via some type of showcase event that uses the car and rewards it on completion), but still have a reasonable way to obtain the car later. Additionally, the events each week could be themed around the new car so players can start using and enjoying it right away instead of having to use up their game time jumping through hoops to get the car without providing a chance to really utilize it like it is now.

To handle the huge backlog of current exclusives, I would honestly just go the FM7 route and add them all to the autoshow.

For other types of exclusives like barn finds and challenge rewards, the cars could be unlocked in the autoshow once a player has satisfied the challenge requirements so they can easily get duplicates of a car they like, which right now can be nearly impossible if you happen to like a car that’s an exclusive.

Ultimately the goal here is to allow players to enjoy cars and live out the Forza fantasy, while still providing a reason for players to log in regularly and enjoy the new content.

2

I agree, GT Sport manages to retain a high number of active players without having cars locked behind short time windows. Still approx 100k players a week actively participating in online multiplayer:

https://www.kudosprime.com/gts/stats.php?stat_preset=weekly_sport_activity

I think it’s much healthier to have a game that attracts players because they enjoy playing it, rather than coercing them into playing it to maintain full access to the game’s content.

(So why am I not playing GTS instead? a) FH4 online is free on PC vs having to pay for PS+. b) GTS’s theoretical emphasis on clean driving doesn’t translate into practice, as they just can’t make the penalty system work properly.)

3

Ok gamer1000k, let’s give them a chance. any feedback of them on any point below, I will consider it a change in their behavior.

Below is more than 5 months old, last time they announced they were reading.

Bugs

  • Game Sync issue resetting progress
  • Winter tyre filter issue
  • Rewind working intermittently
  • Recording online failing with success popup
  • Instant travel blocked intermittently
  • Convoy joining online often takes many tries with disconnections
  • Cars going under the map ( rivals, stunts , …)
  • Sync issue at finish line
  • Invisible walls
  • Rewind allowing to remove obstacles

Inconsistencies

  • Downloading own designs + bug creating duplicates.
  • My designs not filtered on current car while My tunes is.
  • Creative hub not showing number of downloads for tunes
  • Proposing reporting his own tunes or liveries
  • Not possible to delete tunes/liveries from My creative hub
  • Not possible to delete rivals score.
  • Team Adventure systematically putting team of beginners to face team of veterans ( like levels 5-6 vs levels 0/1
  • Online proposing to join a mate that is in a private lobby.
  • Street races rivals with drivatars

Boring things

  • Having to quit rivals to change car
  • Online wheel spin filling garage
  • Having to quit sprint, travel back to start, start race just to redo race without losing point
  • Not possible to start a custom race/cs alone
  • Custom championship not allowing seeing ongoing championship to get in.
  • Parts tunes : No filter/sorting on rims weight

Limitations with no in game work around

  • Number of tunes: no filtering on cars with tunes, no places indicating the remains slots available, discovering error message when willing to save a tune.
  • Rivals : no weather based rivals, no global board, no filtering/indicator of platform, no filtering on car used, no filtering on difficulty level
  • No customization of weather possible on street races
  • Number of cars : more and more cars every month , online filling up garage through wheel spin
  • Rivals : missing race name on leader board thus unable to share meaningful screenshot
  • Online race : no weather condition on race finish board.
  • Impossibility to completely remove specific sounds : music, speed traps …
  • Custom radio gone
  • Difficulty level is not considered online
  • No way to differentiate 2 tunes with same parts and different fine tunes
  • No way to compare 2 fine tunes

Lost / Missing features

  • Club board : weekly score, messages etc gone from FH
  • Fair play racing promotion
  • Online, B class, 3 races road championships
  • Online, B,A,S1 dirt championships with only 3 races
  • Online , B,A,S1 free roams with 3 races
4

They need to keep things as they are right now, please don‘t add these cars to the autoshow. You already can get most of the cars just by checking the Forzathon shop.

I own 1 billion credits. There would be nothing more disappointng and underwhelming then just going to the autoshow and buying these cars with my almost unilimited amount of money. With the current system, at least you have to put some effort into getting them, no matter how rich you are.

Also the exclusive cars motivate the players to regularly play Forza and keep it alive, so PG doesn‘t have to develop a new game every 2 years. I rather have one big expanding game instead of 10 little sequential games which would drain more of my spare time then one big Forza which only requires to be played once a week.

When I realised there were exclusive cars in the game, I made a list and collected them one by one instead of complaining. And this goes out to every new player, if you‘re interested in collecting all cars from the entire game, you should be ready to devote some time into playing it. If you just want that one special car you always dreamed of, it‘s really not that hard to snipe it.

5

I’m glad for you that you enjoy the current system and I’m sorry that you interpreted that as complaining rather than constructive criticism, but you seem to have missed my point that I’m trying to brainstorm ideas on how to keep players engaged in the game (like I said before, I know more people personally who have burned out and quit playing over the weekly chores to get the exclusives than who have continued to play) and still allow players to easily enjoy the Forza fantasy of driving and enjoying their dream cars without arbitrarily denying them access to particular vehicles. I do have all the cars (I’m a collector and completionist) and I did go through the lists of exclusive cars to get the ones I didn’t have, but honestly I didn’t really enjoy the process. For the auction house, if you don’t have good internet, “sniping” (really, spamming button presses as fast as you can to repeatedly search for new listings, no precision skill involved as the term might imply) doesn’t really work, plus this is supposed to be a car game, not an auction house simulator.

Yes, collecting cars is a big part of the game too, but for a new player, just earning the credits to buy all the cars would be a large task, more than the 40 hours most games take. Players like us who have everything and mountains of credits and still play occasionally are the minority, and the change I’m proposing would still see new content each week, it’s not like those previous exclusives suddenly being available in the autoshow would affect our enjoyment at all (its not like we’re hoarding rare cars to sell for a huge markup).

I also fail to see how the current design saves you time. With this proposed change, if you miss a week (or just want to take a week off for something else), you can easily obtain the car you missed, especially if you’ve already got tons of credits. No need to waste time dealing with the auction house, or even to only play once a week, but there’s new challenges and content to keep things interesting if you do want to play.

In terms of keeping the game alive, it’s the new content (and ideally good, fun gameplay) that should be doing that, not the fact that said content is time gated so you have to play or you’ll miss out. IMHO that’s bad game design that will hurt the franchise long term (and from my own experience, has already done a lot of damage). It’s certainly removed a lot of my interest to play any more than I have to since I often feel like I have to play to get the new car rather than playing because I want to play.

6

Dude, I rather have it the way it is being handled than if they start experimenting and things go wrong. Like, never change a running system.

There are good reasons why PG went this way with FH 4 and we all benefit from that decision, even though it doesn’t seem to be the optimal solution to everyone.

7
8

GT Sport’s player numbers nearly 3 years after release show that no such tricks are needed to keep people playing.

You seem to personally want a car collecting game rather than a driving game. For a competitive driving game, which is what many players want from the game, having cars that are not readily available to all players is a terrible game mechanic. Cars are just a tool of the trade, something that you need to have to be able to do the thing you really want to do - drive in races.

I’d be interested to know how FH4 player numbers in ranked adventure compare to GT Sport’s sport mode numbers, but they don’t allow access to those numbers for FH4, as far as I’m aware.

9

When FM7 expanded on the exclusive cars gimmick of FH3 with the locked cars system, one of the cars they locked was the 2016 GT3 RS.

Yes. The GT3 RS. Locked. In a game played mostly by car enthusiasts. That’s like locking the AK47 in a shooter, or offering Scorpion as DLC in Mortal Kombat. You just don’t do that.

The person who took that decision should be fired on the spot, because they’re unfit to direct the development. If it was Alan, well, fire Alan! It was so embarassing for Forza that TORA wanted to use the car in their league but had to request permission from Turn 10 to get access to it.

Fast forward to 2020 and Playground under Ralph Fulton (who should be sent to Fable if colorful and silly is his brand of gaming) thinks locking an electric SUV and a base model Velar will make people play.

With regards to the player base, it’s worth mentioning that GT Sport revolves around its online mode. While 200k online players in GT Sport is a robust count for a racing game, the number of players in FH4’s Ranked is not really representative of the game’s success. FH4 is still one of the most played games on Xbox Live, which makes me believe that actual player count is much higher. Last year, FH4 peaked at 12 million, while GT Sport was at 9 million, with very low percentage rates for Sport Mode trophy, as your data hints at.

In addition to that, FH4 is an arcade game, with less emphasis on clean racing, so it doesn’t have a deep penalty system on the level you see in GT Sport, nor does it need one.

The problem is that FH4 is a big game and could have had a better online mode. Arcade players have nowhere else to go. NFS is dead and The Crew isn’t even a factor on Xbox. But, when Playground doesn’t even focus on the basics, it’s hard to see online racing improve. The metagame is one-dimensional as well, with heavy focus on AWD, to attract players from rival arcade series, which makes the whole thing fairly boring IMO.

10

Good example against car exclusivity … GT Sports. Wait, wasn’t GT Sports the game which excluisively had licensesed Toyota so any other racing game wasn’t allowed to use them??? No tricks you say…

Also you don’t need all exclusive cars to ‘do what your really want to do’. If you’re not into collecting cars, you can completely ignore them all and just drive how and where you want to drive. There are plenty of cars in the base game already to choose from.

Dunno how popular GT Sports is, I haven’t touched it since around 2 years now because Forza stole the show completely for me. Also I don’t like that Polyphony is forcing me to play it on the PS4.

11

That’s good decision :smiley: PC releases brought many troubles and I think it’s not worth it. Forza is now known as buggy mess which is completely new situation. Console releases were always pretty tight.

12

Two different types of exclusivity, one is platform based with license agreements keeping the content off other platforms, the other is based on using time windows to restrict content availability. Both are bad, but in the case of GT Sport if you’re willing to pay the cost of entry for the PS4 you have access to all the game’s content. With Forza, if you miss a week you flat out miss out on the content with no guaranteed way to get access to it regardless of how much you might be willing to pay (leading to the super sketchy black market scams that prey on desperate players who simply want to enjoy a particular vehicle).

In the case of Sony and GT Sport platform exclusivity it’s no different than Forza only being on MS platforms (Xbox and Windows 10 store).

13

But he said that GT Sports doesn’t need such tricks to attract players. Well, apparently it does. I also remember that in Gran Turismo 5 you didn’t have access to all cars immediately. There was a used car dealership that switched through it’s offered cars every two weeks and all of them were unique and not available in the standard car store. So if you missed out one rotation of the shop, there was no guarantee that the offered cars would appear ever again. And due to that circumstance, I’ve missed some cars. Did I complain about it? No, I just moved on because GT 5, just like Forza, offered enough other cars to drive.

Also Sony could open their own store on Windows/Linux to offer their games for PC gamers, but instead they insist you to buy their hardware unlike Micorosoft.

14

The “such tricks” was cars only being able to be obtained during specific periods of time. It doesn’t have that.

In GTS, you can compete in the FIA manufacturer series, and you don’t even have to buy the cars you race with, you get them provided when you sign with a manufacturer. Someone can buy the game today, getting on towards 3 years after launch, and compete on a level playing field against people who bought it when it was first released. They don’t even need to spend time earning credits to buy cars to race in the manufacturer series, they can just run the game up, pick a manufacturer and get started.

I don’t know why people feel the need to resort to disingenuous arguments such as GTS having cars that aren’t in other games. That has nothing to do with whether or not the game’s competitive environment is a level playing field.

Ironically, FH4 gets it right with Eliminator. People can buy FH4, start playing Eliminator, and it’s a level playing field. But it should be the same for the ranked gameplay modes.

15

If I had to bet on what big change will come in next episode I would rather bet on removal of tuning feature.

Up to me, all cars should have a price that could be much more than 20M, just a price like 50M or more depending on car so that the players have the choice, wait for the opportunity of a playlist or go for the challenge of getting those CR. Just like playlist can be “completed” either doing a lot of online or not doing any, two ways. We need two ways to get the cars, easy lucky one or bit more difficult one. Third could be buying, which is also acceptable to me as long as not associated to pay2win cars and the two other ways are available. Having cars directly without buying them, ok, but it should be rental, therefore default tune and default liveries.

16

It sounds like you’re still confusing what Forza is doing with its exclusive cars with normal game progression and platform exclusivity. Platform exclusivity is a pain for consumers, but developing a game for multiple platforms does take real time and effort. If a platform owner is bankrolling game development, they can choose whether or not its in their interest to spend the extra money to develop it to be saleable on other platforms, especially if they have to pay platform royalties (most platforms take a 30% cut). Bringing Forza to PC was a huge amount of work by MS, I’m glad they did, but FH3 at launch was pretty buggy on PC. Developing for PC is significantly more difficult than for console with all the hardware configurations that need to be supported.

In terms of opening an online store, that’s even vastly more work and expense than just porting a game and taking the 30% cut. Yes, Sony could open their own online store. But it’s disingenuous to suggest that it’s an easy task, especially since the PS4 is still selling just fine.

Anyways, back to the core topic here, if you went out and found a used copy of GT5 right now and started a new game, you could still get all the cars. You might have to spend a fair bit of time in the used car dealer due to randomness, but there’s nothing preventing you from accessing that content (and if I remember right, cars in there showed up on specific days of the week so with a guide you could still get your desired car without too much trouble). Not having all cars available up-front in a car game is pretty normal, but in most games there’s always a way to unlock them regardless of how long since launch it’s been, and even if the game is completely unsupported.

Contrast that to Forza. FH3 is still actively being sold, but due to the time gated exclusivity, those exclusive cars are simply not available to new players period and haven’t been for a long time. Given the way things are going with FH4, I fully expect that to be the fate of the excessive number of exclusive cars in this game as well (which is why I speak up about this with the hope that the devs will listen). This is the problem with how Forza is doing it. If the devs want to make players “earn” their new cars via challenges that’s fine, but to arbitrarily deny players the ability to obtain cars simply because they missed playing a week is an issue.

Another way to resolve this would be to let players go back and replay old playlists to get the rewards if they haven’t obtained them already if simply giving out cars for free each week bothers players who feel like they have to “earn” everything or it has no value (not that the current lackluster playlist challenges make me feel like I’ve really earned anything).

17

You can see the total number of ranked players (if you have a rank) at the bottom right of the ranking leaderboards. It is around 35,000 to 40,000 for FFA I think, which is much lower than it really should be…I strongly suspect that is due to a lot of players being put off by the ramming element which is still there. By way of comparison, over 200,000 had done the monthly rivals event last time I checked.

18

I think that would be comparable to GT Sport’s monthly sport mode total of 200k players. But we’d have to add up the people from all ranked modes in FH4, and that would include duplicates.

Re not needing all the cars, of course someone who wants to play the game competitively needs all the cars. It’s a basic starting point of competitive gameplay that everyone competing must have access to everything that can affect the race result. It should be their skill and decisions that affect the result, not being unable to access the cars they want to use.

Contrast with AoE II DE, for example, which is another MS / Xbox Studios game, and has time locked content BUT with the difference that nothing that affects the result of ranked gameplay is locked in this way, it’s only cosmetic items such as player icons (basically the equivalent of clothing in FH4).

One thing that WOULD be reasonable as a way of sustaining interest is to add new cars at the same rate as they have done, but just add them to the autoshow. This would give people a new car to experiment with tuning and racing each week, but everyone would always have access to the same set of cars at any given time.

19

+1

It’s so important. I care about cars and racing and don’t need much unlocking. It’s fine to have some career for unlocking but there are no careers in current games.

20

Oh boy, where do I start?

This is the second year of FH4. I still play, because the cars are fun to drive and you can explore them in many ways. But the game currently has nothing going on to make me interested. Playground’s current support model is cars, cars, cars and the situational QoL improvement, but the game needs much more than that.

I’ve had my heated arguments with people who defend the Playlist and, from the looks of it, I’m convinced I was right. This update has proven itself to be the final neutering of the Playlist. The original idea was to keep the game fresh by adding monthly events and by enticing players with exclusive cars. It was harsh, and monopolized gameplay (remember the couple weeks when you needed 100% to win prizes? I do).

The problem is that such a model only works when the events are fun and the rewards are interesting. No one is gonna play S1900 Modern Muscle championship #999 to win an SUV, unless said SUV is competitive online and even then it appeals to a very small percent of players. I think Playground noticed this, because they realized people only played the Trial and PGG when there were newly available cars, but forcing online to earn cars was a bad move to Xbox players (who must pay to play and form the majority of FH4 players) and the possibility of these cars being available in the Forzathon Shop later on killed all remaining interest.

I’m on Discord a lot and I used to see people posting on auction channel to buy cars which they could unlock that week via event, which is the ultimate proof of how useless the Playlist actually is.

The only month I genuinely had fun with the Playlist was when they added custom routes to championships (September last year I think). There’s no significant reward for 100% either and, even if you earned an exclusive car at 100%, it’d have been worth it only if the car was the Capri FE or something. You do all those events and the most you get is an achievement and a pat in the back, like WTF? At least give me a choice of any exclusive car if I put in the effort. Or a hefty paycheck, like 5 million CR or so.

But that’s only the surface. The game has lots of under the hood issues that detract from the experience.

To this day, you cannot fully disable the music. You must enter streamer mode to do so and it resets every time you run the game. FH4 is the perfect game to play when listening to my Spotify playlists but it creates weird obstacle for me to have a seamless experience the way I want to.

There’s still DLC cars without a full set of suspension upgrades, I love my 1969 DBS but I don’t drive it as much because I can only fit rally suspension to it, and it’s a car I paid money for (Jimbo DLC). Small inaccuracies in cars were never fixed (the Countach was even featured in a Showcase and Playground seemingly ignored those bugged taillights).

Cars painted before the Fortune Island update still have their wheel paint bugged, as if Playground placed responsibility on the creators to reupload their designs broken through no fault of their own. Search criteria for content are poor, there isn’t even an option to only search followed creators. Never fixed the thumbnails looking funny when you changed tune on a painted car.

Track width update was half-assed, they stopped at letter D in the car list, jumped to Subaru and that’s it. Never gave us the bodykits they promised despite plenty of them in FM7 to choose from. Didn’t bring over the new sounds from FM7.

Never added props to Route Creator. Never expanded the Blueprint to add more options such as drivetrain restrictions or stock PI, or even randomize cars to prevent those ridiculous mono-Mustang grids when running Modern Muscle. Never fixed the bug when the Drivatar liveries disappear after a couple races. Drivatars in Solo mode get bunched up and make Britain unbearable. No ability to create custom championships.

No Online Adventure in the DLC maps. Online mode with game breaking bugs that were never fixed. Cheaters banned, yes, but their cheated times never cleaned from the leaderboards.

Instead we get battle royale, silly stories which are inferior to custom Bucket Lists (can you imagine the popularity of a possible Bucket List event with the Caddy Limo?), Star Cards which are useless beyond the rewards, and Horizon Promo… The icing on the cake is 250 additional garage spots but no more design/tune slots, when we have exclusive/unique cars in the 100s and must waste a slot to paint them all.

That’s too little. It’s Playground saying, we don’t need to do anything, because we’re the best in our genre. Yes, you are, but your genre has NFS and The Crew, which suck. Not difficult to be the best with such competition, right? But this should be no excuse to let this game rot. People will only ignore the flaws for so long. We don’t even know if there’s a plan for FH5 since, with 1,000 cars in the garage, you could theoretically support FH4 well into the next gen. Appealing to people who are not into cars does not mean you have to strip the game of all its depth.

Honestly, Forza is so nice to play that it’s frustrating to see the game in its current state. It’s not terrible, but it could’ve been so much more.