Not too long ago they had adjusted the trials to use drivatars named after the story characters and for a while this seemed to work pretty well. I’m not sure what happened, if it’s related to these drivatars leveling up or what but now they’re getting to be a real handful.
Last week we had the stock Ford RS200 trial and it was the first trial in a long time which felt like it was impossible to win. We got absolutely crushed, there was zero chance of catching them.
This week with the stock Renaults, was it? We did manage to win but it was fighting tooth and nail the entire time. Again we got destroyed in the first race and only barely squeaked out ahead in the second.
Here’s one positive thing the Hot Wheels expansion did, it gave me a way to avoid the weekly trial and still unlock both of the seasonal cars. I’m not going to keep throwing myself at a trial until some miracle happens and we win, that is the opposite of fun.
Oh, and I found something interesting yesterday when making D class races on the stock Hot Wheels courses just to see if they could be done (I’m so bored…) There were a few instances where a drivatar, in D class, would rocket ahead like they were driving S class, never to be seen nor heard from again. The Porsche 914/6 and the '32 Ford De Luxe Coupe to name two of these cars. It was bonkers!! I have a Porsche 356 set to reach over 230 mph on the boost pads and I didn’t have a prayer of catching them!
Highly Skilled difficulty, by the way! Like three steps below unbeatable!
I’d like to add that I have a friends list that consists of two random people I happened to like with games I had played in the past.
One of them apparently played just enough to reach level 3 whereas the other apparently didn’t hardly play at all as they are level 1.
They will completely kick my back-side in a race set to “highly skilled.” They will also appear in a race regardless of the difficulty level. They aren’t a representation of anyone in the real world. It’s nonsense. The AI in the first 3 Forza Motorsport games was more convincingly human than this.
The main problem is, I bought the expensive version of the game so I would have access to everything in it and they’ve locked off a bunch of it behind IF they feel like making it part of the Festival Playlist and IF you can manage to beat their forced difficulty level. Let me set the difficulty level myself.
I have bought every Forza game since the first one came out on the original XBox, but if they don’t want to let the player play the game the way they want to, this will be the last Forza game I buy.
i noticed that lately the A.I. has been cheating excessively in Highly Skilled difficulty by seeming to be racing at a higher P.I. than the car that you entered the race in. tunes that were once dominant in their class are now useless. not so! follow these simple steps to reset those cheaters and race like normal.
start your race. if you find the A.I. cheating, go into the pause menu and restart the race.
once at the race menu go into difficulty settings and set the race to “Tourist” and save.
start the race again and pause again, then restart once more.
go back into difficulty settings and set the race back to “Highly Skilled”. save.
start your race with normal A.I. profit!
obviously this won’t work for any races in the weekly playlist (or i haven’t tried it yet). but it seems to work for all race types outside of that. enjoy!
i don’t appreciate the closing of my topic and the merging here. what is meant to be a workaround for people to reference has been buried inside a months-long thread that anyone who searches for it will doubtfully find. more forum heavy-handedness by those who shall not be named…
It’s a shame it doesn’t work with the Festering Playlist. I’ve been trying some of those BS races, made my car as fast as I possibly could and not only could I not pass anyone, I couldn’t keep up at all. I kept falling back and it was obvious that I would never catch up.
The AI is on rails. They have more power, grip and downforce than anything I have.
Difficulty level is supposed to be an OPTION anyway. I just wish the developers knew how frustrating this is. Unfortunately, I don’t get the impression they care one iota.
There was an event a few months ago, C600 Offroad. As an experiment I went through every eligible car in the game over two days and found that most of them failed miserably overall, but variably from one race to the next. The best option seemed to be the vehicle with the best power-to-weight ratio from the outset; or at least, the lightest vehicle seemed to be the optimal one. (As an aside, D-class cars fared no better even if you could add more upgrades to give them more tuning options.)
The impression that I’ve had since then is that there’s an optimal car for the seasonal championships, probably the one that has the best stock power-to-weight ratio to which you add more power, never mind the handling.
It seems worst in B and C class races (esp. offroad) where the drivatars accelerate off the line as if they’re S1/S2 class, and the car in front often gets there and stays there. You might pass it if you can clip a few corners and catch up going downhill.
The net result is massive amounts of frustration against drivatars at a level of difficulty that shouldn’t overly bother me, but do. I also get the feeling (my imagination?) that in seasonal championships, the drivatars have a different level of skill. Just look at the novelty championships in Horizon 4 which got repeated just recently. I struggled to win the road races, less because the course was unfamiliar than because the drivatars seemed to be at a whole different level, and I wasn’t leaving them trailing in my wake as I normally do.
Why is the AI so stupid in this game? Why do AI cars stop as they should in the open world but ram into the back of you during a championship or trial? Why are AI lines so bad? Why do AI swerve randomly and intentionally ram players passing? Why does the AI rubberband?
Why can’t Horizon use Motorsports AI? Is there a license issue? What’s the likelihood of FM8 AI being added to FH5 in the future, if not FH6?
So basically, Forza games don’t use normal racing AI like other franchises. Since 2014, they’re used a system known as “Drivatars” which I’m sure you’re aware of.
The idea is that the system tracks your driving behavior in the game and “reflects” it over to an AI counterpart that appears in other player’s singleplayer races. If you have an Xbox account and play pretty much any Forza title for any amount of time, a Drivatar of you is made.
That’s where the issue is. With normal racer AI, each driver has it’s own racing style and exploitable weaknesses. When i’m playing Need For Speed Heat, I know Gus can wipe the floor with me on the straights with his green widebody Porsche, but corners like a mustang driver and I can exploit that.
When creeperslayer1019 appears in my racing lineup for the first (and last) time driving a car his official Forza save doesn’t even own, I have no idea how he’s gonna drive. And let’s say creeperslayer1019 played 17 mins of the Forza Horizon 2 demo eight years back and never touched the franchise again.
Not only does the Drivatar System have nothing to work with, creeperslayer’s driving style the system is supposed to mimic is now just employing basic rubberbanding tactics to make sure he drives like a “Pro” drivatar, even if the real creeperslayer is nowhere near that good.
Not only is going up against “creeperkiller1019” less immersive than, let’s say “Jackson Parker” it’s outright less predictable. Jackson is coded to drive a specific car in a specific way. The Drivatar system is basically doing guesswork to see how a certain driver handles, and attempt to make the AI reflect how the real person drives. If you know how badly Forza games don’t teach their players to drive well, it’s not a fun experience.
I don’t believe the human based drivatar explaination…to me, it feels like all of the AI drivatars are acting as a singular unit, blocking, brake checking…all w/ the goal of giving the first place AI car a lead it’ll hold until the very last corner if you the player drive perfectly.
It makes perfect sense to me. It does feel like the drivatars have been initially trained based on a bunch of players/races. Most likely a small group of inhouse testers. Then various rules/behaviours have been layered upon this.
The idea of drivatars and training them based on the millions of players/races is great. But AI is only as good as the underlying algorithm and the quality/size of the training data sets.
At the end of the day it’s clear that the current implementation of the drivatars is horrible across the board. There’s literally nothing good to say about it. To me it feels like an intern with next to no experience with AI was given a 6 month project to implement a solution for the AI in FH5 and here we are.
Sadly I think we are stuck with this stupid AI for now but hopefully in FH6 they do a complete overhaul and get someone experienced to implement it. It’s critical for races. It’s critical for blueprints. It’s critical for open world. AI just can’t be subpar like it is now.
But for real though, the idea of drivatars seems a little contradictory, what’s the point of having drivatars that’s supposed to mimic a player then add difficulty options that drastically change their pace instead of having drivatars be a more accurate representation, and making it so changing the difficulty = changing which drivatars I’d see in my races? Am I actually racing against drivatars or just regular AI with gamertags over them? I honestly can’t tell as the quickest drivatar I race against the most in Horizon 5 is my friend who barely played past the tutorial stages on full assists and then quit the game
Basically my experience as well. Almost identically so.
I have noticed many times though, if during a particular race Team Human is abusing the Drivatars (ramming, blocking, etc.) they tend to ramp up their like aggressiveness level. If Team Human is driving clean the AI tend to be cleaner too. Though, over time it has seemed to have devolved more to the AI being aggressive from the start. At least the ones that don’t get the JATO pack so nobody can catch them.
I was told about that “player drivatars are ment to behave like their real counterparts” in FH4 already. And don’t believe it one bit. For the simple reason that I’ve people in my friendslist that are quite good and clean drivers but their drivatars don’t reflect that and are rather unable and/or overly aggressive. The same goes for the few not so good friends whose drivatars often perform better than the real player presumbly would.
Maybe it’s taken into consideration somehow but it surely isn’t reflecting and working as intendend then.
Besides that there isn’t only one type of AI/drivatar. I’d actually split them into two main categories (single- vs. multiplayer drivatars) which again are split into two sub-categories (ingame characters vs. player drivatars) but even that isn’t really suiting as for example a multiplayer ingame character drivatar like Rami can perform completely different when racing in for example a Weekly Trial vs. a Horizon Tour.
OT but i had 3 gold cars racing against me in one of this weeks champs A little confusing as i give myself a ‘mini-mission’ in races with your drivatar in them of trying to knock your numberplate off
The human based drivatar idea doesn’t add up, because the races are exactly the same each time. 2 cars lead, the first car is the car that won the previous race, and the first car ignores all obstacles to get a better lead. The tyres are grippy on the Ai, they are not related to real drivers.
This season features having a Goliath-style season championship, but these long sprint races are a clear indication of how bad the AI is in this game.
Race Progression 0-10% : There is still a chance for players to catch up to the top AI.
Race Progression 10-35% : “Escape” mode ON; top group AI will be upgraded to million horsepower rocket engines, tires with unlimited grip, and Pikes Peak level downforce. It is impossible for players to catch up to them.
Race progression 35%- : Cheats begin to be nerfed gradually. By race progression 40-50%, players will be able to overtake them.
–This is where the AI pattern splits–
Pattern A : “Pursuit” mode ON. they get cheats again and track the player, ignoring the laws of physics to overtake the player. Then around 70% of the race progress, this cheat is suddenly lost and they become as slow as the Tourist AI. No more worrying about losing.
Pattern B : They lose the will to fight. All cheats are lost and they become tourist speed, just as they are after 70% of race progress in Pattern A. Enjoy your cruising.
After finishing the playlist, we tried the same event with different cars and different tunes just to be sure.
But in every race, the AI followed this pattern.
The problem with this patterned difficulty is that it creates two kinds of frustration for the player.
First, racing against the top group AI with cheats turned on is simply unreasonable and uninteresting.
We know we can’t catch up to them on the straights or in the corners and we just follow them until they nerf. Where’s the fun in that?
And after they are nerfed, racing against them is no longer racing. The fun of racing is not there.
Is it difficult to get a better AI instead of these extremes?
It always gets me when I have a hard-fought battle to overtake that one runaway AI in first place, then I look back a few seconds later and it’s already way behind me and part of the conga line of the other AI cars. You’re right that there’s no legitimate challenge, just big difficulty spikes either way.
A little confusing as i give myself a ‘mini-mission’ in races with your drivatar in them of trying to knock your numberplate off 