Everything wrong with FH5 [in my opinion]

Forza Horizon Forza Horizon 5 FH5 Discussion
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Before getting into this post, I’d like to disclaim that this is only my opinion, I’m not hating anyone or the game itself, and also I’ve played FH3 and FH4 for a long time, and I haven’t played FH5 nearly as much or seen most of the updates, so my opinion will be very biased compared to other people, and some of what I say might be outdated.
Without further a-do, this is what I think of FH5.

First off, when the game was released there were so many bugs, and the game in general was a mess! And I don’t mean the fun bugs where you can jump the fence. I mean the bugs that make the game so annoying to play. I don’t remember what most of them were, but lots of issues with loading, saving, cars, audio, races, basically anything you can think of had some sort of issue with it. And their way of fixing it? Throw more content into the game.

Which brings me to me 2nd point. The whole game feels so rushed, yet so slow. It could just be a me thing, but there are soooo many races on the map that it takes ages to complete them all. And there’s not really a story behind them either (if I remember correctly at least). In FH3, each festival expansion came with new races and new PR stunts and new other stuff, and it took a while to advance to the next level – it gave you time to get a feel for the game. In FH5 it just felt so rushed, I don’t even remember if there was a process to unlock all the races or not because it was so quick that I have everything on the map even though I’ve hardly played! On top of that, the festival playlist feels too… messy? It feels disorganised, and it feels like they’ve crammed as many events as they can in it. All the player-made content, the championships, the variety of online competitions, the PR stunts, the ranked stuff, the smashables thingos (idk if they’re still doing that or not) and so on. I do think the smashable things are fun, and it’s nice seeing all the new content all at once, but personally I find it hard to keep up with, which in turn makes the game feel overwhelming, leading me to not want to play it. Again on top of that, they’re releasing so much new content so quickly that it just feels like too much. The expansion packs (I’m so glad they brought back Hot Wheels tho), the events, types of challenges, the badges, and so much more that I honestly just can’t remember any of the rest. The whole game in general feels rushed – the development, the storyline, the progression, all of it.

Next I want to talk about how visually appealing the game is. First of all, I really just don’t like the way the pause menu is designed. The ‘change car’ option is like 3 tabs away which is really annoying when I just want to quickly be able to switch between cars. The convoy controls are such a hassle to go through. There’s no “leave convoy” option anymore, you have to press a button, then press another button which takes you to a different menu where finally you can leave convoy. Other than the way it’s organised (which is just a hassle to navigate), I just don’t like the way it looks. I understand it’s supposed to fit the whole “Horizon Mexico” vibe, but the plain purple, the plain buttons that are crammed into a square space, the fact that mots buttons [imo] just look the same. Now I asked one of my friends (who doesn’t play any FH) and they said they preferred the FH5 pause menu because of the fact it’s organised into a neat space instead of spread out, and honestly I get that and think that’s a valid opinion, but personally I just don’t like it. I want you go search up “forza horizon 4 pause menu” and look at what it looks like compared to the FH5 pause menu. I know there are some players who like the FH5 pause menu, and that’s fine, but personally I just strongly dislike it. Not to mention when the game was released it had 3 tabs, now it has 5 (this could be outdated, I don’t remember) as they’ve added stuff. FH4 has 11 different tabs! Sure, on paper that sounds like a lot and overwhelming, but I think it’s great! Each tab has it’s own purpose, and it’s designed so nice that it doesn’t feel crammed. Take the first thing you see when you open the pause menu. In FH4 you have all the essentials right in front of you: Map, [what used to be the] playlist, change car, settings, drone & photo mode, quick chat settings, player list, horizon life, and convoy options! Not to mention the fact there’s a little bar that tells you the weather one one side, and the other tells you which song is playing on the radio, honestly I love that they added that. Now, what’s the first thing we get in FH5 when we open the menu? Map, settings, playlist, accolades, and Horizon adventure. Not all that much in my opinion. It’s a mess to navigate and most of the most commonly used buttons are nowhere to be found. Now this is probably because I’m more used to the FH3 & 4 menu, but that’s just how I feel about it.

Next I want to talk about the map. To anyone who’s played FH4, how many times did you crash into a rock while going cross-country? Not often, right? I don’t know about you, but I can’t drive anywhere in FH5 without crashing into something, whether it’s a house in the middle of nowhere, or a bunch of rocks that you can’t even see. And the forest? That’s just about impossible to drive through! Again, it could be my lack of playing the game, but it feels like the trees are just too dense, and it’s so difficult to navigate without crashing into a tree every 5 seconds. To add onto that, the roads just feel empty. There’s no life anywhere other than the city or the festival site. And the city just feels crowded too! It doesn’t feel like an actual city, it just feels like they crammed a bunch of buildings into one place with insanely intertwined roads and said “yup, that’s good enough”. Now it’s not all bad, I like the use of tunnels, and there are some nice areas in it, but other than that it just feels like they copy and pasted the same building 100 times with different colours. Other than the odd towns here and there along the edges of the map, it feels bland.
And also can I just touch on the seasons quickly? I don’t know if it’s just a me thing, but there is close to zero differences in each of the seasons. I don’t know about you but I enjoyed being able to tell which season is which just by looking at my surroundings. But I can’t because other that a little bit more rain, or a little less rain, I cannot tell which season is which. I just think it would’ve been nicer if there was some more differentiation other than sandstorms or frozen water at the top of the volcano.

I think I’ve run out of rant for now, but I’ll definitely edit this and add more as I remember. If anyone agrees or disagrees though do reply, I’m curious on what everyone else thinks.
That’s my 2 cents on the game, enjoy lol

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Your comments might have been valid 3 years after the launch as the game was very buggy for the first few months but since then the game has settled down and now works well.

Here’s my short list of what’s wrong with Horizon 5. I’m Prestige Level 8 and level 931 so played the game a fair bit. I’ve also played all of the previous Horizon games.

Map too small and essentially designed with The Eliminator in mind (I actually love playing The Eliminator). So apart from the Volcano it’s pretty flat.

No decent city for proper street racing.

Cheating - where do I start. Leaderboards at the top are all cheaters. I encounter cheaters using speed hacks in The Eliminator that essentially fly through the sky their car is so fast. The developers did say a long time ago they would try to clean up leaderboards but I don’t think much happened.

Not enough things to do. The Crew Motorfest has more things to do.

Stories in Horizon 5 are rubbish. Horizon 4 stories were better. The Crew Motorfest playlist events which are essentially stories are so much better and so much more polished.

Horizon arcade was a backwards step. The hourly Forzathons in Horizon 4 were much better as you often had other players. You’re pretty much on your own in Horizon 5.

No stunt park.

No real progression system apart from levelling up.

AI in cross country often hard to beat (just as it was in Horizon 4).

Boring map. Both Horizon 3 and 4 had better maps.

Cars and cash thrown at you. I know many people don’t like grinding for cars and cash but it’s too easy in Horizon.

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They were bedeviled by the need to accommodate the Eliminator in designing the map. So the map is a real missed opportunity.

Drifting is pretty neglected.

Ranked mode missing.

Too many ancient/poor scans of prominent cars.

I think one season should have snow covering one third of the map.

Night time is too long

The Tankpool truck is lonely without the Iron Knight or some other tractor truck

More cars from the 1st part of the 20th century.

The entire car should be repaintable. No unpaintable trim pieces please.

I want much brighter podium insets. I want to see the top three cars.

===============

But overall I’m happy with the game. It’s a strong game. And would recommend it to others. There has been some cracking updates.

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Even though a lot of what you said would have been more applicable earlier in the game’s life, I agree with some of your points. Not having the change car option on the first menu tab like it is in FH4 was an incredibly stupid change. Sure, let’s take by far the most-used menu option and bury it several tabs over! You’re right that the seasonal changes are barely noticeable compared to 4.; I know that’s a function of Mexico having a very different client than the UK, but they could have fudged things a bit and at least given us some desert snow in parts of the map. And yeah, there are big chunks of the map full of rocks that seemed custom-designed to completely ruin my day in an Eliminator session.

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Boring map

Bland visual treatment which makes yellow cars look pastel

Forza Aero

Apart from EventLab, all the singleplayer activities are the same as in FH4. Street races still don’t have circuits even though Road Race, dirt and CC events have both sprints and circuits. Drag races are still the same as they were.

EventLab and blueprint are shackled with some of the most arbitrary limitations

Worse PC optimization than FH3 and FH4 with horrendously long loading times, clunky menu navigation and sharp stutters when you scroll through upgrades in the car upgrade menu

Story missions suck, from the terrible characters to the lack of mission variety. It’s bad when Simpsons Hit & Run, a GTA clone from 2003 has more mission variety than FH5’s stories.

Still no option to detune cars with way too much horsepower either through restrictor plates or the option to remove forced induction

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We also need to finally close the era of needing to bolt on ugly, geriatric scaffolding (aka forza aero) onto the back of things like sleek hypercars to make them work properly.

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Cheating.
Leaderboard cheaters.
Modders cheating online.
B class cars in first place on speed traps and danger signs… ie cheating
Eliminatior cheating
Hide and Seek cheating

Do you want to know why I don’t even try anymore?
Cheating.

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For me, it’s the following.

The Map. It has elements of a great map, but pushing all the unique biomes to the edges of the map while having the center of the map be mostly flat farmland and desert utterly ruins it, made worse by the fact that it was all done in the name of the Eliminator, which has a pretty niche audience. Seasons have only small effects on the map. The few areas heavily impacted by the seasons are easily forgotten on account that they are heavily underutilized.

Campaign. More of the same from Horizon 4. Completely unchanged and that’s not a good thing. The sandbox concept for a racing game has its merits, but it’s long overstayed its welcome. Remember when franchises like Project Gotham Racing completely revamped the campaign with every single sequel? Time for Horizon to either do the same, or emulate Horizon 1’s campaign as much as possible whilst having the sandbox of the current games as endgame.

Festival Playlist. While its probably the best live service when compared to its peers, its still extremely stale. Little changed between sequels, so we’ve been playing the same formula for over half a decade now. EventLabs don’t alleviate this issue at all either. Like the campaign, time for a big shake-up, particularly one that encourages the use of new content while also not punishing players who don’t want their lives revolving around this one game.

Stories. Lots of problems with these. Only positive was that missions no longer start in the same location, but this is canceled out by the fact that you now need to drive to every individual mission on first playthrough. Alternate story paths are complete waste of space. They only affect the individual mission, not the story as a whole. Doing both versions feels like a waste of time. Writing is abysmal across the board. Dialogue sucks. Plots have no logic and clash with level design. Acting is decent at best and horrid at worst depending on which character is speaking, though I blame this more on the writers than the actors. These could easily by replaced by the Bucket List Challenges too. In fact, bringing back the Bucket List Challenges would probably quite literally remedy all of these problems with Stories.

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Festival Playlist: The worst thing that has rotted Forza. This system is getting worse and worse.

The problem is that most of this system is basically race events and depends on a certain level of difficulty.
Only at the launch of the new FH, MS and PG will promote the game as being considerate of various players and play styles, but this system essentially locks out players who do not have a certain level of playing skill from most of the game after launch.

To be honest, I would like this terrible FOMO system to be abolished immediately, but I don’t think that will happen.
However, this mode definitely needs to be changed to a system that makes users more positive about the game.

For example, The Crew Motorfest’s Main Stage is a good example of improving the shortcomings of Festival Playlist.
This mode is similar to Festival Playlist in that it consists of goals that must be achieved over the course of a month and a number of time-limited challenges to achieve them.
However, what makes this mode crucially different from Festival Playlist is that challenges are not the only way to earn rewards.

To obtain rewards in this mode, you need to collect a certain amount of XP, and the challenges are merely a highly efficient way to gain XP.
And because the game allows users to gain XP in a variety of ways, they’ll be sure to get rewards no matter how they play the game in their preferred style.
As a result, it feels less forced than the Festival Playlist, and all players can obtain rewards by playing, regardless of their playing skill.

This should lead to a balance between the statements made by MS and PG above, and the game design of gaining user engagement through the playlist.

Evolving World: This certainly gave us new fun. There are many of my favorites among them. However, since almost all of these are time-limited content, compared to FH4, where many additional contents were permanent content, the impression that the game has evolved with updates is weak.

Car Mastery: They did a big nerf to Car Mastery in the early days of FH5. As a result, this feature is half dead. Why did they need to nerf a feature that was fine up until FH4?

Map Design: As others have already argued, the biggest flaw in FH5’s map design is that it was designed with Eliminator in mind. Why do we need to take such care just for a single game mode that not all players will play?

Worse Translations: This is only an issue for some foreign languages, but the quality of the Forza series’ foreign translations peaked in FH3 and has been getting worse ever since.

FH5 in particular has many parts with translations that are worse than machine translations. In Horizon Story, it’s not uncommon for a man to suddenly start speaking in a female tone, or vice versa. The Rally Expansion DLC in particular was so poorly translated that I couldn’t understand much of the story in my native language.

And Festival Playlist is even worse. Many challenges are mistranslated, or clues about wordplay that would be conveyed in the English original text are completely missing. It’s not uncommon to go out of your way to check the English challenge requirements on this forum or reddit.

Microsoft is not a small indie studio, but a large global corporation. But why are their games translated worse than indie games?

Inconsistent difficulty and AI rubberbanding:

The FH series AIs are well known for their rubber banding, but for some reason the quality of the banding also seems to be getting worse and worse.
They accelerate with class-defying performance on the straights and then turn with ultimate grip and downforce in the corners.
It does not have to be fair, but at least the AI should be designed so that the player feels a sense of fairness.

And perhaps the FH series introduced a dynamic difficulty level, like Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown.

The problem is that this dynamic difficulty setting makes the difficulty too inconsistent.
Even when racing under exactly the same conditions, both AI that can win easily and dishonest AI that cannot win at all can appear. And there is no way for players to know this except by actually racing. This is the biggest problem with dynamic difficulty.

And since there is no way for players to adjust this dynamic difficulty except by restarting the race or intentionally retiring, when an AI like the aforementioned high difficulty pattern appears in a race event like Festival Playlist, where the AI difficulty is fixed, the player is forced to restarts the race until the AI with the “correct” difficulty.
At the very least, users should be given the option to turn on/off the dynamic difficulty of the AI, and this feature should be turned off for content such as Festival Playlist.

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I just remembered another thing I strongly dislike about the game. You know when you view your car and you want to look at your stats? Well now in FH5, it’s more difficult to compare cars, since there’s no visual representation! It’s just numbers! I personally think that’s really annoying, especially when you’re choosing a car for the trial or smth and there’s a time limit, but you weren’t prepared beforehand so you have to spend extra time figuring out which car is good or not, and the timer ends up running out.

Another thing is players in races. I haven’t come across as many cheaters per say, but if you accidentally bump into a player and say sorry (if you’ve got that in the quickchat), heck if you even try to simply overtake them, they will push you! They’ll crash into you, ram you, push you, do whatever to get you of your course. The team won’t even be winning! They’re willing to make the team lose just because they didn’t like you. It really gets on my nerves.

And another thing, the quickchat! Honestly, I think it’s actually quite nice that they added interactive quickchats, but I also find it quite annoying because I’m only able to say 2 things that aren’t 'wanna go on an adventure" and whatever the other one was. Someone please tell me they added an option to disable that, because if not I’ll be really disappointed. I quite liked having my regular 4 messages in races or free-roam. And, the best part? They called it “Link”! I’m sure it’s just a me thing, but it really bugs me that they changed the name of something that’s been the same for the past 2 (maybe more, I don’t remember) games. Maybe they were called slightly different things, but that’s a big jump from “Quickchat” to “Link”.

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People that claim other FH titles didn’t have the same issues have the thickest set of rose colored glasses on I’ve ever seen.

Lets address some of the other strange stuff I read here…

my opinion will be very biased compared to other people, and some of what I say might be outdated.

So yeah, lets lay this malformed opinion out for everyone instead of going and confirming what has changed.

Stuff in the game: These games all have the exact same progression type, and all work exactly the same way - races don’t have stories - they never did. Dialog in story mode is bad - it has always been bad. FH5 and FH4 are for all intents and purposes exactly the SAME game - play it the same, it works the same - all the same. You cannot realistically sit here and say FH5 is worse than FH4 or FH3 they are all basically the same game.

There are too many races - but it’s too easy to complete them all. ???

The map is too small - yeah sorry literally have NEVER heard anyone complain that this map it too small - if anything they complain that it’s so large you can never find anyone.

to anyone who’s played FH4, how many times did you crash into a rock while going cross-country?

LOL - maybe not a rock - but trees and houses - everything on that map was so compact and tight together - it was a pain to go cross country and didn’t really work well when they implemented Eliminator on it IMHO. Honestly feels like those rose colored glasses again - you don’t know FH5 map as well - I do - I like it better it’s a bit more open and easier to see across than the FH4 map.

e.g.: And the forest? That’s just about impossible to drive through! Again, it could be my lack of playing the game

It is exactly: your lack of playing the game.

Seasons; Yeah listen sorry, but all people did on FH4 what whine and cry and moan about snow - never ending whinging about an entire week with snow on the roads… then FH5 comes along and guess what happened? Go on, guess. It’s so stupid, I’m not even going to continue.

Frankly - you should have saved your rant - because it’s not a rant it’s an uninformed misinformed whine because you had to work at something.

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Hard disagree with your rant about the Festival Playlist and FOMO.

Everything in the playlist is absurdly easy to accommodate players of all skill levels. Problem with that is it leaves nothing for players looking for a challenge.
It’s unnecessary since you don’t need every point to earn the new reward car of the season.

There’s no reason that the Trial can’t be challenging. The AI programmers should be embarrassed by the behavior of the so called unbeatable AI in the Trial.
They won’t even give us S2 or even S1 Trials anymore because the AI would likely have an aneurism.
Not to mention the community likely would too.

This talk of FOMO has always been nonsense. If you can’t be bothered to take 15 or 20 minutes a week to earn the new reward car than I’m not even sure why you’d care about missing it.

Players don’t stop playing the game because the playlist is too challenging, it’s just the opposite.

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I just spent the past week playing Motorfest and revisiting Crew 2. I would argue that both of them do the festival experience/presentation better than Horizon 4/5. But holy cow, driving cars in Horizon and Motorsport feels so much more consistent and predictable than Ubisoft’s offerings.

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