FH4's strangely dictatorial structure

Forza Horizon Legacy Horizon FH4 Discussion
1

I’ve been ruminating on this a bit, and I think I’ve figured out why FH4 is so much less fun for me than FH3.

This series is supposed to be about freedom. Drive anywhere you like, race however you like, perform crazy sandbox moves across a huge map.

But all of the major changes in FH4 have curtailed the freedom I loved in FH3. Some examples:

–FH3 had a championship series at every race site, and you could tackle them in whatever order you liked. FH4 only has seasonal championships doled out two or three at a time. Once you’ve done them, you have to wait a week for the next championships.
–You could race every FH3 championship at whatever skill level you chose, making the game accessible to all drivers. FH4 requires you to race against expert or unbeatable Drivatars to get the highest-level rewards.
–FH3 multiplayer allowed the lobby to vote on what the next race would be. FH4 simply tells you what the next race will be. Your only option is to drop out.
–FH3 multiplayer included cars at all levels, from D up to S2. FH4 only allows you to race in A, S1 and S2 cars. There’s no reason to tune cars to be good D, C or B-level racers, because you’ll never use them.
–Freeroam Rush. I think the devs came up with this because some FH3 players had the cheek to prefer skilling around in the Dry Reservoir, rather than driving to the next race. Because the game gave them the freedom to do this, and the players enjoyed this freedom. So instead, the devs broke multiplayer by coming up with this not-fun cross-country crash fest that actually counts towards a team’s win total.

Every time I logged on to FH3, I had so many options for things to do. There was an activity for whatever mood I had. Now, I find myself struggling to find things to do in FH4, and often find myself doing stuff I’d really rather not be doing because there’s no better option.

There have been a couple of attempts by the devs to increase player freedom, the most notable being the Route Creator. But even these are rather half-baked. For example, I created a really kick-ass dirt route that tied Mudkickers Park to the Wind Farm, and posted it online after going through a few iterations to make it challenging but driver-friendly. I worked my butt off on it. But no one appears able to actually find it and play it. So I can show off my awesome route to a couple of friends, and that’s about it. I’ve wasted all that time creating something that has no audience.

I find myself spending more time playing Battlefield V, Fallout 76 and even Forza Motorsport 7 than I do on FH4. I basically check in on FH4 to tick off the seasonal stuff, then split. And given how much I loved FH3, that honestly breaks my heart.

2

Yeah, I agree and I think the sentiment has been repeated a lot on these forums.

Ahh you know things are bad when Forza players are having more fun playing FO76 than FH4.

3

I’ve commented a lot on the MP, but not so much on the single-player. I guess I realized it’s all part and parcel of this same constrictive feeling you get playing FH4 after having played FH3.

FH4 is just so heavily curated. Think about how much of the game depends on the developers telling you what to do next, as opposed to you choosing for yourself.

4

I was thinking excatly same. Will be intersting to see how popular horizon will be now when gamepass owners can download pubg also.

5

Being forced to redo all the same races multiple times for the sake of completion hardly seems like more freedom to me. FH3’s Championships were awful and pointless. But they were better than the road trip checklist of doom in FH2.

6

At least you could pursue the FH3 Championships at your own pace, if you cared to at all. In FH4 you get the Championships spoon-fed to you season-by-season, two or three each week, with no sense of progression or accomplishment. I was damned proud when I finished all the championships in FH3 and got that Achievement.

7

I’ll take “awful and pointless” any day over FH4’s lack of content. FH4 is empty and boring. It’s nothing but style over substance and I hope both T10 and PG have learned that there are certain things the majority of Forza players demand be in each version and removing or gimping them will only lead to backlash. I would’ve thought they’d have known this after FM7 but I guess they thought they knew better.

8

Redoing existing content isn’t, in fact, more content just because you call it a Championship… well, not as a matter of actual substance, anyway. You can, in fact, do the same thing in FH4 as in FH3, it just won’t be styled as a Championship.

9

We’ve talked about this on another thread, so I try not to repeat myself. :slight_smile:

The way I see it now is, the FH4 map is effectively a free-play mode. You pick a race and then do it, for the sake of doing that one race. It’s like if Motorsport had no career mode at all. Some people are fine with that, for others it’s essential. Obviously the substance a mode like that creates is not exclusive, but only a kind of superstructure. You could argue that creating a spreadsheet file for keeping track of yourself doing different tracks in different cars and classes gives you more or less the same results - as some here apparently have done. I think for many people who need that structure to have any fun, that’s about as un-fun as in-game championships are to you.

10

I don’t understand this criticism. If you didn’t want to complete the championships, then just don’t complete them all. How is optional content you don’t want to use somehow “awful” and how does it force you to do anything? And to the extent that you’re complaining about needing to do the championships to finish everything the game offers, do you really expect to complete all the content/achievements of a racing game without running the game’s races more than once? And, similarly, why are you playing and trying to complete all the content in a racing game if you consider redoing races to be awful? Wanting to finish all achievements in a racing game and not wanting to run any races more than once are just entirely incompatible desires.

The truth is that championships were additional content that you could choose to do or choose not to do. And, for some, they provided interesting ready-made bits of content where interesting themes of car types were tied together with races that made sense for those themes.

The only negative I can see for it in FH3 is that the “New” marker under races that you’d completed but not done the championship for could be a bit misleading, since it could make it difficult to see what exhibitions you’d literally just never run. But that’s a pretty minor gripe. The gripe I usually hear—and the one I think you’re making here—is that completing all the content and competitions a racing game has to offer shouldn’t involve running the game’s races more than once, which is just crazy and also odd because you really don’t need to complete things you don’t want to complete.

11

Okay, go complete a road circuit in your favorite RWD muscle car. Oh you can’t, that race is for hypercars only… and you have to drive it AWD because arbitrary AI boosts dictate you won’t be able to win with an RWD car.

12

False, just blue print it how you want it.

13

What I like best about championship in fh3 was ability to blueprint a championship, add/remove/change number of events, laps, and locations.

I did feel doing the championship thing was a bit of a grind, but thought it worth the time to complete. I still go back to fh2 to knock off a championship or two now and them(because there are so many?)

If they allowed people to create championships in fh4, I think that’d be great, they don’t necessarily need to go back and make a championship for ever race location, just let people create their own as was able to in fh3

14

exactly, the game was made so you can take their suggestion, or blueprint it how you like. you can even hit level 20 in all the race categories before finishing all the races if you set your laps higher through blueprinting

15

I’m with you, dude.

16

I still don’t know how to find other peoples custom routes. All I get are custom blueprint events with clickbait title like": 500k cas, 250k xp bla bla.

Edit: I want to try out OP’s kick-a** route. :frowning:

17

Do you have try to add OP as friend so you can watch could you find that via followers and friends tab.

18

It starts at Highland Farm Scramble. Because I’m incredibly juvenile, it’s called Muddy Wind.

I have it set up as an all-class Anything Goes and as an all-class Modern Rally, to give folks options. It’s about 4.8 miles, and is a three-lap circuit race. Lots of opportunities for wreckage and drifting and air, so you should wind up with a ton of credits and XP. I’d recommend using an A class car first time around…I tried to smooth it out as much as possible but there are still a couple tricky corners that could really use a concrete barrier, if you could add that sort of thing.

Let me know what you think!

19

I added you as a friend, but it still didn’t appear under the friends and followers tab at Highland Farm Scramble. However, I did find it by doing a general search for custom routes at the event.

It’s a fun route and plenty challenging. I (accidentally) ignored your advice and used an S1 car so I overshot the turn into Mudkickers on every lap. I’ll go back and give it a go with a B class car next - that’s more my speed. It would make more sense to me if we shared routes rather than events. That way we could just blueprint the shared route ourselves.

And thanks for giving the event a proper name. So many people seem to stick with the default name which is a bit unimaginative.

20

Believe it or not, that’s the smoothest entry into Mudkickers’ out of three/four tries…I’m glad you dug it!