For some, I’m sure the question can be easily answered as “it’s already reached EOL for me”, but there are those, like myself, that have tried to hang on to perpetuate enjoyment of the game in whatever way we can, but it feels like we are even at the pinnacle of that as well.
I’ve always enjoyed designing & some tuning as part of the game, but I’ve even started to wain from those bc I’m tired of encountering the error messages about reaching my design & tune save limits. I spend time deleting content, but find myself right back in the same situation in no time.
Content has pretty much been exhausted & feels habitual. Credits are maxed, with equal value of sold cars that can’t be collected, hundreds of WSs with no use, maxed garage with further dupes I’ve tried to delete repeatedly. I’ve not completed all the accolades available, though I’m well over 900k just from normal gameplay & have never really been too focused on them bc, well, what’s the point really?
It seems like we are missing a lot of the dedicated players who have moved on & no longer contribute or care to be involved here & even among those who remain, many have gone to the “20pt diet” (credit: @Not_Here_Too; well said).
I feel like it’s becoming more “work than pleasure” as a norm, but maybe I’m the minority in this view? Being dedicated to the franchise with it being such an integral part of my gameplay makes walking away from it tough for me. There’s a feeling of “family” & “community”with this game for sure, but holding onto that is becoming more challenging. (Why am I suddenly hearing “Good Riddance” by Green Day playing in my head? )
If I’m the game developer & I have rolled out something that has my players discussing emotional & rational investment in the game, then that’s a win. No denying they have achieved that given how passionate the dedicated player base is overall to the franchise.
I’m still feeling pretty enthusiastic about the game. Beyond the festival playlist, which I still really enjoy, my main enjoyment comes from tuning.
I earned legendary tuner status some weeks back and that has kind further fueled my enthusiasm.
Reaching legendary status was probably easy for a lot of people but as just some random dude with no social media presence or tuning experience from previous Forza games to gain a following it took some work and patience to get there so I feel proud about it.
I feel like we probably won’t see FH6 until holiday '25 since PG will likely be working with the revamped Forza Tech engine.
Leaving last gen consoles behind will hopefully mean they go bigger this time around and we’ll see a bit of a departure from previous games by mixing up the formula.
Given I think FH6 is still a ways off, think we’ll see some more major additions and experiments to FH5, if only to see if it’s something the community enjoys enough to expand on the concepts in FH6.
Well they’ve already announced the FH4 servers being shut down (didn’t they ?.. early fall iirc ?) so that probably answers the question of which goes officially EOL first. The reason they gave as I recall was low player counts on the FH4 servers (which, given the state of the game a year or more ago when I had enough is hardly surprising). Granted it still had, probably has, it’s hard core devotees and that’s cool.
The problem with the passionate feelings about Forza in general, and Horizon 5 specifically, is they seem more in the how far it has fallen how much we had hoped for than how awesome it is. Not sure that’s a marketing win “no such thing as bad press” mantra aside.
Where was I going with this ? I seem to have derailed my own train of thought Ah well, I’ll just go yell at some kids on the lawn and mutter until I remember
That’s good to hear & congrats on achieving Legendary tuner status, which truly isn’t easy & particularly achieving it through the basic time & effort needed without trying to game the system to get there. I’ve shared quite a few tunes throughout the game & I think I’m only like level 10.
I was able to achieve Legendary painter status but that also took months of work & shares to achieve. Landing on the recommended pages for popular tunes/designs for the week always helps (as I’m sure you discovered) but there’s also those who like to monopolize their odds in various ways which make that even more difficult.
Hoping your right about more content additions to FH5, but not honestly not holding my breath.
Very true, but the passion had to be achieved in order to be crestfallen to this point. If your “train of thought” is anything like the train in the game, then it makes sense why it’s flashing as it rushes by
Oh yeah ! That ! Too much divided attention I guess, I was going to add an interesting stat I saw on the Reddit site while browsing the Suspicious Generosity thread.
345k
At the festival
1.0k
In freeroam
How does that even make any sense ? 345 times the number of “players” are just sitting idle in the game ? I’m guessing a lot of bot accounts farming cars for accounts or something equally “fun” and game play worthy. They can’t all be busy making awesome liveries and tunes
And where’s the “millions” of players in that stat ? Added up for the week ?
I play like 1 hour a week now and thats only 2 collect the new car (20points) exp this month for the 160 points. But yeah im also pretty bored of it. But! I don’t want to be, i still have a desire to love this game but it’s fading fast. But whats happend 2 this game seems to be more of a Microsoft thing, they seems to have some weird guidelines thats focus more on getting a big total of plays and getting more to “everyone can play all games even if your 5 years old” mentality, not keeping us older more dedicaded players.
Same. Don’t get me wrong though, I’m still a fan, just… not as active or likely to be. More of a nostalgia fan I guess. There’s still the odd time FH5 hits a pure high note and I love it unreservedly but they are few and seem to be getting farther between.
If it weren’t for this forum as well as our ongoing Rivals challenge I’d have much less to do with this game, that’s for sure. Tuning is great, but deleting old files to make room for new ones becomes tedious and laborious. If they don’t increase save limits soon I have no doubt they’ll lose an even bigger chunk of players, but I’m not holding my breath for that. To me, that’s like the ultimate slap in the face, especially considering they did it for FH4 and they know we’ve been begging for it here for at least 18 months. On top of that, the bugs marked “Fixed” seems to be dwarfed by the “Won’t fix by design”, as well as the ones they just plain ignore and won’t reply to.
It’s the FH1 and 2 servers that are getting shut down in August. Even FH3 is ostensibly still online, though from what I understand it’s impossible to connect to an online session in the PC version. I can’t see FH4 getting turned off for several years at this rate. (Now if only they’d mix up the repeating playlists to let people get those last few unicorn cars…)
To the topic creator, I certainly sympathize with what you’re feeling, but it does sound like your experience has been somewhat…atypical compared to the average player’s. I couldn’t imagine being anywhere close to maxed credits at this point in the game’s lifetime, or having hundreds of wheelspins just sitting there. I’m not a tuner or painter myself, but it’s far easier to see hitting those limits because of how pathetically low they are compared to the number of cars in the game. It sounds like you’ve thrown yourself wholeheartedly into this game in a huge way, and I think it’s human nature to hit a burnout point eventually.
Well thanks & I have say I used to also think I had invested a lot of time in the game until some of the other dedicated players started sharing their in game times & mine paled by comparison
I think it really speaks to the positive side of the game though when you can perpetuate gameplay to this point & remain entertained. Definitely a good ROI, particularly if I compare it to my earlier gaming which was mostly limited to FPS single person campaigns. The typical $50USD COD game that lasted 2-3 days springs to mind.
Well I think my issues with the endgame are well documented at this point. So much wasted potential on display in this game.
Still, I keep managing to find my own ways to breath new life into it. I shouldn’t have to considering all of that aforementioned potential just being left to rot, but it does speak well to the foundation of the game that I’m able to.
It’s also the premier game when I want to play something more relaxing with cars in it. In spite of the egregious flaws and pants-on-head creative direction the game has accrued over the past two iterations, it’s still gets the joy of freedom with (at least semi-realistic) cars that other games struggle with or outright deny. At the very least, they’ve yet to fully sacrifice that element in their chase of online “streamlining” and trying to turn this game into fortnight.
Recently I’ve been building more PvE builds. 750, 850, and 950 builds mostly. It’s allowed me to make bespoke builds to me (something I really enjoy in this game) without completely ruining the stock characteristics of some cars. The Ferrari Portofino is a good example. It can be tuned down to A class, but that requires winter tires, which ruins the driving feel of the car. It also can make it to the top of S1, but not without significant changes. Tuning it to 850 allowed me to create a bespoke “improvment” to the car, while maintaining the stock characteristics of the car.
That’s the part that I love most about this game. Fiddling with a car to create something I enjoy, both through tuning and painting, and then enjoying it through freeroam cruising and racing it.
Unfortunately racing, especially single player and convoy only racing, where builds like this are best enjoyed, has been stripped away and aggressively ignored by PGG in this franchise. But I make do with what we have for now. I’m not happy about it, but I think I’ve already made that clear enough in other posts.
Sometimes I do think we look too much into it, my answer can be summed up with a question.
If FH had let’s say NFS/TC2’s physics would I come back?
No, in my opinion the game lives almost entirely on that one aspect, as well as being fantastic in itself it makes all the other things you do in the game enjoyable/bearable, the actual content within the game is shallow and downright poor at times, transfer it to a game that doesn’t have those physics and I don’t think anybody would be interested.
Much like TWW above I have said this before, content is what makes a game great + stand the test of time, Silent Hill 2 is still talked about 22 years on and is being remade (though I think it will lose the magic), it’s moment to moment gameplay is janky as hell, the camera often causes problems and once you know what to do it can be completed in less than 3 hours.
But those can be overlooked when the content within is of such high quality, there’s only so far polished gameplay + tip top graphics can take any game if you mess up on the content.
I mean imagine playing FH4 or FH5 as an offline player, no championships available to you at all, only being able to race AI, no new cars, no Playground Games, no Eliminator, no Rivals, no Arcade, no downloading designs/tunes, no leaderboards for stunts and there’s probably other aspects I’ve missed out.
Even with the fantastic physics + graphics you would be mostly relying on the game’s core content to keep you entertained, how long do you think any of us could stomach that experience for?
Since the last expansion has released i personally could care less even if they stopped supporting the game tomorrow. There’s so much more they could do with post launch but even that in itself has a certain longevity. It cant last forever.
I think its also the racing genre itself. Lets compare it to games outside of it. There’s no way you could compare an mmo rpg something like - dota, league, smite or shooters like cs go , valorant and so on… to the kind of post launch and “sustainability” the racing games get to have. But that is sort of what is expected. They have a bigger audience, bigger budgets. Racing titles require probably a lot more licencing. And in its core these games have so much more replayability. No game ever feels the same. You could jump in on the same map , on the same gamemode 1000 different times and it will always be a different experience. In the racing games genre we just dont have that.
For example ive played smite for years. This game changes so much. Just between a month, a few months of updates or a year its just no racing game ever gets this kind of treatment. Same with the shooters. Forza horizon 5 at launch and forza horizon 5 now is simply more forza. What have they done to shakeup the gameplay? They havent shaken up the gameplay in yeears. Years. When a new forza horizon game releases people always critisze it for being just another clone.
I havent touched Smite in a year and the game has changed so much already im gonna need 100s of hours before i get up to speed with everything. And im constantly fed content in abundance, i constantly have new things to look forward to, new features or whatever.
In forza we wait a month to get the same festival playlist in an already samey horizon game. Donut media took them like what over 10 months since it was announced to be made into the game? And the content is basically a few cars and a horizon story.
Racing games simply dont have that replayability. Obviously some do better than others but still overal its apples and oranges. Not reached End of life but even if it did i doubt it would make much of a difference since the current post launch feels like a gimmick.
)
“no such thing as bad press” mantra aside.
I seem to have derailed my own train of thought 
Ah well, I’ll just go yell at some kids on the lawn and mutter until I remember 
