The Ford GT HE has the V12 engine swap from a Lambo. It’s handling isn’t the greatest, but you can tune the handling so that even if the numbers don’t change, it does handle better than the stock tune. (I’ve spent countless Goliath races turning it for better handling and trying to get rid of the front end-hop. The Hop was minimized but otherwise a lost cause. It does handle a lot better now in RWD form though. A lot of small tweaks to just about every segment of the tuning menu helped and learning to kick the rear end out in the tight turns also helps).
The Devs don’t seem to realize that V8’s can make as much or more power, and sound better as well.
Another thing I’ve noticed is that instead of using a REAL turning radius, the faster the car goes, the less it turns. (The wheels turn less, so instead of turning the wheels at full radius and experiencing a plowing effect like you would on a FWD drive car, it reduces the radius of the turn. A cheap way to reduce handling). The more I play this game the more I realize it is not based on real physics at all but a bunch of hacks to achieve the “idea” of physics. This “Fake” Physics rears its ugly head when you take a car that has a 9.3 handling rating and realize that it ONLY handles that well when you let off the gas pedal.
Since the Drag Races are broken, just tune up a Mercury Coupe to the top of C class, and it will win every time. Unfortunately I don’t think they can fix this issue without removing the timer for lower classed cars as the problem is with the basic coding of FH3. Overall I think FH2 was better, though not great. There are still bugs with FH2 and FM6 that have never been fully fixed, including the Drivatar system. I had a Level 1 driver on my butt for a 6 lap Goliath race for pretty much the entire race on Pro the other night. It was laughable.
I was playing with the Aston Martin Vanquish last night (love this car IRL). And it was disgustingly quiet even with the race exhaust. The Mustang GT500, similarly so. Yet the GT350R sounded as it should. Half the reason why car nuts love cars is the sound of that exhaust. And these Developers just don’t seem to get that. Even the developers of Mad Max realized this so even the V6 engines sounded like V8’s, Which was disappointing (but I enjoyed the game even though it was basically Batman with a new skin). Jaguar specifically tunes its cars to let a little fuel enter the exhaust when you let off the peddle to give it those extra pops and burbles. They are non-existent in the game.
They need to start from scratch with the Horizon Series and maybe go to a three year development cycle like Ubisoft did with Assassin’s Creed.
Horizon is not a real Open World game. Even though they call it that, it’s really just a cheap way of saying “The campaign will be over in 2 days, because we’re lazy.”. Almost all of the side stuff you would normally do after the campaign is over is broken in some form or fashion. It “Technically” works, but is broken in such a way that it takes all the fun out of bothering with it.
What I can’t figure out is why the Ferrari F40 with a handle rating of 8.3 and a speed rating of 8.0 turns above 150mph like it has a handling rating of 7. The cars just aren’t true to form (I bought this car because I’m waiting for the Porsche Expansion Pack, hopefully it will include the Porsche 959 which was the F40’s main competitor in the 80’s.).
Last thing. I’d almost rather every car in the game remain true to its RL stats. Maybe I just need to go back to FM6.
That said, almost all of the cars need to be customized to get the most out of them. Some will never hit the rev limiter even all out on a long stretch, leaving as much as 1.5k revs on the table. Shorter gearing can fix this. Others like the Pagani will be bouncing off the rev limiter to the point that it is completely annoying. Which means it’s got a lot more power to give, but the gearing is wrong.
Don’t even get me started on turning every car into AWD to be competitive with the leader boards.