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Which is weird as FH is BC. I have a x369 disc and it works fine on Series One S so should also be OK on Series X though I haven’t fired it up on the X yet.
Thankfully I’ve got a Series One disc version of FH2 so should be OK on the X too…
FH and FH2 are both backwards compatible on Series X.
I just booted up both to be sure (I knew FH was, but wasn’t sure about FH2). I have the digital versions, so if you own the original discs, those should be BC as well?
Also, I thought going back to 30fps would be jarring, but the main thing that made a lot of 30fps games bad is older hardware couldn’t maintain consistent frame pacing. With modern hardware, that’s a non-issue, and the performance is smooth as glass. Yes, 60fps and above is ideal, but if the frame pacing is consistent, 30fps is perfectly playable… Even in a racing game like Forza Horizon, that’s primarily single player focused at this point in time.
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Must be a joke!
Maybe someone can create simple script Bugreport->“Won’t Fix or By Design” so we get faster “reply” to our reports
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Yes, but it is FH2 for X360 which is not backwards compatible
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I watched the video all the way through to the end. All I saw was him ranking racing games based on his opinions of what he thinks is a sim or less than a sim down to arcade. It’s very clear he’s a wheel/pc racer first, xbox biased second, ps third gamer. Which is fine.
But I didn’t get anything out of the video about “what” defines a sim.
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He’s a sim racer, he participates in most of the biggest events in that genre and most of his content is based in the racing games of it, he doesn’t need to explain the how and why when he’s experienced all the games in that list and has played the majority of the ones he classes as sims more than almost everyone.
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Don’t forget, he also races professionally IRL as well, winning the Praga Cup in 2022 and placing 5th in the Brittcar Endurance Championship in 2021.
So if you’re going to look for someone who can compare IRL vs Sim, I would say he has the experience to do so accurately.
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This is one of those discussions that can get really in-depth, but it also depends entirely on what a developer chooses to prioritize as well.
I will say, however, one of the main (technical) things racing game developers have consistently done over the years to make sims/sim-lite racers different from arcade racers is most arcade racers let you turn without braking and still maintain your speed, more or less.
If you’re approaching a corner IRL, you brake, and then start your turn. When you brake, you slow down, even if it’s a smooth deceleration using ABS. You make the turn (crest the apex), and then increase power as you exit the corner. This is how real life physics work, and this what many sims and simcades try and replicate to some degree, or another. They promote players having to have an awareness of, and use different skills like throttle control, braking thresholds and other aspects of real racecraft.
Compare this to arcade racers where you can turn without having to brake and still maintain your speed.
Most arcade racers focus on simplifying the skills needed to race competitively (against AI or humans) in order to promote the overall fun of going 120MPH around a track, or through city streets. It’s also why most casual racing game fans just like to “Put the pedal to the medal”, and don’t care about anything else… Because the game is purposefully designed to where they don’t have to worry about anything else other than going fast.
We most often associate arcade racing games with things like “wall riding” and the general physics of the cars resembling “bumper cars” because that’s what the driving consists of because of not having to brake, lose speed, and/or having a very forgiving damage model… Because it’s fun, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
On the other hand, as we’ve also been discussing, sims can sometimes go overboard trying to prove they’re “the most realistic simulation of driving ever” when they would actually be better games if they took a “less is more” approach. Some of this is technical… Like trying to have the most advanced tyre model with X number of data points running at Y number of Hz… Where devs get too caught up in the forest for the trees. Yeah, it’s great if these games are uber realistic, but it doesn’t matter one bit if they aren’t fun to play (dirve), and/or often times have tons of outstanding bugs that keep getting pushed back in the quest for “realism”.
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Or the quest of marketing and income…
In the grand scheme of things. To the above quote I say!
The buck stops here!
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@FTLFAM that’s a great explanation of the braking differences between the game types and I can totally agree with your breakdown of the braking. 
And it’s a good start for further discussion.
But I stand by my previous comment of the buck stopping on the “fun” factor. Currently, FH5 and FM7 have failed miserably in the fun factor. And TC2 is winning the day.
So as Adam Savage says, “I reject your reality and substitute my own”.
A bigger discussion (we’ve touched on briefly, but can expand on) is how the availability & growth of the internet has shaped not just the video game industry, but modern racing games in particular, for better or worse.
Coincidentally, I watched a video by a content creator who does retrospectives on gaming in general, and he chose to focus on racing games because it’s his favorite genre, supposedly.
I’m not going to link the video, or name him, because while it was well researched and presented, it boiled down to the same old, “Back in my day, racing games were so much better than the corporate cash grab crap that’s released today!”, you see from every Millennial who waxes nostalgic about the “hey day” of racing games e.g. NFS Most Wanted, Burnout, earlier FM and GT games, etc. They also covered sim titles and how this subgenre is (supposedly) struggling, too. The video was 30 minutes long, and really milked the ad algorithm, but I digress.
While he is free to express his opinion on what he feels the current state of racing games is…
What he didn’t acknowledge is how the always online aspect of PCs and consoles caused a major shift in how many games are not only released (half-finished, patch it later), but designed from the ground up. This applies double to the racing genre because no longer do studios just release a racing game and be done with it.
Games As a Service (Live Service) mandates by publishers have forced many racing games to be more than just games about racing. They have to have “something” to not only attract the casuals, but keep them coming back for more, week after week (to spend money on microtransactions, buy DLC, etc.)… Even if there isn’t enough content to support this kind of perpetual model.
One would think racing literally hundreds of cars on different tracks, or open world locations would be the perfect model for a Live Service game… Except there comes a point where players have raced every car on every track, or open world location and just get bored.
What about multiplayer?
Multiplayer has its limits… Especially, in arcade and sim-lite racers where the general quality of those racing has a lot to be desired. This is exacerbated if the game doesn’t have any kind of system that awards clean racing, or discourages dirty racing.
So, while players running out of things to do is inevitable, developers are always given the impossible task of figuring out ways to keep them engaged that have nothing to do with racing cars.
This is Forza Horizon’s biggest problem (aside from its numerous bugs), and Forza Motorsport, to a lesser extent. And it’s due mainly to gaming becoming more mainstream, but also because publishers have shifted to an always online model that can provide near perpetual revenue that wasn’t there when older, primarily single player focused racing titles like NFS Most Wanted, were released.
I guarantee you, if NFS Most Wanted released today… EA would find a way to turn the post-campaign play into a Live Service filled with loot boxes and other egregious practices gamers have come to despise in the last decade. That is, if they actually believed in, and supported the franchise compared to the reality of today where NFS is on life support, and Unbound, may or may not receive any more post-release updates.
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Don’t forget the events over the last few years have caused a boom in sim racing never before seen. Lockdowns kept people at home and while at home some of those people needed something to do, a large number turned to sim racing as a time filler. Many actual racing governing bodies turned to sim racing to replace significant events on their calendar. Indy, Daytona, Spa, Le Mans and a number of others held “online” events that showed the unaware that there was this whole other world of racing that they could get involved with. Peripheral companies like Fanatec, Moza, etc. have seen record profits because of this.
Now that the world is starting to get back to normal (sort of). Some of those people are sticking around, but many have gone back to what they were doing before 2019.
With the “fun” argument you keep making, that’s all fine for the casual gamer, but those who look for and pursue sim racing the fun is had in competition, lap times, and doing something they couldn’t do IRL (due to costs and other things), race cars on a track. Not everyone into racing is “Wow, look at that sick drift Bro!” or “These graphics are amazing”, their focus is on lap times, finding their groove.
As Ken Miles (albeit from a movie) put it, “If you’re going to push a piece of machinery to the limit, and expect it to hold together, you have to have some sense of where that limit is. Look out there. Out there is the perfect lap. No mistakes.”
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That’s great and all until you have incompetency ruining the entire thing (like LeMans Virtual 2023)
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The issues with rFactor2 are well known, it’s also why I avoid using it specifically as an example. Granted, the stupidity flows deep throughout the company and the people involved with the event (I.P. readily available through the link in steam for the event). On top of that, DDoS attack had to come from somewhere outside the group.
I vehemently disagreed with that content creator who I vaguely mentioned above when he asserted sim racing is struggling the same (if not more) as other racing genres.
Of course, he used the rFactor2 virtual Le Mans fiasco as his example when those of us in the know already knew it (the game) is not the best example of sim racing by a long shot. Car setup exploits, poor connections, etc. rFactor2 is the exception to the rule rather than the rule the way he portrayed it.
Sim racing does a far better job at what most other racing games should be doing and that is focusing on the racing itself. The degree they do, or don’t achieve this may be subjective, but as a whole, if I want pure racing and to focus on the more skill-based aspects, nothing beats it. This goes for single player and especially, MP, where most sims have driver and safety ratings that foster (in theory) more grown up and “professional” racing environments.
Except, it most definitely is, the barrier to entry for most classes is far too high, some are luckier than others
GT3/4? You’re lucky, you just need to get ACC for 20$, no additional payment needed after buying the game
V8 Supercars? Good luck, you’ll get to pay multiple 10s of dollars monthly, for one class, want to drive other classes, prepare to pay up even more, also monthly.
Compare that to Forza Horizon 5, where you pay 50-100$ and get the full experience, all classes included.
If FH was like Sim Racing, prepare to pay monthly for the game and pay monthly on-top to use the 488 Challenge, then more on-top to use Retro Rally cars
Even if it isn’t, how many people know that, they see Max Verstappen, F1 Champion complaining about an officially sanctioned event, how many of those are people in the know? Most people don’t know and probably don’t care about Simracing, they were there for Max Verstappen, and when they see a livid Max Verstappen, you believe they’ll de-rank Simracing in their minds and think less of the category.
And yet, Forza Horizon 5, a game which doesn’t focus on racing, blows any Sim-racing game out of the water in terms of Players. Which shows, if anything, that pure realistic racing games (unless it’s Gran Turismo or Forza, the most varied and accessible ones) are not going to go above and beyond outside of their niche
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Why does a genre that focuses on doing something well have to appeal to, or even be readily accessible to everyone who isn’t even interested in the one thing the genre does well to begin with?
This is like saying, “Unless fighting games become more mainstream, they’ll never grow above and beyond their niche audience.”
Fighting games are one of the most niche genres out there, but they are also one of the most financially successful ones because they consistently focus on what they do best instead of trying to be something they’re not in order to “grow beyond their niche”.
This very issue is plaguing a lot of racing games, the Forza series in particular. Forza is no longer about racing because Xbox is trying to grow beyond its niche, but in all the worst ways. This is the problem. But the franchise isn’t struggling financially, which makes it a double-edged sword, and almost a Chicken/Egg scenario.
Mainstream racing games like Forza Horizon focus on superfluous stuff like virtual avatar clothing and Dopamine dispensers like Wheel Spins, or how F1 2023, added super cars in a very limited & underdeveloped mode. Many racing games aren’t playing to their core strengths. Instead, they’re trying to appeal to a larger audience who A) Don’t care about cars/car culture, and B) Aren’t going to stick around long term no matter how much Xbox, or EA tries to make their racing games not about racing, ironically.
Forza Horizon is a victim of its own success (and not having any viable competition in the space).
It’s why this thread exists. The series has reached an all-time low where game breaking bugs in single player and MP are preventing players of all skill levels and interests from enjoying the game to its fullest potential… Because PGG has concentrated on the wrong things in an effort to make this a non-offensive, family friendly game Vs. a game about car culture that just might also touch on things like illegal street racing, or the actual thrill of competition in favor of superfluous participation trophies (Accolades).
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I find it interesting that you removed that part about “not meaning to sound elitist” in later edits.
Eh, not really, take Street Fighter, the last game in that series was Street Fighter V, in 2016, which got… mixed reviews, with most outlets calling it “average [i.e. 7/10]” and it missing sales targets in it’s first fiscal year, with it only selling 1.5 Million Units (FH5 in the same timeframe had 10-15 Million players, they’d beat that if only 10-15% of all players bought the game outright back then) by the end of FY 2016.
In fact, the only fighting game i can think of that is really mainstream right now, is Super Smash Bros. Ultimate for the Switch, and that has the benefit of featuring many many characters from other popular franchises in it, you, of course, have Nintendo Characters (Mario, Fox McCloud, Kirby, etc.) in it, but then you also have characters from popular non-Nintendo franchises in there (Minecraft’s “Steve”, Persona’s Joker, SEGA’s Sonic the Hedgehog, etc.), which all drives sales to over 30 Million Units so far, beating Street Fighter 4x and Tekken 3x.
For a game like Forza Horizon to grow beyond racing makes sense though, like it or not, racers are only one small part of the community now, you have Drifters, Car Meeters, Cruisers, Stunters, Photographers, Designers and more. Racing isn’t everything anymore, it needs to share it’s space with other things in the game.
First, Wheelspins aren’t anything new, Gran Turismo 3 did those 20 years ago, second, clothing items aren’t that superfluous, it’s a natural evolution of racing games to allow you to customize how the person that’ll stand on the top of the podium looks, especially in a game as broad as Horizon and third, it is normal to try to appeal a game to new audiences that don’t inherently care about racing games, it’s the way anything in the world grows.
Is it really? The next Crew game looks like an almost carbon-copy of FH5, with a few changes in it, NfS has fallen off the face of the earth over the last decade, TDU: SC still doesn’t have any public gameplay under a year from it’s launch, there’s a very good reason FH5 is the only super successful game in the genre, and it’s not because they stayed complacent and forever stuck trying to chase 2005.
Again though, that effort has worked out, with it being much more successful than Unbound or Heat (until it was discounted so far that you could not not buy it), but they are also trying to touch on different facets of car culture, they’re bringing in a Group B rally car, a WRC Rally car, many different classes of Offroaders, from a Baja Beetle to full-on Trophy Trucks, and that’s only the next month. Previously, they also focused on Classic and Vintage Pre-WWII Race Cars, TCR cars, Supercars, Classic Rallye cars, British classics, and so on and so fort. If they didn’t do that and just lasered in on what the community wanted, we’d have a one-faceted game without anything else, and that’s 90s JDM culture, which other games have already done a well-enough job of representing in the past.
Also, no one’s taking the thrill of competition away from you, there are many communities around the web that can provide you with other players also looking for what you want.
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Some of these comments should be published as books they are so long.
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