Don’t get me wrong, Forza Horizon 5 is also a great game, I have played it myself once and it was a great game, however, after I started playing FH3 as early as yesterday on my PC, I was very surprised by how good FH3 was despite being an almost 10 year old game.
One bad thing I must say is that I could not find anyone playing on the PC version, servers must be long dead since Forza Horizon 4, Forza Horizon 5 and Forza Motorsport 2023 (or as I like to call it, Forza Motorsport 8 because it acts more as a very buggy sequel to FM7 than to a “built from the ground up” game) are now, and still are the most popular entries in the franchise.
The FH3 PC servers have been broken for a couple of years now…the Xbox servers still work fine (as far as I am aware anyway)…PGG refuse to fix them, even though they say they will keep online connectivity for legacy games. I highly doubt they will ever return.
As to it being better than FH5, that would be subjective. FH3 has it’s positives: Car handling is not a smooth and so you feel the conditions much more; map is definitely better; online is better in the sense that it rewards good driving (as opposed to FH5 which rewards bad driving and penalises someone who is driven into); custom championships (FH5 would be infinitely better with that but PGG refuse to add it for unknown reasons). FH5 has the graphics, playlist, better UI.
Yeah I fully agree with your statement, the fact that I think FH3 is better than FH5 is a matter of what my thoughts are, I played both as I said, and I see the clear differences between both of them, including the pros and cons (like the handling of FH3 and the online multiplayer from FH5 like you mentioned)