Holy Wall of Text, Batman! Too long, didn’t read.
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Short attention span or just poor reading skills?
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Neither. Thanks for your concern. LOL
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Some Rivals leaderboards are already ghost towns as it is, with barely 200-300 or so times set.
Randomised Traffic is part of Street Scene, that’s integral part of it making it different from Road Racing. I somewhat understand the frustration, it needs more patience than Road events, but no one is forced to enter in Street Scene Rivals.
I have written before in similar topics how I feel it’s weird how little they did with seasons.
First the good things
This month Trial is good example how variable route design can add to experience. Lakehurst Forest Sprint. Last segment which is snow covered is really fun with S1. There are other examples on Derwent Reservoir Trail and the Marathon in Street Scene and Lake District Sprint in Road Racing (though latter shares segment(s) with Reservoir Trail and the Marathon).
Visually it’s really refreshing to have seasons.
There are other bit and pieces mentioned in topic, but in they are so few end it feels like winter is a bit of wasted opportunity. They could have also designed some crazy challenges like on Blizzard Mountain expansion to FH3 by creating more winter exclusive routes, a lot could have been done with props, but all we got was one Drag race on lake.
Autumn / Spring / Summer are very similar, only difference being where it rains and where it doesn’t.
Options:
Spring, why all the ice needs to disappear at once? There could be packed ice formation on Derwent Lake, creating natural bridge over it, Spring exclusive route that could be Dirt or Cross Country, though hopping on some ice rafts could create better extreme CC experience, so why not both?
Autumn, there could be more done with weather dynamics, having some ice and sludge appear on routes blueprinted to night / early morning.
There are more possibilities than those, some appeared on Community/Developer custom championships on Playlist when we still used to get those, but I think everyone gets the idea. Seasons make some things possible, but there’s no content that takes advantage of those opportunities.
I like seasons, but I agree that they can feel somewhat redundant, visual addition.
Developer is Playground Games, though MP and Horizon share car models and engine, what other role Turn 10 has in this? Double seats?
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What I think, beside TL DR
Ow so many people have too much time on their hands.
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Given the global situation with pandemic, how exactly that comes as a surprise?
If you like the seasons like they are, why not tell what makes them work for you. Positive feedback is important too, no point in fixing what works.
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Hopefully FH5 will be set in summer only. That’s my feedback. Will help with the tedious loading times too.
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I agree OP, seasons were a waste, and forcing them on us is just plain wrong. The worst part though? Winter is too much of a compromise because it is forced on us. Blizzard mountain was a far, far, far superior winter. I’ll be very mad if seasons make a return in FH5.
What we need are biomes. Purpose built locations that suit each condition best. We could even somewhat keep the theme of seasons and have seasonal events each week focused on one of the biomes. Even if there are still loading screens and even if it did reduce the overall size, 4 purpose built maps would be a far better experience than 4 of the same map with a watered down experience on all.
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I agree it would be useful for that purpose. Would more than a handful of hardcore people use it for that though? I don’t know. I doubt it though.
Even now, a lot of the top rivals times are set using cars and tunes for that one track alone; ie. only suitable for perfect conditions, dry road, no other racers. In a series of races you would usually need a compromise car which can do a decent job in all circumstances, rather than being the absolute best car at all three tracks. (If you include freeroam rush then it would need to be even more of a compromise.)
We don’t have winter rivals now but we still know which cars are good and which aren’t. Knowing which one is 0.2 seconds quicker than another might be nice to know for some people but for the rest of us, the 99.9% majority, it doesn’t matter, particularly for races.
Why compromise?.. When we can actually have all? (“Drive Anytime”)
Feedback welcome.
Thus making the game worse overall and sells worse thereby? Sounds implausible…
But that’s apparently what has to be fixed in the future series…
Rather than using the new game as the test ground (which is no doubt gonna attract lots of attention), testing things first in a game that’s approaching its end of life seems wiser.
Bolstering the sales metrics should be of more use.
3 problems of “Custom Events”:
- Drivatards (not everyone wants a race)
- Checkpoints & Wrong Way Reset (intrusive design)
- Lack of Traffic
But what if things improved with perfect backward compatibility?..
Old players can still enjoy the game in the way they get used to, undisturbed; while new capabilities are added to enable new possibilities, for those who seek a change, and potential new players.
What has been troubled me: Core of the game?..
1 major difference is the lack of icy (frozen) road surfaces, thus the overall compromised driving experience.
The same also applies to the enforced weather. (downplayed aquaplaning effect in wet conditions)
I think a hybrid of open world and non-open world would be the perfect solution.
Somewhat related:
Hmm?.. But does this aid the game’s sales?
Probably related: Core of the game?..
So they can make themselves out of the business in an unprecedented speed?..
We enjoy the game differently. Nothing spectacular.
Negligibly I fear… It’s not a main factor.
…It’s merely the fact that nothing enjoys parsing a bunch of text walls.
Thus the famous saying: “Garbage in, garbage out”. (no offence intended)
This sort of data cost little storage.
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Personally, I like the seasons. FH4 is two games for me…one are the weekly forzathon challenges which I do with a controller to save up points for those rare cars I missed or struggle with unlocking.
The second is the cruising aspect, for that I use my wheel and it becomes a much ‘harder’ game, mostly with a wheel I can’t easily drive 3rd person and I struggle to recover from spins…aka: more realistic so you have to drive more consciously depending on what car you’re in. With a controller I can do first/third person and drift/slide to my hearts content. I know some people at Playground must be fans of the last two Project Gotham Racing games because they have nailed that feeling perfectly, including the weather/night effects…and that in my humble opinion was the best racing on any console up to that point (arcade-ish racing, that is). Horizon scratches that itch.
What I personally want, and I think everyone wants this, is more surface area and more roads. Having 1 stretch of superhighway and 1 lengthy route ‘around’ is simply not enough. I get why they make the Fortune Island map but, again, when 75% of your cars are for road and track…why not have more road and track. If Lego had been “Motorsports Island” with some built-in track layouts…why, would anyone have been disappointed? Motorsports Island with tracks and then roads connecting the tracks.
Personally I’m not a huge fan of having mostly “open hoonigan space and dirt roads” everywhere, I’d be putting more tarmac down and more elevation changes, but FH4 is very much a more interesting game than FH3. Tried to go back to FH3, was amazed at how little road there was in that game and how quickly you could get around the map without trying very hard and how utterly flat it was, you can only race through the subtropical jungle area so many times before going “damn I wish this was the entire half of the map”… Also forgot how hard the trees are down in 'stralia 
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Here is my take then.
I really enjoy winter, I love driving in snow or rain - fast (IRL and in game).
I like it that I can enjoy and experience all season in only a month.
I also like to build my car to drive well on snow, not just in perfect sunny dry conditions.
Lastly I’m here to have fun and FH4 as is provides for me.
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Nobody here is complaining about winter though, it’s how little the difference is with the other 3 when it was the main thing this game shouted about before release.
Adding to that is how the championships and online races have pre-determined conditions so can make the seasons feature even more pointless, there’s been summer events in the rain before now and online adventure can take place in any season.
I doubt anyone’s going to base their decision of buying FH5 on whether seasons is present or not.
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From the OP (and I could quote even more ranting about winter if I wanted!)
“Not sure if it’s true, but I heard that 2/3rds of the playerbase disappear during winter. If it is, I’m not surprised one bit. Winter is the bane of my enjoyment with this game.”
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He’s in the minority then, winter’s the only one where this feature is any degree of worthwhile.
I rather ignored OP after reading it once, that was enough despite agreeing with parts of it.
Still don’t think the feature is much use though overall, like someone previously mentioned my bet is that it was more likely made to fit around it’s trash ‘I can’t be bothered to make a lasting bug free game for release’ live service model, not to enhance the game.
This! 100%. (Except the “IRL” part, which is dangerous)
You do know there are car races in the snow and on the ice, 100% legal and “safe.” They are in a controlled environment.
That’s why we’re seeking for a bit of transcendence: “Better than the Real Life”.
It needs deeper snow and white-out blizzards!
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I rather like the seasons. They are easy enough, quick to do, but still provide some challenge, you get to mix things up a bit, and get new cars.
The only two things I don’t like are the playground games and the time factor.
The playground games are just boring and they take entirely too long. Just make them single game at least, I don’t think you could find more than a handful of people in all of Forzadom that actually enjoy forced random grouping best of 5. It’s just a time sink, the gaming world has much better time sinks…
The time factor is much less of an issue but I do think it would be nice to have a catch up or something similar. People go out of town have busy weeks etc. The game has enough cars now that it could be a very long time before one someone missed shows back up as a reward again.
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