Let it burn on it’s own fuel as the devs just pour gasoline on this atrocity.
1 Like
I just wanted to thank the devs at PG and Turn10 for not addressing the glaring shortcomings of the multiplayer experience. Had you fixed multiplayer, I would have continued to spend hours each day tuning cars and practicing, as I had done with FH3, and I wouldn’t have moved on to other really amazing racing games such as Redout (I’m a Wipeout and F-Zero fan), Grip, and Wreckfest. It doesn’t matter how much I tune and how much I perfect a driving line if some prepubescent sodium fluoride addled player proceeds to ream me at each and every chance they get and ride all of the walls because that’s how they think racing games are meant to be played.
It seems that there is some confusion here, is your core constituency the growing chorus of unsatisfied players, voting in the vocal majority here and on the other 69 page thread that you locked in an attempt to hide (and then came to your senses after the fact and opened this thread here) the players that have been with Forza Horizon since it’s inception and who want an approximation of the sim that Forza is but in a multiplayer setting who dropped $100 on the Ultimate version of FH4 or do you think that your playerbase are the Fortnite players, who, might get the game on sale, play it for a few weeks, and then promptly uninstall it and move on?
We’ve asked you to take actual polls, here and at Twitter and elsewhere:
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Do you think the main mode of Forza Horizon 4 should be ghost only?
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Do you think that wall-riding should be fixed?
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Do you think that a point / reputation system, i.e. Gran Turismo Sport should be implemented?
But you refuse to do that.
And now youre telling us that a version of Ghost only adventure might be available 2-3 updates from now as an available mode. Does more cosmetic nonsense have priority over bleeding YOUR CORE CONSTITUENCY? Does the inclusion of cartoonish, clown Final Fantasy cars have priority over this?
Have you lost your mind?
Check it out. I’m a FH3 veteran, my old handle was “UltimateBanjo27”, I played clean and tuned my cars to perfection and was addicted to that game. I was so excited for FH4 that I foolishly pre-purchased the Ultimate Edition, thinking that it would not only build upon FH3 but that it would also address the unsportsmanlike, borderline troll behavior: the ramming and wall riding that was already a problem then (the ramming in Surfers Paradise and wall riding at Highway Circuit was particularly bad). We brought that to your attention then and instead of addressing it with a point / reputation system via GT Sport you not only made it a central design feature but added insult to injury with stupid, and I do mean stupid, avatars, all of whom only represent one age group (the 17-19 “I just got my drivers license!” group). I’m 40, a combat veteran with mild PTSD and a few other minor issues, I grew up with the original Gran Turismo and then grew into the original Forza, which was built on the concept of Gran Turismo. Clean racing that rewards high skill and tuning makes for a great racing game. A game where you can win by rear-ending other players at hairpins, ramming everyone out of checkpoints, wall riding and then driving in a straight line clear across the map as fast as you can (free roam rush) isn’t a racing game. This is a joke. An absolute disgrace. Where is my age group represented among the avatars? Nowhere. Not only do I NOT want an avatar to begin with but there isn’t even one that remotely represents my demographic. You know what players think of the avatars? Why don’t you add that to your poll questions? You didn’t ask us what we wanted with FH4, you just shoved all of this crap down our throats and we are now here in the near unanimous majority telling you that but you not only refused to listen but you are continuing to thumb your nose at us with more stupid crap, i.e. Final Fantasy Car taking priority over fixing this mess of a game.
Do you think the Fortnite casuals are going to line up to pre-order FH5 Ultimate at $100? LOL. No man, you just ruined a great IP. It’s done. I’m not getting FH5, no way in hell. I mean I might get it if all of the above is addressed on sale 6 months or so after release but yeah, youre not getting another $100 out of me and you can rest assured that I did indeed try to get a refund for FH4. That’s what I think of this game. I tried to get a refund. The only reason it’s not off of my hard-drive is because I have a sliver of curiosity to try a ghost only adventure mode with wall riding addressed, and hopefully some kind of point / reputation system i.e. GT Sport in 2 or 3 updates / months.
Here’s how smart ghosting can be implemented, it’s not that difficult: Gran Turismo Sport│Bricking It: First Multiplayer Race! - YouTube
If you continue to ram other players like in that video it affects your reputation and youre placed with other players with a similar reputation. Meaning, all of the mentally challenged players whose concept of a racing game is rear ending other players at full speed at hairpins, wall riding, and ramming get placed with other players whose concept of racing game is rear ending other players at full speed at hairpins, wall riding, and ramming. Those who race clean are placed with others who race clean. What a concept!
Instead of a game that rewards skill we have this:
What else.
Ah yes, the music, everyone has it turned off, how about updating the track roster, making it so that we can COMPLETELY disable the in-game music (tired of it blaring over the own music I have to play externally in place of the in-game music around areas of the tracks with spectators, at a Festival site, and Forzathon events and at the end of races, where only like 3 or 4 songs play over and over again.
And other quality of life improvements could be made. How does FH4 compare to Test Drive Unlimited, a game from 2004?
Look at that, you have control of the y axis with interior camera and you can customize your interior! What a concept!
I have no idea how this game received so much critical acclaim, it’s obvious the reviewers spent a single weekend with it and didn’t attempt any multiplayer nor actually looking at it’s shortcomings by simply comparing it to a game from 15 years ago.
But yeah, if it’s one point I want to drive home it’s that I won’t be purchasing another Forza anything titles from here on out short of you miraculously addressing the ramming, wall riding and unsportsmanlike behavior at absolute minimum.
I still can’t believe I spent $100 on this garbage.
19 Likes
It’s the whole ideia of games as a service. You buy the game now and maybe the devs will finish it 1 year later. What an amazing concept.
Even more amazing is that some people here defend this practice.
How about releasing a complete game at launch? Nah. That would be pretty silly.
7 Likes
I only bought the standard edition of fh3 and I enjoyed racing in custom lobbies d/c/b/a so much, I think I have around 6-700 hours. I opted to buy the ultimate edition of fh4 for £80, I have never spent that much money on a game before. I have not even launched the game since November because whats the point, I don’t enjoy anything it has to offer anymore.
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All about the mighty $ unfortunately. Now we’re expected to pay for something that may or may not work 10 months down the line. Didn’t people use to receive money to test games?
Some developers get it right with DLC, tweaks, etc, but this game has been an insult.
Well said, PUR MANA CATMAN. I agree 100%.
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No it’s the new “game as a service” development model where a game that has just enough of the basics to be considered a working title is released at full price, then, the developer takes said money and decides whether or not they want to continue to develop the rest of the game. In this case, it appears that Turn 10 / PG / Microsoft have decided to take the money and sit on it because the fixes and quality life changes that we are asking for are already features that are locked away behind code within the game itself, and, as per the developer post above, would only take maybe a working day or two at the most to implement. I mean, if they can’t pay a single developer to sit down and unlock “Select Race Class, Surface Type, Contact / No Contact Adventure Mode”, fix all of the problems I enumerated in my previous long winded post here (start with the unskippable 30 second “TURN 10! and MICROSOFT STUDIOS!” at 100 decibels (mind numbing and maddening, knowing that for all of the games in my entire 100+ Steam and Origin libraries combined I can disable or outright delete this nonsense) splash video. They can’t even start with that? But they can implement stupid, and I do mean Stupid, avatars, all of whom represent only one demographic.
It’s insult to injury.
It’s literally them saying:
“Yeah, you know what, not only are we not going to address the stupid unskippable 30 second intro splash videos that you’ve been complaining about for a long time, but we are also going to do a “game as a service” development, releasing the game with zero single player progression structure (and tell you that it’s because we care about player freedom), a broken multiplayer (how long did we have the reviled “Team Adventure”, 4 months, sorry but racing isn’t a team sport) and to top it all off we are going to infantalize you with avatars that you can prance around in!”
And then we are going to pretend that none of this is a problem, and we are also going to attempt to lock your 69 page comment thread and then try to get everyone to keep the criticism away from the public eye with someone whose job is supposed to be as an ambassador between the player-base and the devs but who is really employed solely to hide criticism from a potential customer:
https://forums.forza.net/turn10_postst133563p59_-ANSWERED--Horizon-4-Online-Play---See-end-post.aspx
Not only was this thread locked but it’s title was changed from “Forza Horizon 4 Online Multiplayer is a Huge Disappointment” to “Horizon 4 Online Play”.
I mean, correct me if I’m wrong, but if a forum member refrains from using profanity, where is it stated that a moderator has the right to edit how we title a thread we create?
Then, after the successor thread (this one) explodes with a resounding, near unanimous chorus of the same message:
We want, immediately:
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Ghost only adventure, if not primary, then a mode we can select.
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Disincentivize ramming, there is no risk reward for this mechanic. You can rear end other players and not incur any kind of risk. In Wreckfest, a game that you can actually try to spin opponents out and push them off the track whilst racing, if youre too aggressive, say rear ending an opponent at full speed as they brake for a tight turn, you risk damaging your engine, ruining your steering, blowing a radiator, or losing a wheel (like in real life) where you hit them also matters. But in this game there is no downside to reaming your opponents at every remove. I mean at minimum there should be a time penalty. To add insult to injury they removed any kind of point system incentive for clean racing that was present in FH3. Now its win at all costs, and there is zero risk to ramming everyone every chance you get.
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You should NOT be able to go faster by wall riding than actually, you know, having a driving line, braking, accelerating smoothly, etc. Anyone can hold down the right trigger button and aim any car in some general direction and win in this game: https://youtu.be/IkklY7CGqfU
I mean that video right there should result in the immediate uninstalling of the game by anyone with any dignity who enjoys a racing game. You can’t win unless you do that right there. How this made it into the final beta that we are still beta testing is beyond me because the wall riding and ramming was something we were already complaining about with FH3 and hoping they would address with FH4 but instead they built the game around both wall riding and ramming.
But they did include those avatars you can dress up like clowns!
Yeah!
A game built around wall riding and ramming and you can have a prancing avatar!
Feel infantilized yet?
This is what Turn 10 / Playground Games / Microsoft thinks of the Forza Horizon playerbase, that we are all complete morons, incapable of experiencing an open world racing game without ramming, wall riding and stupid avatars that we can dress up like clowns and prance around.
https://forums.forza.net/turn10_postst134288_Horizon-4--too-avatar-centered.aspx
Does anyone like them?
That the devs wasted a single minute of development time on this absolute nonsense crockery meanwhile they couldn’t allow us to skip the 30 second long TURN 10 and MICROSOFT STUDIOS at 100 decibels splash videos, couldn’t figure out how to not delete my settings with each update (PC), couldn’t figure out how to not address constant disconnects from Horizon Life, and apparently didn’t listen to feedback from FH3, at all, makes my blood boil.
https://www.reddit.com/r/forza/comments/a1o0nj/a_simple_solution_to_get_rid_of_wallriding_back/
I mean, they are tone deaf.
Where did we create threads along the lines of “You know what this game (FH3) is missing? Avatars! Yeah this game is just perfect and peachy but could sure use some avatars!”
Just thinking about all of this makes me want to uninstall this crap off my SSD right now.
I swear to god, if they don’t have a fix for the wall riding and implement Ghost Only Adventure with the very next update this game is gone forever and I will never purchase another Forza anything title for the remainder of my life.
Too many amazing games out there from developers who actually listen to the playerbase to waste any more time with this game, Turn 10 and Playground Games.
To wrap this up I want to reiterate that what we have with FH4 is no different than what many unfortunate players have with Anthem, Fallout 76 and Mass Effect: Andromeda: games with tremendous potential (Anthem) and a strong history (ME and FO) ruined by corporate shortsightedness and greed with this new, abominable “game as a service model”.
Take your service model back to the dumpster of ideas from whence it was spawned, it’s an absolute spectacular failure.
It doesn’t work for an Operating System: https://www.extremetech.com/computing/279368-windows-10-1809-may-have-another-file-deleting-bug-problem
And it sure doesn’t work with video game development.
Releasing a beta and asking for people to pay for it, it’s ok for me as long as it is stated beta + the dev workforce is sized enough to make the game progress + customer voice is loud. This can be an acceptable concept for more accurate fitting of features to the customers expectations ( put money on feature that are needing it)
We had a beta that was never stated as being one, dev workforce is so few that they are hardly able to change a size value in months and priorities raised by customers are systematically pushed back after critical things like fixing the shacking tramway. Btw, the only fact that some dev dared spend sometime on such a thing is upsetting me.
Just a word about ramming, hope everyone has noticed that FFAA was considered as a cure and since that, ramming is totally and strictly out of staff’s vocabulary.
Personally I still playing the game my way, no ranked, no team unless invited by some mates. Same as Catman I am not a teenager anymore since so many years and FH4 sure helps a lot to lower addiction to FH compared to FH3.
Went to FH3 yesterday, 2 full championships, not rammed a single time, not a single time. Not forgetting the undeniable pleasure of selecting Custom adventure, S1, so good.
Yeah, from all my FH3 club, I am the single one who did not quit FH4 yet and half of them are not half my age. Ramming is so much frustration to them, they were going into war each time and finally decided to go back to FH3. That said to raise the fact it is not related to Age.
3 Likes
FFA has resulted in the biggest enjoyment and the biggest frustration. This weekend I had tons of joy. Finally made it back to the 3000s. The ramming is still an issue obviously but i’ve gotten more defensive. Thats not the best strategy when you wanna win but if you want to salvage 10+ points it might be best to let the dirty drivers pass you. I streamed most of the weekend so I couldnt record the most blatant example of dirty.
Driving along Marathon, maybe the last 20%, coming out of the hills, I was riding neck and neck with a 05’ Ford GT. I started to pull away in 6th gear and what does he do? Tried to knock me into a tree. I was able to avoid the tree but I hit a incline and did a full on barrel roll that I landed. Thank God for that because if I didnt finish at least 4th I would have lost the lobby. There is no other way to deal with these types except for ghosting. Maybe they can be penalized after the race but whats the point if I lose enough spots to drop out of 1st overall?
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Oh and how could I forget, just let us bypass that 30 second “Microsoft Studios” and “Turn 10” splash screen for crying out loud. I get that it may be there because XBOX One X’s comparatively anemic processor can’t load the game faster than that but there are those of us on PC with hardware that is magnitudes of order faster (i7 8700k @ 5.0 GHz here) or faster but we have no way to bypass that screen. Nearly all games have an unofficial way to bypass such annoying and lengthy splash screens by either editing a .ini or deleting the videos outright but because this is a Microsoft Store exclusive we don’t have access to the game’s folders to do either.
And while we are on the subject of editing the game settings via .ini, apparently the engineers at Turn 10 / PG Games are incapable of creating a .ini that is write protected through game updates because for each and every game update, and they come out every month, I have to redo all of my settings, some 10 or so specific settings such as uncapping the FPS beyond 25 or 30, turning Dynamic Optimization off, and turning some 8 or so settings from High to Ultra (except SSAO and Shadow Quality as there is next-to-no difference between the two levels and both carry a 2-3 FPS hit each at 3440x1440 (AW3418DW, 1900R curvature, IPS 120 Hz G-Sync: The ULTIMATE Gaming Monitor - Alienware AW3418DW - YouTube) with a GTX 1080 Ti @ 2025 Mhz under full water block and 1kw rad surface area.
I have to do this every time you update the game because you either cant or haven’t bothered to figure out how to write protect our local configurations through software updates.
I mean, seriously, these are glaring problems and annoyances (I’m truly serious about having to sit there for 30 seconds through mandatory, unbypassable splash screens, whilst simultaneously muting the audio) Ask anyone on PC if they are bothered by this, in all of your Forza titles and they will answer in the affirmative. The segment of us playing on PC is growing and we are paying a premium for content because it can’t be found on other platforms and seldom, if ever, goes on sale, and even then the sale price isn’t under $39. for a main Forza title.
Let’s compare shall we?
Since I put down FH4 for good about 3-4 months ago I have picked up three different, solid to exceptional racing games for less than $50 in total.
Redout Complete Edition: $20 on sale through Steam
Wreckfest, $20 on sale
Grip: $10 on sale
You ask for a premium yet you treat your playerbase like suckers / chumps / (insert expletive here). The only physical hardware analogy I can think of is how Apple treats it’s customer-base, with exorbitant price gouging (800% profit margin on all Apple products as of the past 5-10 years, particularly the Iphone) design things missing features that could be easily implemented because, hey that would mean hiring more engineers and developers and that would eat into that 800% profit margin!
As a company, you, Microsoft, can’t even manage to create an Operating System that isn’t a bug riddled mess.
I just tried to update from 1703 to 1809 to dry dark file explorer and I found a huge bug where I could no longer use the contextual menu’s of all task-bar items, meaning, I couldn’t bring them to the fore or even select them period without using Win+Tab.
And you can’t even design the console ports of your games to work correctly. I had a problem with FM7 where the game exhibited atrocious hitching, and I had the title on a relatively fast SATA SSD (850 Evo) with the aforementioned processor: https://forums.forza.net/turn10_postst128825p8_Forza-7-PC-stuttering.aspx?=
I’ve completely lost faith in both Microsoft as an OS developer: https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/287310-latest-windows-10-update-kills-performance-in-some-games
And I have nearly completely lost faith in Turn 10 and Playground Games, the competent and creative game developers (Playground Games > Turn 10) behind a formerly relatively treasured game of mine.
Forza Horizon 4 is completely, and I do mean completely (See the video comparing Test Drive Unlimited, a game from 2004, vs. Forza Horizon 4 in my previous post) half baked.
Period.
If this were a 3rd person shooter (Anthem) / adventure / RPG (Mass Effect: Andromeda) or FPS (Fallout 76) this game would have generated an uproar. But because it’s main shortcoming, the abysmal online multiplayer experience, was inaccessible to most-if-not-all reviewers with a large audience (Gamespot, PC Gamer, etc.) because multiplayer is inaccessible until a certain point in the single player progression, this glaring, absolutely unacceptable shortcoming isn’t mentioned in the rave reviews, none of which are updated. I mean it looks like you designed the game that way, that’s what the “conspiracy theorist” in me is shouting. Who buys racing or FPS games solely for the single player component, raise your hand (hardly any hands are raised). Add all of the problems above for those of us on PC and yeah, FH4 absolutely is right up there with now broken and half baked Anthem, ME:Andromeda and Fallout 76 were and still are.
The only way I will pick up the next addition to the series is if you address all of the issues in my previous post, and all of the ones above.
No?
Ok then no more money from me.
Vote with your wallets folks, youre being bamboozled.
4 Likes
Preach brother!
this has progressed to just plain sad
they need to stop doing dev streams because all they accomplish is making themselves look like a bunch of amateurs
the wall riding fix: Jesus its seriously going to take you another 3 months to fix. you can’t fix a bug you introduced by making (what should be )a simple change., stop trying to reinvent the wheel the mechanics to address the issue already exist they simply need a bit of tweaking to slow people down more to make it untenable
this is directed directly at the devs
its time to swallow your pride
ASK FOR HELP Goto whoever you need to goto and say look we can’t do this on our own we need help
at this stage, I am of the Opinion that they simply do not know what they are doing or are not familiar enough with the code to make any real changes because literally 90% of things on the big list of stuff people want are super duper easy fixes and they obviously can’t even do that
5 Likes
They said that a fix for wall riding is only coming in 3 months? You can’t be serious…
If you saw our last stream, we stated that we tried to get it within this update but couldn’t due to issues which appeared.
We are positively certain that we can get it in our next update following the stream next month.
There has been no mention of 3 months
1 Like
Cool. I was finding what he said hard to believe.
On a side note Krystal I don’t watch the streams. A lot of people don’t want to. Could you remind whoever is appropriate that you guys have something called “Forza Hub” where you can post info like that? Thanks in advance.
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I’ll believe it when I see it. So if the wallriding fix is in next update you may just win back some credibility. If not then there is no hope of regaining that.
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Im allready waiting next month just for to see what is their explanation if they still cant fix that.
3 Likes
Who even cares at this point? If it takes them this long to fix wallriding, imagine how long it will take them to implement a driver reputation matchmaking system.
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I agree with you, I’m a software developer and believe me, everything is ready, just adjust. For example: choosing classes S2, S1, A, B, C, D, voting for the next adventure, have already developed before and they have this function in their scripts bases. Adventure without touch or ghost mode, they already have this function, in only 8 hours of work they can develop and test this function. Why didn’t they add at least tires to the walls? They test on live streams using drivatars from developers because they do not do a live streaming playing in public lobby after the update? They do not play the game, if they actually played, we would have better results. Looking at the professional grid with great diplomas, but do not possess the simple, systemic vision and competence. Everything can be done quickly, one thing at a time, every sprint in the scrum method they use, one update per month, can divide all the tasks and complete them quickly, it is lack of will, or better: "We are not even there with what you think. "
2 Likes
TY.
[/quote]
It’s the whole ideia of games as a service. You buy the game now and maybe the devs will finish it 1 year later. What an amazing concept.
Even more amazing is that some people here defend this practice.
How about releasing a complete game at launch? Nah. That would be pretty silly.
[/quote]
I know, as I stated in my previous post, if this were Anthem, Fallout 76, or Mass Effect: Andromeda people would be up in arms, but because most of the game’s shortcomings relate to the multiplayer experience and are therefore inaccessible to a professional review because you have to progress to a certain point within the single player game to unlock MP none of the professional reviews issue due criticism for FH4 also employing the “Game as a service” model where a game is released maybe 50% complete at full price, and is patched, fixed and updated over the course of it’s life-span.
Agreed 100%. What is despicable is the fact that as recently posted, these features likely already exist within the game code and introducing them would literally be a matter of a few hours of coding.
On PC the unskippable splash videos in are really a nuisance because up until an update or two ago if you made certain graphics changes, i.e. Shadow Quality etc., then the game had to be restarted for them to take effect. Compound this with the aforementioned problem of Turn 10 being incapable of not deleting our configuration settings with each and every update and you have a game where you have to sit through that crap at least twice, sometimes more if you forgot a setting.
1 Like