The following comments are based on Forza Horizon 5 on Xbox Series X.
-There should be a single unified menu. Why is there a Festival-menu, and a separate menu accessible from everywhere outside the homes/festivals? Some features are hard to find, and having to fast-travel to a festival just to check that it isn’t in the other menu is nonsensical. (Maybe one of the Player Houses should as a reward unlock the “Unified Menu” feature, so that once you are an experienced user you’re no longer required to deal with the separate Festival-menu feature.)
-Please let us label our cars; e.g. “Dirt”, “Road”, “Speed”, “Grip”, “Drift”, “Awful”, “Allrounder”… Without it, I have to colour-code my garage: Brown for dirt; green for speed; red for grip…. My garage just looks ridiculous.
-Please default to my preferred filter/sorting in the “Change Car” menu: every single time I want to change the car I’m driving I have to press Menu-RB-Left-A-Y-A-B-X-Down-A to see my Favourite cars sorted by Class. Every. Single. Time. And I change cars a lot. And then there’s a further 3 presses of A to actually get into the car I’ve chosen. (More generally, the menus across the game require way too many button-presses.)
-The map filter is suboptimal. Why are the most common features not at the top?… And maybe use two columns? And remember my preferred settings?
-The Car filter is painful. It’s hard to find the category you want, and it takes ages to scroll to the bottom… Please either use alphabetical ordering over two columns, or better, use icons to quickly find groups: rally; sports cars; hyper-cars; hot hatches… each with its own subcategories.
-Rivals. There should be a simple way to quickly do a race against yourself using your current car. That’s what I do most, and this can require up to 12 button-presses. View-Right-A-Right-Right-Right-Y-X-A-A-A-A for an 800-Class race against myself in my current 800-class car. (Also, the rivals menus need to be more responsive; it repeatedly hangs a few seconds to load scores from the server, slowing down every button-press. Can’t you cache the data from the database in advance…)
-Rivals. Please give us a screen which shows on which races we’ve already achieved a solid time, and which ones we’re behind our own average/typical performance. (A page similar to the Rival accolade page, but with Bronze-Silver-Gold tiles to quickly see which Rivals times are weakest; and each tile takes you straight to the relevant Rivals race to improve your times…)
-Remapping the button on controller. I don’t use Anna and I don’t use the Radio; I want to remap those buttons to something more useful. Please, please, please, let us. I don’t want to see a “Controller mapping required” error when I try to get rid of them.
-Controller Menu-Wheel. It would be great to have a menu-wheel which quickly pops-up to give easy access to useful features without stopping the game (TCS, Auto/Manual, ABS, Telemetry, Remove Destination, Advanced Link dialog, Hide UI, Ghost on-off,…). A menu-wheel is a well established mechanic in many games (e.g. shooters) to very quickly access a lot of functionalities without using up precious buttons on the controller.
-The Rev-counter is not obvious enough when you reach the rev-limiter, and neither is the engine sound. In FH4 and FM7 you can clearly notice when you’re on the limiter… Not so in FH5.
-Please help us find duplicate cars in our collection to get rid of them more easily. (Filter: “duplicates”?)
-And finally, please, pretty please, let us reset the XP Boards. I particularly like the most difficult boards (e.g. on top of pylons and buildings) and I want to do them again. It’s a great feature, and it’s the only feature in the game that you can’t do over and over again to your heart’s content…. Why?
I must say there is one thing that FH5 gets absolutely spot on: the driving. It’s pure bliss once you’re behind the wheel. I love FH5; it’s an amazing game! A big thanks to all the teams involved. And if you could just dedicate some more time for the UI and the events, Forza Horizon would be unrivalled.