Now firstly I’d like to advocate that I’m posting here as a loyal Forza player and someone who has dedicated themselves to Horizon and put a huge amount of time (hundreds if not thousands) of hours into the Horizon Series. I consider myself a known competitive racing/rivals driver in the community and have raced with and against the top clubs and place regular World Records on the rivals leaderboards, particularly Horizon 3 onwards.
Disclaimer: All of my points mentioned in this post are purely from a content, gameplay and infrastructure perspective so the points can be applied both for “needed improvements” and for both casual and competitive/elite players to relate to. Players skill level is subjective and as I know potential replies will be “Why don’t you just play Motorsport if your a competitive player?”, this creates my own dilemma is that I simply enjoy fast street roads and open based racers a lot more. Horizon gives me the ability to enjoy tight touge like tracks, slight dirt here and there and circuits that I continue to learn and master. This combined with a more community feel of drivers I can get to know and learn from gives me more enjoyment than endurance, monotonous laps in Motorsport.
Now the game ugghh - Overall in my opinion this is a step BACKWARDS for the series. The only positive thing is the visuals and I applaud the devs for this as the game simply looks amazing but the gameplay and community feel is what keeps people playing for long periods of time…not the pretty sky. Before Horizon 4 I lived and breathed the series every day and night and looked forward to racing but now it just seems like a chore to play.
Now the negatives;
Single Player, Seasons & Horizon Life
The general story and feel of the Festival has now become mediocre at best especially after 3 previous titles. Coming from FH3 I figured the story would develop into more character interaction and festival site management but it seems like a copy of FH3’s with just the fancy houses, businesses and avatar cosmetics which offer no linear storyline or real benefit of owning these things.
Avatar customisation is non essential for a racing game and this is just a ploy to take ideas from the cancer that is Fortnite (racers do not care for dancing in a chicken suit or waving like a queen).
Wheelspins they’ve just been upgraded as more of a gambling type system that doesn’t even give anything of value (a Forza Edition car is meaningless I don’t care if it gives me extra credits)
Seasons is a good long term idea but forcing people to race a certain way for 7 day cycles is a little overkill and encouraging players to live in the world will burn people out eventually.
The map becomes a mess after around 10 hours of play time and there’s WAY TOO MANY EVENTS to keep up with. It all becomes confusing and a grind with no real end goal.
The walls and physical environment is flawed and if you hit even the slightest fence or barrier your race is ruined, in other words there is way too many physical barriers present.
DLC and Car Pass addons are ludicrous (extra money spent for a few cars that are not special in any way for other than the first 20 mins of driving them)
Stunt events, businesses and super wheelspins are just a way of trying to accommodate for every kind of driver taking incentive from games like NFS Payback (parts slot machine feature)
and also The Crew. YOU SHOULD BE FOCUSING ON WHAT MADE HORIZON GOOD IN THE FIRST PLACE AND NOT TRYING TO DO EVERYTHING IN ONE GAME!!!
Credits are hilariously easy to get and becomes a joke, I can sell every vehicle I own from VIP wheelspins and rewards on the AH, share 100 tunes that are good, create a few nice designs and have millions within hours. As time goes on it just becomes way too easy.
Houses hold no benefit other than a few perks which don’t make the experience more enjoyable and are overpriced, who will spend their time in their house or castle for more than 10 mins???
No player in the Horizon Life sessions co-operates fully in races, events and PvP like the preview at E3 glorified unless you have a group of 12+ friends which most don’t have readily available.
Performance ( I understand these are minor things that can be changed quickly)
Car sounds are hilariously bad with RB engines as a prime example, R34 etc.
Constant anti lag from cars (with included audio stutter)
Ranked matchmaking takes on average 15 mins every time I search for a game and worsens when in a convoy
Whilst customising my cars at houses or in the festival site the menu lag on visual mode is very slow with 30ps. (even on 30 there should be no delay in menu interaction)
Online (the worst ever in a Horizon game…)
Drive to Event feature removed from online sessions, we are now forced to look at white blank loading screens before races which decreases driving and player involvement. In previous games driving to the events gave you the ability to experience the map more, test your car before entering the races or simply have a short break between racing.
NO NON COLLISIONS why oh why is this not in the game when you DEVS know for sure that there are going to be people who can’t control the speed of their cars (casual players) or are simply out to ruin other people’s racing experience.
Quick chat is simply an un-used terrible feature and I only see 2-3% of players actually using it, most of the time for showing off and not socialising.
Free Roam Rush is a joke and is essentially a measure of who’s got the best off road or highest powered vehicle and flooring it across the countryside. (There is no skill involved or track knowledge required)
Rivals and removing class based rivals is a stupid mistake and now people cannot experiment with their builds in a time attack setting (there are players who compete regularly including myself to see what my cars are capable of doing)
Ranked Adventure rewards are an absolute joke for the amount of time you spend in that monthly period to gain the rank you want. Spending hours and hours for a different colour icon and a poxy coloured hat is embarrassing design. Period. Why don’t you give the skilled players a reason to grind for something that is meaningful???
No Solo Online Adventure feature anymore so you’ve forced players to drive as a team and their success is based on strangers who most often than not will be of varying skill levels. This is unfulfilling to experienced drivers.
Still no penalties for incompetent and poor drivers. I understand people are at different levels of Forza experience but at least make the driving less stressful for competitive players and give the casuals their own system to wreck each other.
All in all there are countless other problems but time is precious and people don’t want to read an essay. Before the announcement of FH4 and the location hype the players created an enormous amount of interest in going to JAPAN and why there is a reluctance for this location to happen is beyond me!!! This is again lack of communication between the DEVS and the people who buy the game at expensive prices every year and feed the game to keep it relevant!!!
Before future players take advice of sheep like reviewers on the Microsoft Store and online, take the time yourself to look at the games systems and see how broken this one really is at a gameplay and content level. It’s massively a downgrade to the other titles and positive criticism is ultimately healthy.
That’s what happens when your product (FH3) becomes a critical & economical success and you lose track of what made that product successfull because you desperately want to reel in even more with the successor (FH4). Thus you sacrifice features in order to focus on things focus group testing and market analysis indicate to be popular: character customization, lootboxes, rpg-based ranks everywhere, typical tiering system (green, blue, purple, yellow/golden), “game for everyone” by killing every sense of progression or challenge (doesn’t matter if you win to rank up and complete events) and competition (only team races, no ranking in Forzathon live).
Horizon 4 is definitely the lowpoint of all Forza titles, even below Forza 5.
I havent had any performance related issues, and have been enjoying the game alot co-op playing with friends. (like the other horizon games)
I turn to horizon if i wanna chill out… and motorsport if i wanna race… I seriously cannot see the mayor issues you apparently have with this game.
Ive been forza faithfull since forza 1. i own all of the games in this franchise, and some are imho better than others. But none of them are litteral disasters. I actually think Turn10 and PG have done a pretty respectable job with every respective title.
This is my first Forza game, and it’s pretty disappointing. I was expecting a lot more considering the reviews. When I first started playing I was thinking wow, this is good, feels nice, looks great. Then I did a race and came twelfth. It gave me a little gold trophy and said ‘race completed’ and another five races popped up. Where’s the fun or challenge in that? About 15 minutes later the map was half full with events and signs, despite me not winning nor getting three stars in anything. You can go through the game half asleep, finishing last every race, doesn’t make any difference, you’ll still get all the points and credit regardless. No sense of achievement whatsoever. You can’t even go back and try to improve on your last position as the results are not recorded, just a sad little trophy for each one.
If you want serious racing you buy Forza Motorsport. The Horizon series is all about having fun. I’ve had a few issues when playing online so I just play offline most of the time because I’m not interested in this modern everything must be an online multiplayer. At the end of the day these games need to make turn10/PGG money so of course they’re going to follow what’s popular at that time and Motorsport and Horizon will never be the same because then they would be competing with themselves.
And who the hell are you? lol, probabily someone that cant even finish a race when there is a decent player on the lobby. Raaz is right about absolutely everything, and fyi in our club,one of the best and well known on the community, about 90% of our players have stopped playing fh4 and started playing motorsport. This just shows how awful this game is,and honestly i think it is the worst multiplayer i have ever seen on a game.
The part you said some people stopped playing FH4 and went to FM7 is so true… I’m one of them and can’t be considerated an ‘elite driver’. You don’t need to be the best to like time trials and that’s the major reason why Turn 10 did a awful mistake doing what they did to Rivals mode. They did the same to FM7, remember? They screwed up Rivals mode and after a whole year they changed their mind, but sincerely I don’t have any hope they will do the same to FH4. This game has a lot of people that play it just to hang around, to take pictures, to do the carnage multiplayer racing and now to find the best clothes to your pilot. So, to those people everything is fine, beautiful, while the essence of a good racing game (time trial and multiplayer) is lost. Tested FH4 through Gamepass and ditched it. I will only return when they fix Rivals Mode at least.
Yeah, i dont play motorsport, but my club has both horizon and motorsport competitive players and they told me it took the devs 1 year to create or fix rivals there,dont really remember. Honestly i think it is going to take them about the same amount of time to fix FH4 unfortunetly.
More like 9 months. And Class Hoppers were added even prior to that.
There was Rivals before, but the subset of the community who run Rivals in Forza are people who treat the franchise purely as a game and don’t care about the few simulation aspects. They want total freedom and frown upon the slightest bit of restriction.
There are several homologated cars that need the full assortment of upgrades to be competitive in their division, yet there were people complaining that the system was “too restrictive”. For some cars, yes it was, but for many others it wasn’t. Class system has worse problems.
With the way FM7 was structured at launch, the message was clear: they wanted people to really run all those 700 cars down and specialize in every division. That’s why the single player career is so extensive and that’s why Leagues and Hoppers shuffled every week. The people who complained the most about it were the ones who wanted the opposite of that: they wanted to run a single car everywhere and perfect it. IMO, in a game with 700 cars, it doesn’t make much sense to stick to a single one. When I start the game, I rarely drive the same car I was using in my last session.
While I enjoy the fact everyone has what they wanted now, I don’t think the game was terrible before the changes. It was a combination of people refusing to adapt and the division system inheriting many of the flaws of the class system due to the PI system being broken in certain areas.
I don’t run Rivals in Horizon very much, if at all, but I miss Class restrictions simply because there’s no easy way to test builds in the game. And Horizon has remained wholly Class-based, with PG taking measures to tweak upgrades and PI in order to help fit certain cars in certain classes. So it doesn’t make sense not to have the old-fashioned Class Rivals.
Since FM1 the rivals and leaderboard part of the community has been one of the loudest (sometimes obnoxiously so) about making the times and the way the tracks were raced and lapped as real as possible. From the FM2 drafting fiasco to input on the implementation of most of the boundary and time penalty systems came from the HL/LB/Rival guys.
I know I’ve been here chasing guys like Daveyskills since the beginning…if it wasn’t for the LB guys and the hardcore online race clans like VVV, DUI, RR and Cruziers adding input over the years we wouldn’t be where we are today.
So to say we don’t take the competitive nature of the game seriously is just ill-informed.
What’s ill here is your ability to interpret things. In no way did I say the hotlapping community was not competitive. What I said (or rather, implied) is that, to be competitive, they’ll exploit every inch of the PI system without regard for reality. Yes, people have fought for implementation of proper limits, as seen months ago when the limits update generated some backlash, but this does not make them any more concerned about the simulation side of Forza when they’re all driving leaderboard tunes far detached from reality anyway.
And I speak of both tunes AND builds! It’s absolutely ridiculous to see gripless missiles on bad tires anywhere close to the top of the leaderboards just because they send power to all tires and have a strap of cloth or an FnF wing on their back.
The regulations and track limits side of the issue is one thing, the physics side is another. People don’t care about realism in Forza, as long as it plays like Forza. Hence why we have Race Regulations but no proper pit stops, no qualifying, no pit strategy… Judging by the livestreams, the big guys at T10 definitely don’t seem to want Forza Motorsport to be more “cade” than “sim” anymore. People who abuse the PI system are on the other side of this fence.
So your inability to articulate means I cannot interpret? Interesting…
You’ve obviously never raced in a series with any of the people I mentioned because they would force pit stops, force full damage/no assists, and if you can run a gripless missle under those circumstances and still be competitive, more power to you. It’s rare, but it has happened. As far as the PI system, this isn’t any different than the rules set forth in F1, NASCAR, etc. Except the program won’t let you cheat. If it is in the parameters of the program for that PI range you can do it. And just like the real world, if you can exploit a rule and you don’t you’re just not trying hard enough.
Just because T10 didn’t make it mandatory does not mean it can’t be done…was it better when we could do it in a custom public lobby? Yes. Has the ability to do pit stop and strategy totally disappeared? Nope. You can still do these things in a private lobby (well in FM anyway). I have friends that still run series with those exact rules in place. We even post “qualifying laps” for the leader to review and set the field.
As far as tunes go I will say that the ability to share tunes has taken an element away from this game. You used to have to be a good tuner or have a good tuner in your clan. Now it’s just McTunes everywhere. But I consider that a challenge to place a goofy car in the sea of LB ringers, no matter if it’s on the 1st page or the 8th page of the leaderboard.
When it all said and done every racing game is based on 1’s and 0’s. You can exploit tunes and the physics engine on almost every game, be it PCars, FM, FH, Asseto Corsa, GTS, F1, even Ride (don’t play iRacing so I can’t make a claim to that one). If you find a racing game with a perfect physics engine let me know. Until then I will fight to bring back class racing and what has been the most comprehensive leaderboard system in a race game this side of Drive Club (bad game, but they got their LB system right) to FH4.
Not gonna lie it really gets repetitive, on fh3 i have like 60 World Records using about 5 different cars only, but its like you said, rivals used to be the perfect place to test cars also.
In my opinion there sould be rivals the way it is now with restrictions and that those could change every couple of months and AND the rivals system from fh3, why not have them both? everyone gets happy and it would actually improve the game on somehting, considering everything right now is worst than what it is on fh3.
I’m someone who’s capable of winning a race against randoms regardless of how they race. I also lol when someone tries to impress me by name dropping on a message board.
Between the three Horizons I’ve played (FH2 to 4), there’s no clear winner. If anything, I’d rank FH4 above the others simply because it has more cars. But each has its flaws:
FH2: Best map
FH3: Best… soundtrack?
FH4: Best car list
It was difficult not to think of FH3 as the most overrated entry in the franchise after playing FH2 and 4. It was fun and I’ve clocked hundreds of hours in it, but it’s simply not that good IMO. As a rounded off package, it was probably the best when it came out, but there are many arcade games that did things better than FH3 in certain respects. TDU was a better “live the dream” game, NFS has better customization…
The people calling Forza Horizon “perfect” are the insecure Xbox fanboys who need something to stack up against Sony’s scripted, story-driven, but high-grossing games. It’s definitely not perfect and it’s in dire need of competition.
