I was just thinking about how much more I would play online in free-roam mode if players could collide, the lack of player interactions seems to make the whole idea of online Horizon Life a bit stale.
Dropping into offline mode when someone becomes an annoyance sounds fine to me, but I assume the general idea is to keep everyone playing together online as much as possible.
The answer sounds simple enough to me, just give players a button to toggle ghost mode, people can choose to interact or not to interact from moment to moment, and I bet a lot of people would have fun playing chicken not knowing if any given player has collision turned on.
I think the opt-in model they currently use is fine. Ghosted until you decide you want to drive with someone, at which point you can convoy up. If anything, they should extend this model to offline mode too, so we don’t keep crashing into Drivatars all the time until we want to race them.
I agree with OP. The visual ghosting has always been very disconnecting to me and l dont actually feel l share the same space with anyone. At the very least l wish the see-through ghosting would happen only on direct contact.
The gameplay presentation looked like that but it could’ve been they were all in convoy mode or just a demo setting.
Imagine in your mind, FH with the ghosting turned off. Now, who will be the first to complain about being trolled in free roam? You know that will be a huge problem without ghosting. Especially if this title goes to steam at some point.
Looking at the current controller mapping, I think the “Window” button would be best used for the Ghost Mode toggle.
Right now the Window button is used for activating events, but you also have to be stationary to do that, so any time you’re moving or not beside an event the “Window” button should toggle Ghost Mode.
Entering an event also ghosts your car so even if you are beside an event and you hit the button just to prevent a collision it will still have the same effect.
Ghost mode is only turned off by the player, yes, leave it on by default.
Currently it’s impossible to have physical interactions with random players that you meet while free roaming, with the Ghost Toggle you could choose to leave Ghosting off and you’d never know if other people are or are not ghosted.
With Ghosting as an individual choice, as long as your car is not ghosted you would still need to behave as though everyone else is also not ghosted because there is no way to tell until your cars have nearly collided.
At which point the only people “trolling” would be the ones using Ghost Mode to phase through your car as a ghost just to break your sense of immersion.
My entire time in horizon 2 and 3 I was never griefed once, and even if I was, all I’d have to do is find a new session, which literally takes a few seconds.
I agree with the OP, I really dislike the ghost cars in online freeroam, really breaks the immersion and makes me feel disconnected from other players.
Nah! The ghosting feature in Horizon Life in FH4 was for me the best thing about the game! Got sick to death of all the griefers in FH3. Mind you if you’re into that kind of thing you always have the Trial events…!!
I 100% agree with this. I’ve easily met and added 100-150 new people on my friends list from all over the world, between Horizon 2 and Horizon 3, simply by randomly meeting them at one of the popular drifting or drag locations and having fun for hours. Most times without even talking to each other, just enjoying the moment and checking out each others cars. Anybody ramming got ignored and we simply moved to another location until eventually the person left the room.
Most of the online experience is meeting random people and enjoying the experience together and seeing their car designs. But having to invite random people to a convoy that you don’t know, or don’t even know their skill level yet before you’ve even had a good time together makes most of the situations awkward. I usually play the game with music on, but now I need to join a convoy, and now a random 12 year old wants me to join his party to chat. No thanks. Ghost mode is the main reason I didn’t play Horizon 4. I think this idea of people thinking rammers ruining their experience is way overblown on this forum.
Those who grief others with ramming and wrecking should be individually voted against, and THEIR car should become a ghost. Not everyone. That way I keep my immersion and enjoy my experience, and the other individual can learn to let others enjoy themselves. Simple.