Can we talk about this mode, and maybe get some light shed on it’s future? It has a lot of potential, but also a lot of issues.
First things first. It is NO replacement for custom championships. It’s a good idea that I’m glad I tried, and I’ll continue to play it, especially when in a convoy, but being able to setup my own championships with my own restrictions and even my own custom routes weaved in is a million times better and more useful to myself and the people I play with. I want to stress: your metrics will lie to you. Just because myself and presumably many others are playing it a lot does not mean it’s “better” than custom championships. It isn’t, it’s just what we have, so we play it to fill the void. I’m not saying everyone who plays tour would prefer custom championships, but there definitely is a non-zero amount who would.
The next most important issue: the selection of events is paltry and terrible. I hope this is something that gets fleshed out more as time moves on, but right now waiting on the tour refresh only to be disappointed again and again with the same deluge of events, most of which are cross country, is the height of disappointment with such a high potential game mode. If you were to say that past seasonal events will get added after their season or series is done, I’d still be disappointed in the starting rotation, but at least I would have something to look forward to. Moving into today and the start of the wet season I was really excited for a change, but was foiled by once again seeing the same list of events. My Friends and I are ok with doing some cross country, but when we feel like doing a road event, we have to sit around for 10 minutes+ for one of those to come up. And when it does come up…
… something needs to be done about the trolls. We spent 10 minutes waiting for a road event, and when it finally came up, it was A class anything goes. I bet you can guess what happened. Two people showed up in as heavy as possible tankpools and spent the entire time making sure that everyone else had as miserable of a time as possible. One of the things I hate most about Forza Horizon is that it doesn’t teach people to be good drivers, it teaches people to be dirty drivers, and people feel the need to take that to the extreme, even against their own teammates, because people are awful. I’d actually would be ok with this whole situation if I had the choice to leave and play a custom championship solo or with my convoy. I would be totally comfortable with embracing the chaos of online play, to the point where I would even be excited for it, but since since in PGG’s infinite wisdom they’ve decided to withhold this very simple but amazing feature from FH3, Horizon Tour is really the only outlet for those of us who crave this type of experience, and that fact makes the chaos a frustrating, alienating experience.
Lastly there is the freeroam in between races. It’s fine. It was neat the first few times, and a great decision to make it not mean anything (except for a few accolades) but it gets old really fast, and really unnecessarily stretches out the time a tour takes. A version of the mode that removed these sections would be very much appreciated.
It’s a really good idea, truly, and well implemented as well. I want to love it, I could even see it becoming the main way I enjoy Forza Horizon one day, even if custom championships get added back in (in fact like I said earlier, I’d probably like it more since I’d be more open to embracing the chaos). It just has a lot of worrying mistakes and oversights in the details, and being in the dark about it’s future (and what that potentially means for the possibility of custom championships coming back) brings forth this fear that it’s going to rot away as a bastion of wasted potential.