Hot Mess expansion

Forza Horizon Forza Horizon 5 FH5 Discussion
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1067 hours driven, 120k tune downloads. this is the only game I play, and I’m very good at it.

but idk what to say. this ain’t it. hard pass. I was actually happy yesterday because we haven’t had any new content in so long. even thru the ridiculous double-update after “launch” I was excited.

but 10 hours of hot wheels made me question the entire 10 months I just dedicated to Forza 5. it makes the fh4 Lego expansion feel real, in retrospect.

this doesn’t even feel like the same game. they had to literally change the way it works to make it playable, i.e. the tilt-o-meter, changed steering angles, new steering assists, nauseating faux-physics screen spinning. plus the recent physics change to the Mexico map… why?

lol at the easy progression prizes vs. the way they rolled out the cars as series 9 wheelspins to keep us occupied in the absence of decent content.

the orange track is hard to look at… imagine it with real roads instead. there’s almost nothing to this beautiful map. it’s just scenery that you watch fly by while you’re stuck on these stupid tracks. barely any explorable offroad map, no actual offroad races, dumb simulated track textures… the speed boosters, and all other manner of fakeness. and you can just ride the rails like bumper-bowling ll the way to victory. I won every race on unbeatable barely paying attention.

the 2-D thumbnail map doesn’t make any sense now with the vertical aspect of the track. so get ready to totally relearn your hand-eye coordination.

the glitches are already ridiculous. I had to reclaim ALL of my manufacturer bonuses TWICE already.

and every single new car I’ve driven is unimpressive. the new venom is like a car-pass afterthought. the Jesko speed adjustment makes no sense now. the hot wheels cars are either garbage or boring meta-mobiles, just more Bone Shakers for casual players to ram you with.

I told a friend a few weeks ago, I like horizon because it’s a serious driving sim that doesn’t take itself too seriously. but this is too much. a total departure from the base-realism that made this game interesting. at least to me.

if I wanted hot wheels, I would have bought the hot wheels game that just came out. this absolutely killed the already dying momentum of Forza 5, it should have been the second expansion, but I guess they were hoping it would save the game. they chose to engage 14 year olds for a few days, rather than pay attention to the people who basically live in the game.

please give us something more like fortune island next time, an actual expansion of the game I play and enjoy.

  • GEI$T
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It wouldn’t be Hot Wheels if the track wasn’t orange.

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I would be open to them painting the track gold. Just saying.

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and last but not least, I CANT BELIEVE they cluttered up the specialty paint selection by listing TWELVE hot wheels glitter paints BEFORE all the standard options. come on.

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I don’t think Mattel would be very happy if they’d give Turn 10 the Hot Wheel license for cars, tracks, name, tyres and paint only for them to put the new paints on the bottom of the special paints list. It makes perfect sense to put them on the top of the list. If it was me I would have made a separate tab for them

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I had that Car Collection bonuses claiming bug as well (had to claim all of them again).

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I disagree. I quite like it.

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There have been a few actual offroad races for me so far. And I expect there’s a couple more I’ve yet to do.

And I’m not hungover or running my brightness/gamma settings too high, so the orange track isn’t hard to look at. And when the sun is behind it, it seems to very slightly shine through the track which is kinda neat. The night time lighting effects are pretty as well.

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Excellent post, Geist. I agree with every point here.

The few positives I can give to this expansion:

It’s very pretty.

It’s much better than FH3 Hot Wheels.

Driving through waterfalls is neat.

The Hazard races were kind of fun, although extreme straights on the offroad routes and terrible Drivatar AI means they’ll rocket ahead of you never to be seen again.

More car customization options are always always welcome. I’m not sure why they took out the redline tires for FH4 considering they still had Hot Wheels cars and later included a paid DLC full of them. More car mod options, always! Not less!

Normally I hate S2/X class cars and rarely dip into S1. These machines need purpose built roads to drive on or else it’s a total cluster. The HW expansion does provide us space built for speed and these cars finally feel like they have somewhere to belong.

Here’s where it all falls apart for me.

Out of all of the new cars most of them have zero visual mod options. Nothing. A select few have basic Forza aero upgrades. The only unique mod you can do on any of these cars is take the parachute off the back of the drag Camaro. Seriously? They aren’t going to give us anything else to play with here? We can’t even take the surf boards off the Deora?

Bad to the Blade is at least visually interesting (center seating and open wheels, neat!) and I sorely wish the chromatic paint would have been one of the new options we could paint any vehicle with, but nope. I gave every other car in this update a quick look over then left them to be forgotten.

I am going to ask though, why are the new Subaru’s headlights a flat decal? The lights still turn on but the texture looks awful.

There are no normal roads to drive on. I like the extreme verticality of the map but trying to drive anywhere off the orange is kind of a mess. Most of the scenery is just scenery, stuff to go ‘hey that’s pretty’ as you sail past it onto the next thing.

But the biggest problem of all for me is the limited prop options for the blueprint creator. The ONLY part to this DLC I was looking forward to was making use of the water, ice, and rumble tracks (the latter of which turned out to be yet another disappointment) in my custom races. I thought we could FINALLY make use of interesting road surfaces in our routes! Nope. We don’t have access to these pieces. Only the basic orange garbage.

How could Playground so horribly miss the mark on so many levels? This whole expansion feels like an interactive ad for toys. Just listening to Haley practically foaming at the mouth over the history (and she still couldn’t tell us why the track is orange) was kind of disgusting. I was getting serious Lego flashbacks which is never good.

The most fun I had in the entire expansion was making a D class blueprint for Goliath just to see if the cars could make it. Fully upgraded it is possible and it’s kind of hilarious. Everything else about this expansion is forgettable at best and disappointing at worst. I pushed through it to unlock the cars in the hopes of finding something inspiring but I’m done. Short of occasionally splashing through the water track which we’ll never be able to build with, I’m going back to Mexico.

I can only hope the second DLC is something proper and not another toy showcase. C’mon PG. This is not Forza and it’s not fair to Forza.

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There are two feelings that I can’t shake as I play through this. One is that this is effectively a $20 tech demo. The other is exactly what you said. You ever watch a movie and see them key in on a product so hard that you know that particular entity paid handsomely for that one moment? That’s this expansion.

EDIT: changed to a more SFW term

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This is the vibe I got with the Extreme E update. Almost no one on here requested Extreme E, and this forum is the one place where car requests are actually taken somewhat seriously by the developers. The fact that Extreme E itself comes off as extremely pretentious, and the fact that their YouTube channel has an abysmal subscriber count despite the many famous faces involved in it tells me this was Extreme E reaching out to Playground to get more younger viewers on board with the concept, and Playground eagerly took the money. Hot Wheels was likely similar, but more mutual since this is their third collaboration together.

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I agree. with your thoughts on the Extreme E update. This update is of zero interest to me.

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It feels smart trying now to attract new already not locked in fans who watched it, liked it and think “ooo, I wanna be the driver swap!”

There could be many people who really like it but have not yet played FH5.

The cars being individually done is annoying - but I get the plug in and play aspect of casual drivers just wanting to hop into their favourite teams named car and race them against a field with all the liveries.

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You’re the first person I’ve ever heard describe the Forza Horizon series as a serious driving sim. I wouldn’t call it an arcade racer but I’ve always considered it more like simcade.

I suspect Hot Wheels has as much appeal to adults as it does to 14 year olds and they said it was something that fans had been requesting.

I had some fun with Fortune Island but it’s not something that appealed to me for very long. If you weren’t into drifting up and down the mountain there wasn’t any reason to ever go back there since the multiplayer aspects were kind of nothing.
I like that this Hot Wheels has Horizon Open and Tour and rivals and such.

There are nice areas to drive offroad and I suspect the eventlab community will come up with some strictly offroad race bangers.

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FH5 is full arcade, it’s one of the easiest games to drift in IMO. S2 class cars reach superspeeds with insane cornering grip. Ironically this is when they took some physics bits from FM7.

There’s a huge mass of casuals who wanted more HW and that’s who Playground made this expansion for. “Fans” should be understood very broadly here. I think the individual car choices like Deora II are more representative of the fans’ choices, though. When it comes to HW itself, HWU dug deeper into the brand, but it’s not made by big name studio, so nobody cares about it (shame).

Even then, would be interesting to see player count for this because I haven’t seen many people streaming it in the last couple days, just the usual arcade racing channels. Stray got way more views and that’s a short game avaliable on a more expensive PS Plus sub tier (and not on Xbox).

With regards to FI, I think it was one of Playground’s better maps. It’s far more than the drift roads. Both of the endgame races rank high in the franchise, certainly above anything FH5 has had and far above Lego’s Goliath. But Playground’s main focus is to scratch that FOMO itch with the seasonals, so the expansions were completely abandoned.

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I heard people mention it and didn’t know what it was until I saw it in-game. Mind you, had I seen it before that it’s the sort of silly thing I might have requested.

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This DLC is the best DLC ever in Forza Horizon!

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True words mate…
i didnt play previous versions of FH but heard the hotwheels was popular… myself … well since the 1st few event labs with sections of sticky or pipe track, i didnt really like it compared to other racing in the game.
Its not good value for me to buy this pack as its not content i will enjoy… idm it being added for those who do but at full price it does nothing for me… i bet the car pack people will be mad… same price for dlc & car packs… what they paid same price for & own already… and had to wait each week for a car… ouch…
These modern games eh… so each expansion will be £30 + the last few dlc or… ?
if not it eventually may cost over 100 for some & not all content… idk if any game is worth that anymore, xbox game pass or not…

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Expansion is £14.99 not £30.

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true, ty & apologies, but sort of the same issue tho, maybe that should be 1st in the list :wink: