If you’re after something to “finish” you’re probably better off with a story-driven game like Driver. Forza Horizon is not exactly a “replayable” game - it’s a racer, you drive or you don’t. I’ve “beaten” the game a week ago (final showcase, credits rolling) but I’m far from having completed it (all cars, races, achievements) - and even then I probably won’t get bored to play the game a few times a week (not like now, spending almost every free minute with it).
The map is big, with varying landscapes (outback, jungle, wood, beach, suburbs, city, hillsides), dynamic weather (best sky ever!) and lighting. There are hundreds of cars and although I own 150+ already I have driven maybe only a third of them. You can create your own challenges and races - be it challenging or funny ones or an interesting one in a rare hypersport car your mates don’t own and might like to test. You can create artworks with livery and photographs - some spend hours with that alone.
There’s tons of stuff to do for endless hours to come - the real question is: do you enjoy the driving?
The game is infinitely replayable. The more you do, the more there is to do. If bang for the buck is your concern, you can forget it, as long as you actually enjoy racing games.
Go ask Reddit, this forum is massively biased, and you’ll get a much more honest response there. Yeah there’s a lot of events, but in my opinion the repetitiveness starts to set in after the last showcase. That and if you’re playing on PC there’s the relatively poor optimization to worry about (don’t pretend it isn’t there).
I havent played in a week and a half. There are definitely things to do but its just not up my alley anymore. My opinion is that although technically theres a lot of races to complete it feels more like a grind. I was never really into the speed traps or speed zones and drift zones arent really anything special. Barn finds werent particularly hard to find and there arent many showcase races which i think there should have been more of.
I think its very similar to horizon 2 in many ways and the things they did add are more novelties than anything else. It seems to me that they just refined certain things and didnt really change any core features. I think whatever real “new” ideas will come in the form of one of the 2 expansion packs, which is unfortunate. So if you still havent bought the game, i wouldnt be in a rush to buy it now anyway, id wait till its cheaper.
Did not play for a few days now. I played it a lot (almost everyday) since Sept 23 and reached level 373.
Completed the ‘campaign’ (if we can call it that), all the exhibitions and championship, all the challenges. Discovered all roads, found most boards.
Played a bit of multiplayer and rivals. Used the AH a bit before declaring it ‘a waste of time’.
Did not care one bit for drift zone / radars / jumps, although I did some of them but could not care less about 3 stars. It feels like a todo list and a chore to me rather than something enjoyable, and is there because you have to populate an open work with ‘stuff’.
At this point, there is nothing that give me the urge to play it again for long, although I will come back to it from time to time.
Some flaws of the game started to pile up after playing for so long and it gets repetitive.
Multiplayer could be great if I could consistently find races in the slower car classes I’m interested. But almost anyone seems to prefer flying rockets.
Rivals is unsatisfactory to me as I’d like to compete for top times of stock cars (like Driveclub allow me to do), and not whatever the combination of a specific maxed car for its class is for a specific track.
Drivatars have weird issues making the game less enjoyable sometimes.
The ‘campaign’ with that fan thing was super lazy, and just a gross gameplay mechanic to unlock races and the map. The last showcase event was the most anticlimatic ‘end’ ever.
The grinding used as a manipulative gameplay tool to keep users playing leaves a bad taste (not that FH is the only game to do that!).
The game does not put the emphasis on winning races and does not even keep track of the position you finished a championship. Depending on where you are coming from, this can be considered good or bad. For a racing game, I consider it bad.
That and more made me kind of stop playing suddenly, as I started playing another game that I put aside while playing FH3 heavily during 3 weeks.
So my conclusion is that past a certain point, the game suffers and do not give enough incentive to come back.
Even if this post reads like heavy criticism, I enjoyed the game a lot and there are things it does very well (offroad and blueprints comes to mind).
Depends on what you like? For me personally the game will never end. I played H2 virtually every day from Nov 14 to the release of H3. I expect the same here. I like building and testing the cars, learning the tracks, putting up good rivals times and testing my skills against humans online. The are parts of the game I dislike and ignore and avoid to concentrate on what I do like. I have no use for bucket lists, speed traps or drift zones so I just pretend they aren’t even there because doing them just annoys me. Everybody is different but for me it will likely always be playable.
Indeed but the answers change as more people have it longer.
I’m at the grindy clear the map stage, I am playing still but have started playing other games again. One of these is GTA which does rather hammer home that the map is a little small in comparison. It is however nicely made and very pretty with lots of variation, also travelling round at 220mph will make any map feel small.
After a bit of a break I’ll go back and start my collection of all the cars I want and build and tune them.
Im pretty much at the point of trying to acquire the different cars now however will probably be taking time off to finish DOOM and skyrim till the DLC comes
Despite what that first comment says, this is not even meant to be a full representation of Australia and should not be held as such. It captures the atmosphere and variety of environments, but it’s not all of Australia. There’s your big skyscraper city, an ocean highway, the outback, the rainforest, farm country, and far more kinds of driving space that I can’t even begin to list. There’s tons of valleys and hazardous terrain to entertain yourself with, as well as the ability to drive through water.
The more you do, the more there is to do, and Forzathon gives you new challenges and stuff to hit to unlock unique stuff.
Map is much larger than FH2 and FH1 hands-down no-questions-asked. The Goliath Circuit, a race that doesn’t even go to the full asphalt borders of the roads (let alone the offroad portions which go farther out especially north) is a longer drive than taking the full highway outskirts around FH2. If you are basing your comparisons off a view of the map, you are probably forgetting the fact that the zoomed out overview in FH3 is much more zoomed out than that of 2, and the map in FH3 isn’t even close to the “square” the map would imply. It’s a massive map that takes a while to drive around, even a top-speed tune for a S2 class car drive around the Goliath circuit for a single lap with little to no crashes is at least 10-15 minutes and going all the way offroad (to the gorge and everything) could easily take double that (not that I’ve ever had the time to attempt it myself).
Hail friend I love driving game I have them all but this one tops them. as you progress you unlock
more and more it just does not stop. Any ways you have so much to do and while driving your
always looking out at the buity of Horizon 3 constantly Hell I hang out on the cliffs over looking the
12 apostles a lot. Like I said lots to do and I don’t think it gets boring much at all. I just never get
the time needed to run long events :(. But like I did I read as much as I could find out. now I
don’t regret it. Also if you use a wheel it also works like a champ mine is flawless and I still
tune cars. Thrustmaster TX Italia 458.
Stopped playing over a week ago having 1000g’ed, will be back for the last Forzathon for those challenge achieves. Want to get the last 27 cars in my garage, but it is only worth doing Goliath, and to be honest it is the only race that I really care for / remember in any real way, as compared to oh so many in FH2. The destinations were more interesting, with a lot more city street driving and more roadtrip like, and the map was much better designed.
If they had put blueprint in as they described it, so we could “make our own races”, I would be designing races for multiplayer, but as it didn’t mean that, but rather we can “choose random races from a rather uninspiring list”, I’m not. They kept talking about the pink lakes in some of the pre-launch stuff, but there isn’t even a race that goes near them. I don’t care for bucket list stuff beyond achievements, so I’m really hoping the expansions change some of the map content as it is, as well as actually expanding it, rather than making separate standalone islands again.
I played FH2 for like 600 hours,but im already bored of FH3, maybe its because of the amount of time i played FH2,i only enjoy the tarmac only races, the offroad/mixed surface races and games are stupid imo
Would like to go back to Forza 6 but alot of the community are such crybabys and will send turn 10 vids and report you for even the slightest mishap/crash… not to mention the one car wonders who only use leaderboard cars over and over
Both Horizon 1 and Horizon 2 had to make sacrifices to make the open world design work. IMO, Horizon 3 is the first Horizon that doesn’t take any steps backwards.
Horizon 1 used a severely limited Forza engine. No tuning/upgrading, weak physics representation, etc. The map was also pretty limited, with very little drivable area, just a bunch of roads and trails with indestructible guardrails. Car selection was also pretty slim (went from over 500 cars in FM4 to just over 150 in Horizon 1).
Horizon 2 opened the map up quite a bit (but still some pretty annoying invisible walls) and added the full ForzaTech engine we know and love (but with some still questionable physics). Horizon 2 also got rid of possibly the best part of Horizon 1, the rival characters. The trash talking before each race really added some narrative weight to them. It’s not the same facing random Drivatars.
Horizon 3 made leaps in the physics and weather system, opened up the map with almost no walls, and opened up ultimate freedom in designing the championships and races. Add to that a massive selection of cars and the fantastic return of the Storefront/Auction House, I think Horizon 3 is one of the best Forzas (both Horizon and Motorsport) ever.