How to ruin a potentially perfect game

…And they even cannot do ONE, LONG, STRAIGHT road on the map. Even The Juggernaut marked as “great drag strip” is just an another sprint race. It’s a kind of joke…
But HEY! We have bends, corners, more bends, 180 degrees corners, another bends. We have a Paradise For Drifters! More drift cars will come soon. In the second expanaion there will be… - guess… - MORE BENDS. Because people loves them.

I miss my Test Drive Unlimited so much. With long journeys with real people. Without using breaks every 2 seconds.

I think this game has gone into wrong direction…

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Where does everybody get this drifters paradise from? Yeah, people can drift? But you know what else you can do on a drift? Grip! Grip driving! If you tune your car wrong, of course it will suck. Build your cars right and it is a glorious bit of driving.

Hey, I was a huge TDU player until the TDU2 save file corruption bug struck me. But grip racing is always faster than drift, so build a car, and have some fun. Yeah, is lots of twisty, but there is a reasonable bit of straight. Problem with straights is they get boring really fast and all that matters is a top speed… Zzzzzz… At least here you can enjoy the hills unlike the janky angles back then.

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Vaporisor the opposite of a drifter is your corner bomber/wallrider so either way you go clean racing just isn’t fun in this game. Damned if you do and damned if ya don’t, brother.

Well, I might agree on some of your points - but there is only so much you can do in an open world game. There’s always FM if you get bored of Horizon. I largely avoid online racing in Forza because people simply do not practice good racecraft - I’m told that’s been the case since way before FM5 and H2.

As for Car Pass, maybe a good idea to see what cars they have in store and then get the CP? I know this doesn’t help but since you bought the game might as well enjoy it.

PG has even acknowledged that FH4 is a downgrade from FH3, in a sarcastic meta sort of way. On one of the first missions in Isha’s Taxi, you drive for a belligerent Australian who spends the whole trip talking about how the Aussies do everything better. I got a chuckle out of it, then shook my head sadly.

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I agree with your overall point that the core game has all the ingredients to be incredible, but is let down in numerous small and sometimes large areas. What I don’t agree with is that this is the fault of the developers, I would expect even, that privately the game is far from what they wanted to release in a number of areas. Judging by the excellent quality of the core game, it’s clear to me anyway that the development team are a passionate and talented group that if given time and resources, could release a fantastic product.

For me the issues this game has, come from corporate decision making far above the level of the developers. Simply put, they’ve been told which parts of the game to focus on and which parts to cut down or remove entirely based on metrics of what will make them the most money. As with most of this kind of planning, it’ll work short term but drive away fans of the series in the longer term as they become more and more disillusioned with the franchise. Already there’ve been numerous posts on this forum with players stating it’s the last time they pre-order a Horizon product.

The sad thing is that with more time and freedom, I believe that the core foundations for this game are strong enough that it could be a masterpiece and potentially the best open world racing game ever. Just imagine if PG was given the amount of time required to properly build the game? Take these driving mechanics and map design/detail but imagine a world 4 or 5 times the size, a full multiplayer mode with proper choice, full rivals, user friendly route creator and just general polish on what we already have (eg. better car sounds, models, UI, less RNG loot etc.). Hell, it wouldn’t even need to be as grand as that, the core foundations were there with FH3, just make a bigger version of the FH4 map + route editor and leave things like the MP, rivals, UI, championships and progression system as it was in FH3.

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I largely agree with this, Forza Horizon has by-far the strongest driving physics model of any of the open world racers and by-far the biggest and best car roster. If FH4 had just been FH3+ with a new map and cars plus the avatar customization and route creator, I don’t think people would have really complained.

However, I do think the devs do have a bit more responsibility in this than you allude to. Sure, I would expect they’re privately just as disappointed as we are with how things turned out and had unreasonable demands and timelines passed down from on high, but part of managing an AAA studio is working with the demands and pushing back where appropriate to prevent gross abuse of the players like the wheelspin mess and time-limited exclusivity that really destroys the long-term value of a franchise, and also choosing where to best use their limited time and resources. Hindsight is always 20/20 and I’m not saying the devs are lazy or incompetent or anything, but some poor decision were made and things could definitely have been done better, even within the confines of whatever time and required feature constraints they were under.