I always thought the moonlight that FH5 brought was either unnecessary or could be greatly improved. It’s way too bright and blue. That brightness and color coupled with the lack of shadows gives nighttime an “off” feel and it frankly just doesn’t look all that good.
I’m by no means a game dev so I may be a bit out of my depth here, but I feel it’s possible to update something like lighting post-launch; like an overhaul of some sort. As I mentioned before, the moonlight’s main issues are the brightness and color, so if both of those could be toned down, it’d look significantly better and greatly increase the enjoyment factor of nighttime driving. For reference, here’s the nighttime in FH3 (not my image btw):
And here’s FH5’s nighttime (again, image isn’t mine):
Quite a difference.
So here’s my 2 ideas of how this could be improved:
A. The aforementioned overhaul. Make the night darker and less blue, along with the sky.
B. Make it adjustable. With the limited knowledge I have on graphical updates, I’m assuming this is much less feasible, as I imagine it’d require the lighting to essentially act the same way as a brightness/gamma setting. However I am curious to know if I’m wrong about that.
Now I do recognize the possible reasoning behind the moonlight in FH5 and I’m not against the idea of it; it makes the nighttime driving a little easier as you’re not completely shrouded in darkness. However I do believe its implementation was a little heavy-handed and the experience suffers as a result.
Thanks for reading and a hope I explained this well despite the length–I’m not too great with keeping things concise lol
image sources if anyone cares:
FH3: Forza Horizon 3 - Night Gameplay (HD) [1080p60FPS] - YouTube
FH5: https://www.reddit.com/r/ForzaHorizon/comments/oixa3t/the_night_sky/
Perfectly said 
Darker nights would also add an extra challenge.
3 Likes
I agree with this and I’m surprised there wasn’t more made of it when the early footage came out. I’ll copy a post i made elsewhere about how dawn is actually darker than night.
As some of you may have noticed the “Night” setting looks funky. It doesn’t look like night time is supposed to look like to me. But there is a way to get properly dark night lighting and I don’t know if this is a bug or not. Blueprint a race and choose hot season, dawn, clear, fixed time. When you test drive you can get several variants of “dawn” lighting.
You’ll need to start the test drive then back out to the editor and start again until you get this one, a black sky. It seems random so it may take a few tries.
Run a few races in that last lighting condition and compare it to the actual “Night” setting and tell me it doesn’t look better. Races through sections with little ambient light like the jungle is dark like you would expect. You can only see as far as your headlights illuminate but lights in the distance are still properly bright so it isn’t just an overall darkening of the picture like with the interior view bug. Call me crazy but i think the HDR looks better too. FWIW I’m using a Series X in HDR10, but I’ve tried it with Dolby Vision with the same results. I’d love an explanation of what’s going on here(devs?).
What night racing SHOULD be like:
Here’s the difference it can make for the driving experience.
“Night”
“Dawn” special
5 Likes
Also shadows in performance mode on cars I too have always felt something was of but dident know until recently that in performance mode at least on Xbox series x/s the game doesn’t render shadows (at least from the player car) during the night.
1 Like
Hopefully they don’t make the same mistake in fh6
Yes, right now it doesn’t look real. It needs improvement.
They will never change it. And there is NO FH6
It might. They’ve been listening to feedback.
