Forza Horizon definitely has the potential for becoming the definitive arcade racing game… But, right now, it’s not.
With The Crew 2 adding “air nitro”, I’m not even motivated to play it anymore, as you have planes in that game, you shouldn’t need any cars to fly, lol. Especially because you can change vehicles “on the fly” (literally!). If I wanted to play San Francisco Rush 2049 I’d just grab an N64 to play it rather than buying TC2.
IMO NFS is a closer competition to Forza despite being a different game with different physics and different fun. And in post-release support Forza hasn’t paid much attention to its “car culture” aspect. We were promised new bodykits and paintable calipers and got Lego and Eliminator. Meanwhile NFS is a game brimming with car culture, but Ghost Games often fails to take advantage of it, for various reasons. The slump of NFS is more EA’s fault than Ghost, because those guys do listen to their community, but EA has a reputation for “unreasonable demands”…
For FH4 to realize its potential, Playground needs to understand why FH3 was successful, but IMO they saw Hot Wheels being very well received and thought they could “bridge” the gap between silly and serious. It didn’t help that the mods and liaisons on Discord would be playing Fortnite and Apex Legends most of the time (when they weren’t playing FH4 of course), when those games aren’t competition to Forza. Maybe even Microsoft pushed for it too after seeing FH4 had enough of a playerbase to justify investing in a battle royale mode instead of car culture updates. Who knows?
All I know is that the competition is underrated next to Forza Horizon… Yes, our game is really good. One of the best, in fact. But in the last few weeks I was playing NFS, with all its problems, and having fun with it. Because FH4 currently doesn’t offer more than championships I played through hundreds of times and cars I’ll drive for 30 minutes then drop. Game is old and going in a direction I don’t like, sorry.
I don’t see it as arcade, the thing I like about it is that the physics feel pretty good to me. It’s no more arcade than GT Sport, indeed the handbrake, for example, is much more realistic in FH4 than GTS. The collision physics between cars in FH4 is also much more realistic than how cars bounce off each other like snooker balls in GTS. I also find the progressive understeer in FH4 more realistic than GTS’s knife edge effect where turning the wheel a tiny bit past peak grip induces catastrophic understeer that ruins your lap.
I think Horizon has the potential to be right up there as a top racing game, and it doesn’t need major changes to achieve that. But it explains a lot if the people who make it are all playing Fortnite etc in their spare time.
You’re right in everything you say. Horizon might be a simplified game, but it’s still a simplified version of a simulator game (Forza Motorsport), and Forza has its merits when it comes to physics. The GTS effect of elastic collision, whether car/car or car/wall, is something I see in lots of games, and it hurts the gameplay.
[Mod Edit - No duplicate topics please. You all know where the Engine Sounds thread is. - MM]