There is a severe lack of both single player and multiplayer endgame. The most egregious situation is convoys. They should be the best way to play the game, but there is very little to do together outside of seasonal races.
I know for me Custom Championships would solve A LOT of problems, but a ranked PvP and a ranked ClanVClan modes would also go a long way for a lot of people and maybe put some life and motivation back into grouping up and forming communities. It’s sad that a lot of modern players don’t ever form convoys. I’d consider a car meet mode essential as well, both as a form of downtime while still being endgame, and also as an LFG/recruitment avenue in client.
EventLab is great, and I’d definitely rather have it than not, but it also reeks of “if you want to have some endgame, you have to make it yourself”. Plus, without the ability to weave these events into a custom championship, they kind of become shallow, one-and-done affairs. Even if I did want to play these events multiple times, the favourites system doesn’t always work and they aren’t (and can’t be) organized in any fashion. I’d be better off keeping track of events using pen and paper than the in client tools. That’s a pathetic situation.
You can be very creative with convoys in free roam and make your own games. For example, my favorite German YouTuber had various formats of “Cops vs. Racers” in FH4. Or he played “Isetta Ball” with Unimogs.
In FH5, however, the synchronization with 12 players is horrible. Even with 10 players in a small area like Guanojuato, it’s terrible. It can take them up to 30 min to get everybody synchronized. And during the game there are many instances when they don’t see each other anymore… FH4 was not perfect in that regard, but much, much better.
Convoys shouldn’t have to make their own games. I’m not saying they shouldn’t or wouldn’t given more endgame activities, but the need to do so is pathetic.
Doing custom races result in more prep time than actual time driving, PvP is a no restriction meta chase (something my friends and I don’t want to participate in), we’ve done practically every Tour on tap, if we wanted to play a battle royal game we’d go play a battle royal game, not the eliminator, and if we wanted to play a fun variety game, we’d go play Fall Guys, not playground games. Worst of all, all of those activities except custom races require us to interact with randoms, who will just ruin the racing experience for us in a variety of ways.
We’ve been doing pen and paper championships. This is what we’ve been reduced to, since the game refuses to provide any sort of fleshed out racing endgame. Just an absolutely unacceptable situation, made all the more frustrating by the fact that the solutions are blindingly obvious and simple, yet PGG keeps trying to reinvent the wheel as opposed to providing basic racing game tools.
My point is that the sand box concept in an open world per se is full of possibilities. And that’s fantastic, not pathetic. If you use them or not is up to you. However, the implementation is totally crippled now in FH5…
It is pretty pathetic for a racing game to not provide the most basic of racing game tools.
Open world activities are great. It’s a big part of what attracted me to this series. I love having genuine down time with a car. But at the end of the day I still consider racing the ultimate expression of driving, and the current situation in FH5 stifles racing for convoys, which, in a racing game, is pathetic.
I said this to a mate early on in the year pretty soon after launch - Boring. Just another typical week. Come on Thu, Fri, finish the weekly chorelist, then back on for a few minutes for the daily. Todays was one of the worst (Isay one of as there’s been many similar). Log in, paint car and exit…
Yes, exactly. The playlist feels more like a chore than actual fun gameplay. I dont want to do any playlists alone basically, i do everything i can with buddies.
Agreed. As in previous post, I spent about a minute in and was just about to exit, then my mate came online. He doesn’t play often so we use it more of a chat on the phone type thing, but while he was on, I redid a few of the weekly things to help him out so that kept me in for another 3, 4 hours or so today. I’ll probably leave it running for now till Top Gear comes on (Mercedes-AMG One review this week) and pop back in later for a while till the F1 highlights start - don’t have Sky so have to rely on CH4 highlights.
I genuinely don’t understand why PGG doesn’t allow players the ability to fully customize their world in Horizon Solo from traffic density to time of day etc. It’s just a bunch of configurations which should be easily exposable to players in a simple screen with adjustable sliders.
Honestly this is the biggest problem IMO. PGG should be the innovators coming up with cool new game play that make us go wow. Instead as we’ve seen nothing changes apart from the removal of things we actually enjoyed. Furthermore here we are begging for tiny little improvements which don’t get actioned.
I could argue horizon isnt even good at sandboxing. I have 930 hours in h5 and honestly after the first 100 hours i was already bored with horizon 5. All the glitches, crashes, performance problems and the mediocre post launch updates left a bad taste in my mouth. And i still cant shake them off my mind. Its like a stain you cant get rid of. On the other hand i could hop in horizon 4 and all this prejudices are just gone. I could just drive around do anything i want and the frustration i have for 5… when i play h4 it just disappears.
Ive still continued to play horizon 5. Ive become increasingly interested in racing games about 2 years ago. And since then im in love with horiozn. But comapred to horizon 4, my experience in horizon 5 as i said keeps leaving a bad taste in my mouth. I just cant shake it. But i still play because i want to play horizon. And honestly the thing that keeps me most is the car list and online racing. And at some point after ive become more than familiar with the car list and done reasonable amount of online…Well what?
And honestly most of my 930 hours, especially the last 200 are mostly spend by me just logging in and doing nothing. Or just changing my cars liveries. Driving around, using drone mode. Maybe something to do with my lifestyle as well. Usually if you spend that many hours in a game you kinda get addicted to it. I use now horizon mostly to just waste time. The quality of this game just been going downhil… And i completely understand why someone can get bored within 200 hours.
If i had something better to do or another racing game that im interesting in i wouldnt bother with horizon 5. And because of my frustrations i couldve quit way back when i hit my around 100 hours. And also if it wasnt for my horizon obssesion.
Collecting badges really? To earn a burger icon designed for 12 year olds? Accolates? I dont think those spark that much interest in the players. Driving gets really dull in this map after a while. It really is a really bad map design. Its so lifeless and dull that no matter what you do you’ll end up getting bored of it really quikly. When the map is bad everything else just becomes unfun and dull. Accolates are dull because for the most part they’re easy. Their design reminds me of like a mobile game. And i have no incentive to complete them. Festival playlist gets boring quickly when they keep on rincing the same things over and over. This game is waay to casual, too babified.
Horizon can never be good at sandboxing. Its not beam ng and can never be. Even the few sandboxing elements are very limited and just like left in beta. And i honestly i would prefer the game to have some actual content like the crew 2.
And if the game is like: “well do whatever because im sort of a sandbox” Then i might as well not do it. Which leads immediately to boredom. And even if i want to do something specific again im being very limited. Optional sandbox content to me is excatly “optional”.
If horizon wants to add post launch content like the crew 2 and at the same time have some sandbox elements to it the game might as well refine those elements. Not everyone wants to spend 100s of hours into eventlab. Thats no content. Festival playlist, horizon stories, new events, expantions - thats content that keeps the players enggaged. If it has any quality to it of course
If i wanted to play Beam ng id just play that game instead.
965 hours here and I’m the same, Jezza has done more to keep me playing + enjoying it than PG have.
Though got to be honest I don’t see what is so different this time from FH4 unless you were into ranked racing, boring updates, silly bugs and constantly having your flow of play broken up were in that game as well and sometimes even worse, Horizon Life was regularly a case of when not if it would disconnect, the menus were absolute garbage, so slow with random hanging and the time it could take to find an online mode was just as bad as in this game.
Better map + better variety of cars (though that is after all of FH4’s added cars, unfair in my opinion to give 5 a complete bashing on this when it’s currently 2 years behind the amount of time 4 had, I’d guess several well liked cars in FH4 weren’t there at this equivalent stage of it’s life) and ranked racing are what FH4 has over FH5 for me but personally a lot of my gripes with 5 were already there in 4.
The change to live service was never going to be good for the series in terms of quality though, I wish more people would have realised that 4 years ago, I almost wish I’d have been more suspicious of FH3’s Forzathons with cars being locked behind them but I saw those originally as just a nice little bonus on the side of a full, substantial game, whereas now that tiny little snippet of that game is what the past 2 games have almost entirely been built around.
It’s more frustrating than with any other series because at the most basic fundamental level FH is still 1 of the very best, it looks + plays brilliantly, seeing everything else done so lacklustre makes it doubly egregious.
Wasted potential will always irritate more than something that just isn’t very good full stop, for any of that handful that like to turn up occasionally and belittle us all for saying things against the game please just read these bits and make an attempt to understand, soulless trash like EA’s yearly sports games don’t get the same treatment because people expect very little change + improvement from them, they know EA don’t care enough to do anything and the games themselves really aren’t capable of being much better because at their core they’re a terrible simulation of the sport they’re based on (excluding the F1 games).
People give Forza a much harder time because they believe + know so much better can be done with those fantastic foundations and it irks them to see so much potential being wasted.
THIS^^ Definitely have to agree that those dedicated, long term players just want to see the game continue to have viable gameplay with quality updates to keep the engagement enjoyable at the level they expect, rather than forced with sub-par content. The result is a definite attrition of that dedicated player base, which should be concerning for them, but Gamepass has helped to mask that IMO.
I have given this great thought, and here is what I have come up with. I played Horizon 4 religiously until mid August of 2021 (so nearly 3 years), when at that time it became way too much same-o same-0 and I realized that “I had done all that stuff before”. Now along comes Horizon 5, which for me was very much the same game as Horizon 4, just moved to a new location, so after the initial excitement of the new game wore off in about a month, I became bored with this game, for the same reasons I tired of Horizon 4.
I am not so upset with the car list as I am the lack luster content and lack of an overall goal and direction in Horizon 5. I have come to despise the weekly chore list (as others have put it), which is continued from Horizon 4. In the earlier T10 games, there were plenty of things to do, and I could do them as I chose; not being tasked with completion of events in 7 day intervals.
Earlier Horizon games were more focused with a sense of purpose and an overall goal to aim for, while this has been completely eliminated in Horizon 5.
So I tired of this game early on because it was very much a repeat/continuation of a game I had already tired of.
I wouldn’t say this game is boring, otherwise I’m saying I spend my time playing something boring which makes little sense. I would however describe it as lackluster.
Everyone will have a different view but for me the first major feature removal was ranked racing and this was not only surprising but very disappointing for me. Ultimately it was replaced with… Well nothing.
In terms of new game modes and replayable content there has also been no change in this department since FH4. Nothing… Instead it’s arguably worse. Eliminator in FH4 for example was 100x better due to its map.
Now if FH5 removed rivals then we’ll I literally have no reason to play because there would be nothing to do. And I am part of a wide group of similar players. So in a sense many of us are clinging on despite knowing nothing will unfortunately change when it needs to. Now that’s just me. Ask someone else and they will give an entirely different view of why this game is lackluster and is in dire need of improvement and they would be 100% right too.
Long story short, add new game modes. Focus on fun replayable content. Think up something new like adding Eliminator in FH4. Do something meaningful and good…
If they cut the entire map out around the Volcano canyon road and thats all I had to drive on. It wouldn’t really change my current experience. A testament to both how well that road was made. And how poorly everything else in the game has been handled.
I would love to be making custom routes and games with Eventlabs. But they still dont have playable starts, so theres largely no point.
Theres sooooo many things they could do with this franchise. They wont. They could redo the tuning menu to give you actual power tuning controls, A/F ratios, Turbo and ECU mapping, Exhaust tuning, Nitros. They pretend like they care about tuning and customization every release but have never made meaningful changes to these quite literally ancient systems to accommodate that. Power tuning wouldn’t be unbalanced either as everyone already just downloads meta tunes to race with any level of competition anyway.
