After the Barn Finds were done with…the game started to really be less fun and even Forza Edition Cars are not like the previous game…the Unicorn factor is gone and DLC even has restrictions…you have to buy a whole pack instead of buying the cars you really want individually…but to play Devil’s Advocate…there have been two expansions and Mitsubishi as well as Toyota have returned…to the franchise …even though cars like the Ford Thunderbird , Acura TSX, Toyota Prius, Chevrolet Corvair Monza , and Lexus IS300 are still M.I.A. …with Motorsport 8 or Horizon 5 possibly in the beginning of a 2 to 3 development process…what is in the near future for this franchise?!?..I was playing last week …trying to win that Peugeot Rally Car that I didn’t really want and the A.I. was making no mistakes…finding the perfect line through jumps and changes in terrain while my assortment of Rally cars that had been dominating most races in Dirt and Cross Country…struggled to get much needed podium placements…I got frustrated and started playing a game by the competition that focused on street racing …N__d For Sp__d : H__t…it is still fun even though it is a year old!
Its not just you, those are all valid frustrations with the current state of the game. To me it does feel like one step forward, two steps back from FH3 for the reasons you described and more.
In terms of the near future of the franchise, I expect it to be more of the same unfortunately. Although the devs didn’t state it outright, the fact that they’re taking a step back to reevaluate the franchise and spend more time on the next game makes me think this game was a wake up call to them. Good for the franchise long term, but rough in the short term where a game that was rushed to begin with now has to be put on long term life support and milked for more than its worth to fill the time until the next game is ready.
Comments:
- The game is on iteration 4. Any franchise, even really good ones, starts to get a little stale by iteration 4. Movies? Check. Games? Check. TV Shows? Check… The game also has so many cars at this point, does a new car matter? No I think we need new roads or a new map, but that means…basically…a new game. Or a new DLC that may not have been planned for because of point 2 below.
1.5) This game was designed to last longer (games as a service) compared to previous iterations…perhaps not quite this long however, which means many of us are, unsurprisingly, getting bored.
-
COVID. It’s affected people, and I don’t mean work from home, I mean people get sick, team mates have to care for sick relatives, you can’t get replacement/new hardware for development purposes due to shipping issues, worldwide distribution is slowed down, trucks aren’t moving as quickly, whole countries go on lockdown, slowdowns abound so we need to re-learn patience…which leads us to…
-
The next Motorsports and Horizon games were probably due for release on Xbox Series machines. How many of you have them? How easily can you get one? Right. Until you can walk into a store and choose from 20 on the shelf, no company wants to release AAA exclusive games to a “limited audience” when people are still finding it literally impossible to get new hardware, either on PC (GPU’s) or Consoles…
Hype matters with marketing software…the reviews, the “OMG that seems so cool I’ll just pay full price” versus six months later people still can’t get new gpu’s or hadrware, the game is six months old, they want to buy it for $39.99 not $59.99+ So my guess is this is what we’re going to get in the short term.
Maybe we’ll see a new DLC map available (my guess is they added Super 7 mode to help appease the masses and give them more to do in-game) that might have been slotted as DLC for Forza Horizon 5, who knows…either way we’ll just have to be patient at this point.
I agree with all these point almost entirely, though here I would say yes. Despite the number of cars available, a healthy amount (dare I say majority) is stock Forza, vehicle staples from many prior Forzas. That in itself could be seen as a double-edged sword. On the one hand, there’s a degree of expectation and desire for returning ‘old friends’ and fan favorites. On the other hand, over-familiarity is old hat and stale/boring. Ask any player and they’ll tell you their laundrey list of cars they’d love.love.love to see in-game; cars people are crazy for certainly adds a premium level of playability. Me? I would cut off my left big toe if that meant the AMC Pacer X and AMC AMX/3 (any one of the nine chassis protypes) would get added to the game and no one would ever hear from me again. Not likely, thus, here I am.
Incidentally, I will add that I was pretty dissatisfied with the H4 barn finds. First, I went through them too fast too soon; the ‘special value’ the uniqueness and rarety barn finds bring to the game gets all used up too early. And that there are two extra barn structures remaing unassigned and unused leaves one feeling somewhat unsatisfied, like being given a reason to wait for a few more shoes to drop indefinity. If there never was more planned to come, they shouldn’t have repurposed that special barn find structure for background. They had to have known doing so would only create the false hope and expectation for two more barn finds. The other thing I didn’t like was that approximately five of the 16 barn finds (almost one third) were cars carried over from FH3. Perhaps it’s just my perception as a newer-ish player of what a barn find is, but the Subaru 22B and Mini have absolutely zero luster and intrinsic value as barn finds/specialty items after having already driven them to death, Hell, and back again in the game’s predecessor. Just my unsolicited 2¢ on that.
All that said (from above), a new proper DLC map would go a VERY long way to adding playability for all those cars and the game generally. With the game’s life being planned to be so long, I’m a little surprised a 3rd DLC expansion wasn’t part of the strategy from the beginning. Say what you will about the Eliminator and Super7 game modes and the trickling in of two new exclusives a month, but they are in no way a substitution or even comparable to a what proper dlc content brings to the existing game. New maps are eveything, and I agree it’s doubtful we’ll see that.
• Expansion Multiplayer: (Okay, yes, this is DLC suggestion, but it’s just one.) Extremely popular in FH3, this was removed to make way for the addition of Ranked. Big mistake, should’ve never been omitted. It’s probably too late to reintroduce now, but FI and LEGO runs would certainly be refreshing change to play rather more sessions of the toxic, somewhat broken Ranked that replaced them.
• Route Reversal/Partitioning: Why not do what Turn10 does with Motorsport tracks and make reversed versions of existing routes and circuits available for online and Rivals? Some may require barrier adjustments and/or jump re-working in some off-road cases, but the resources needed would be minimal, I would wager. They’ve already done three reversals with the LEGO expansion’s Ocean View/Lighthouse Scramble and Three Fields/Plastic Flowers Circuits (Falcon Indy/Arrowhead Circuit is a near-identical reversal), so why not go farther with this? A few of the longer existing routes could even be partitioned and reversed, but most everything in FH4 is already too short, imo.
• Combining Routes: Since FH4 routes generally too short to partition, what about combining a few existing close-by routes and/or circuits for some longer races? The Titan, Gauntlet, Colossus, and Marathon are always crowd pleasers during Online Adventures. Had they not neutered the expansions by removing their multiplayer, The Leviathan, Kraken, and LEGO Goliath routes might have been just as popular.
• Online/Ranked Map Combinations: Introducing new combinations of online adventure/ranked maps would be welcomed greatly. The map combinations from classes dropped from online are just sitting there unused and alternate routes/circuits could be swapped in. Not too long ago, I did a custom online B700, all terrain types including FRR, and the map combinations we saw were extremely refreshing. The ‘star of the show’ was actually FRR, believe it or not, as the the change-up in maps created entirely new FRR’s requiring new/different best routes to whatever race was next. Even the hardcore anti-FRRers I was with enjoyed the change up.
• B700/C600 Online Adventures: Frequntly requested even today, the addition of B700 fully into online play would be huge, dare I say even ― gasp ― C600 if they were feeling wild and crazy. While I’ve no doubt some players would be unable or unwilling to tolerate anything lower than B700, they wouldn’t have joined in to begin with and would be free to drop out to find another lobby exactly like they did in FH3. Lower classes in multiplayer didn’t break FH3 and from my admitted cursory sampling of low class racing in FM7, it doesn’t seem to have ruined Motorsport, either. I think there’s more than enough room for a full B700 and even C600. D500 is probably a step too far with the FH4 map being such harder than FH3’s flat Aussie map, though I personally would be thrilled with D500 online.
• Winter Rivals: I stopped short of saying All Seasons Rivals as I don’t think there’s enough difference between Spring and Summer to warrent adding Spring. Autumn could be very worthwile if made wetter and muddier, but that may tread into needing additional resources. But at least making Winter Rivals, a season which needs no extra differentiating from other seasons, available in-game would would be worthwhile, if anything it’d be something; the work is already done and just needs to be made accessible.
Now, I acknowledge that some of these suggestions may not exactly be selling points for some, necessarily. Is Winter D500 cross country Rivals for everybody? No, FN, I know that it is not (
), but like everything else in this game, those that don’t care for something are free to do something else. I’ve always maintained the omittance or removal of any feature is bad for everyone and for the game itself as a whole. These suggestions I suspect would almost all be largely easy to implement and require minimal resources/low cost to implement making use of existing elements already in the game. While some players may be cool to some of the suggestions above, collectively these additions/reimplementions would certainly add some playability longevity to the game’s life with little cost/effort.
…and they all lived happily ever after.
The End 
you being a veteran forza player would also know that the game would normally have been replaced after 2 years
and that usually no new content would normally have been added after 12 months, or very rarely
and now after 2.5 years you are still expecting more , 1.5 years after what normally would have been the end date