I interpreted her as intentionally being a parody of a vlogger, where you laugh at her exaggerated characteristics. So I think her annoying voice is part of that, it’s an exaggerated version of the standard hyper-enthusiastic vlogger voice that seems to be required to be successful.
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The game in general is just full of obnoxiousness.
The voice overs.
The car cosmetics.
The avatar cosmetics.
The emotes.
The music that cannot be turned off.
It’s all overbearing and obnoxious and completely unnecessary to driving.
And there are bugs and bugs and poorly implemented features for years that directly relate to the core game and it just gets ignored.
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This is honestly one of the GREATEST posts I’ve ever read on this forum. To say you’ve summarized it beautifully, would be an understatement!
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I think they should probably add the variety of race types from Horizon into Motorsport, but give them a “serious” treatment in Motorsport. The problem at the moment is that if you want dirt racing, for example, you have to play Horizon, but then you get people who want it to be like dirt racing in Motorsport would be, whereas Horizon is intended to be a bit of a laugh.
This might seem off-topic for this thread, but I’m reading between the lines of what people are saying - how it comes across to me is that people don’t want the game to be “a bit of a laugh”, so I ask myself why they’re playing it when that is what it is, and the only conclusion I can come to is that they want the types of racing that aren’t in Motorsport, but they don’t want the “bit of a laugh” treatment of them.
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I liked LaRacer’s missions if only for the fact that they paid homage to racing games past. Her voice wasn’t all that annoying for me, but I can get where she will be annoying to others.
Robert of Drift Club on the other hand needs to seriously shut up. Doing some of these missions having to listen to his annoying banter about power to rate ratios and if the back end comes out then I’m using too much power made me rage. Too many times I’d shout "oh shut the (insert cuss word here) up!
I miss Alice Hart and Dak Stewart from the first game. Keira isn’t so bad, and I miss Warren from Horizon 3 (kinda liked the guy). Everyone introduced in Horizon 4 are annoying.
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Dak is easily the best character in the whole franchise.
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The homages were largely half-baked. The only one I really found amusing was the SEGA Rally homage.
That said, the character didn’t bother me much. She’s certainly no cause for “cringe”.
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The thing that broke it for me surprising wasn’t the accent (which was a bit annoying, but American accents usually are for me, especially harsh ones like New York and Valley Girl), but the fact that she sounded too young to have actually played the games she was referencing growing up. The original OutRun was late '80s as was the Test Drive she mentioned, Daytona/Sega Rally/Ridge Racer were early-mid 90s for their first installments, whereas the LaRacer character sounds mid-20s at the latest, which would put her at only a couple of years old when most of those games were in their prime. Whilst it’s not to say she didn’t play a lot of older games when she was growing up, it just breaks the whole “nostalgic” feel and sends it down the whole hipster-y “I’m cool because I like old things, even though I’m still young” path.
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LaRacer is so annoying to the point I’ve had to mute the in game voices.
Why am I playing Horizon?
Open world so there are roads and hill climbs rather than sterile race tracks/circuits.
I relate to roads more than circuits.
I like driving the car roster in Forza and like the modifications we can do to them.
I don’t need zaniness. Just give me cars and the place to drive them.
What more is needed in a driving game?
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You missed the point. She’s a parody. That’s why she’s so obnoxious.
The other characters (Joel, the director and the mechanic) are parodies as well.
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I actually feel like she’s not obnoxious enough. Her lines are kind of dancing on the line between nerdy and annoying, but the acting isn’t quite there. Doesn’t come off as a real character but as someone just reading from a script. Unless THAT’S the parody…
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What drove me crazy when I was completing the Horizon Stories challenges was how you have to hear the same dialogue on every attempt with no way to turn it off. There were a few of them that took me a good number of tries to 3-star, and I got sick of hearing the characters say the same dialogue over and over again. Not just with LaRacer but all of them.
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I just retried the events and it avoided the dialogue.
How is she different than aw12 blackpants slaptrain and every other sh*y YT/Streamer
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Because they all have personality traits other than loud content creator.
LaRacer is annoying because she’s a parody of YouTubers and streamers. She’s supposed to be exactly what the public sees YTers and streamers as, a loud and obnoxiously happy person with a camera in their hand. In fact, most characters in these games are stereotypes and parodies. Mike Steele, LaRacer, Warren, Alex, Jaimin, Don Thompson, Scott Tyler, Ben, even ANNA! This is a franchise built on characters that are intentionally annoying to be funny and it keeps going over your head the more they do it.
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I disagree, I don’t think they are parodies or attempted parodies, but instead just incredibly badly written characters.
I’ve seen nothing in my time playing the game to back you point up.
As for OP’s title “maybe the worse”, she is the worse, I can currently recall.
The fact that every sound cant be set to 0, is the real problem, and again points to a rushed / poorly thought out game.
It makes me wonder if PG lost a lot of talented game designers since FH 3 was made ?, or if turn 10 had less of an involvement than previous years, hoping by now that PG would know the formula.
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I’d say pastiche is the better word than parody, they are obviously hamming up some of the classic cliche/stereotypes but they’re not really using them as insults or making fun of them.
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Mike Steele - Movie making veteran, yet always surprised when a new guy does well. That’s a stereotype if I’ve ever seen one.
LaRacer - Already discussed her.
Warren - Typical, thick-accented, Austrailian car man. I felt like I couldn’t turn a corner without him referencing Mad Max as well.
Alex - While the character itself isn’t a parody, his accent sure is.
Jaimin - The man who runs the street racing scene also happens to be young and annoying.
Don Thompson - The “old fart” who doesn’t quite understand technology and the youth and such. He even says it himself at the end of The Halo Experience.
Scott Tyler - It really wasn’t until FH4, but he slowly grew into the annoying, yet charming young pop radio host.
Ben - The first really British voice I remember from Horizon and it was hilariously bad and cheesy.
ANNA - The typical intrusive GPS.
I think there’s plenty of evidence to back up my claim, you just need to play the game to see it.
A stereotype or trope is not a parody.
It’s not parody to simply use a stereotype / trope, a parody is taking the characteristics to their logical conclusion, to the N’th degree (see the smoker from scary movey for a prime example).
These aren’t comedy characters, they are just bad / poorly written characters.
This wasn’t my main point, my main point was that not having the option to completely mute any in-game sound aspect is the problem.
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