I’ll admit, parody may not have been the best term to use, but I still hold my stance that these characters were supposed to be comedic. I just simply can’t see them as poorly written when I look at them like that.
As for me not refuting or commenting on your main point? I don’t disagree with it. The fact that in-game audio levels cannot be fully muted is just poor game design, but me stating that in a forum where it’s stated about every 20 minutes wouldn’t help anything, y’know?
There does seem to be more dialogue in this than in FH3 and it’s so annoying not being able to skip it or switch it off!
I don’t mind LaRacer’s voice…just wish we could skip the cutscenes. The voiceovers during the missions are the worst though…that World’s Fastest guy actually distracted me and caused me to spin out and crash on the McLaren Senna mission!
I don’t find it as annoying as everyone portrays it. I liked the nostalgia feeling of the story as well. I would say I’m neutral with her voice, not my favorite, but not cringe worthy annoying as everyone is saying in this thread.
Doesn’t bother me at all, none of the characters do.
LaRacer is my waifu. I have had many thoughts of doing things to her. Like drifting around in a hoonigan and hearing her scream.
Game developers are always trying to design games that slide into the hands of streamers and “content creators”, because we’ve seen about a half dozen games from very small companies explode with popularity from popular streamers playing them live. This is a very distracting aspect to video games now as a lot of things are being undermined so that games play well during a live stream. Look at Destiny 2. Everybody who plays it says it’s great. Everybody who watches somebody play it , says it’s boring. This is troubling. The whole streaming video games thing is really putting a kink in game development. And it gets worse…
Game developers used to design and develop games based on what they knew to be true. These days game developers have basically turned themselves into monkey’s that write code. They ask kids what they want in the game, and then they write the code and present you with the game. The problem with this is two fold. First of all, these kids don’t even know what they want. They might think they do, but they don’t have as much information as developers who have been designing and developing games for decades. Second, if these people knew what was required to design a successful game, THEY WOULD BE DOING IT. Game developers need to put their big boy pants on and get back to being professionals. I thought you guys were the game developers? Why are you letting 12 years olds tell you how to make games? Create a professional product, and present it to consumers. Stop letting people pull you in 900 different directions while you create these abstract games with a bunch of distracting gimmicks that annoy everybody to death.
If you want to get back to hitting home runs, guess what? You have to be willing to take a risk. You can’t play it safe 100% of the time, and expect a home run. You’re going to hit a ground double at best. And that’s exactly what Forza has been for several years now… A ground double.
I would start by putting a bias of -5 on any vote cast on a Japanese car in any of Forza’s Twitter polls. But that’s just me. 
Except FH4 is extremely streamer unfriendly. You can’t turn the music off to zero for crying out loud, this is basically a streamer necessity.
^^ very interesting observations
I actually liked the female mechanic from Horizon 2, at least she always seemed cheerful and happy to see me.
Kiera on the other hand… All that time we spent in Australia; she was cheering me on, concerned for my wellbeing, even ensured my insurance was covered.
And then what happens? The first thing she says to me in the U.K. is “Nice to meet you”. Nice to meet me? What the… I thought we had something… @$#%!
Aside from those expressionless dead eyes that kept creeping me out, of course.
I actually really found it disheartening when she acted like she was meeting me for the first time. In the Forza Horizon canon (if there is such a thing), I assumed that my character was a persistent entity in the world. I thought this way concerning the character that filled the seats of our vehicles in Horizon 1&2 (only because the character model in 2 looked similar to the model in 1), and considered him the “returning champ”. Horizon 3 brought new models obviously, so this was an obvious new up and comer to the Horizon throne. Since the same models were used for this games, I again assumed the thought of being a "returning champ, only for Keira to have no idea who I was. Surprisingly jarring for a Horizon game. Or maybe I’m just over thinking things?
It’s not that you’re overthinking - you’re just not thinking right. 
In Horizon 2 the game refers to your character like he’s a known ace, establishing a pretty clear, if not necessary, continuity. In 3, you’re running everything from the get-go. The main reason for this is series progression - the sandbox features and blueprints are emphasized, and also they want the scope to feel bigger, with you being in control of expanding festival sites and such. For me, this position made the most sense if I saw the character as once again the same one. He’s dominated the previous two festivals and was then asked to run the whole show. The fact that the character has possibly changed their sex and/or ethnicity isn’t such a big deal if you’ve played Saints Row 2. 
So the reason why in 4 it’s a completely new character is that you can’t really go bigger than running the festival. The player position needed to be rebooted. It was a welcome move for me, to start from the bottom again. Unfortunately the campaign itself doesn’t really have any of that rags-to-riches structure, but regarding the game characters and dialogue, I’m glad that this time there’s maybe a tiiiiiny bit less of everyone just, well, stroking you. That’s the thing that really gets on my nerves in the writing.
Another vote to incorporate an option to skip the cutscenes. The thesaurus perfectly describes what I think of those vomit-inducing Millennial Sims:
Obnoxious, unpleasant, disagreeable, nasty, distasteful, offensive, objectionable, unsavoury, unpalatable, dislikeable, off-putting, awful, terrible, dreadful, frightful, revolting, repulsive, repellent, repugnant, disgusting, odious, vile, foul, abhorrent, loathsome, nauseating, nauseous, sickening, hateful, detestable, execrable, abominable, insufferable, intolerable, unacceptable, despicable, contemptible, poisonous, noxious, obscene, base, hideous, and scabrous.
That pretty well sums it up.
However, if the developers insist on keeping them in the game, how about giving us an option to RUN THEM OVER? Splat…
you’re making a big deal out of nothing… u trying to be edgy or something?
I cannot stand all the unskippable dialogue in these games. I really don’t like he voice acting (LaRacer’s American accent is about as convincing as Tom Hardy’s Sean Connery impression in Batman), but I most of all resent the fact that I have absolutely no choice. I can neither skip these people nor mute them. It’s remarkable how noisy this game is with all the volume and sound options at 0/off. I used to play the game with music off, then play my own tunes alongside. I can’t do that now because even with the music off, it blares music in every race load , and makes a ton of noise every time I open the map so jaimin can tell me about 60000 stupid new traps I can ignore. I love this game, sincerely, but it’s profoundly irritating for no reason lol. Just let me mute these people oh my god it has been 4 whole games I HATE them
p.s. I’d like to find out which person at PG is responsible for the map update dialogue forcing control away from the player, take him to lunch, and sternly explain to him why that’s awful and horrible and the wrong thing to do, and then when he tries to leave at the end I’ll force him into his chair and tell him about all the stuff he could eat tomorrow. And THEN I’ll let him get up, my point having been proven
That bloke from the drift club makes me cringe more. Would rather listen to LaRacer’s voice.
That quote by the way made me giggle at work. Hope you’ve been well nuvo
Strap a pair of headphones onto him at the start of lunch which plays music that he doesn’t like and cannot switch off.
Also make sure the volume control of the headphones only goes down to 1 and not 0.
Music can be disabled temporarily via a menu option buried 3 layers deep.
The option switches itself off just before lunch finishes and suddenly music will be blaring once again.
I don’t really care about the ‘youtuber’ but I have no interest in completing any more of the stories, they’re very boring. Even the stunt events were boring since it made you drive to the location before doing the event. Route creator is fun and once my buddies start playing more I’ll be fine just playing online like I did with Horizon 2 and 3 but I have to say there is an awful lot of soulless grinding in Horizon 4. Perhaps if 7 of 10 wheel spins didn’t give you clothing garbage it would be better, but…
I don’t get this grind talk at all, because in FH3 and also in FH4 the CR is pouring in from every direction. I have 320 cars in garage (10-15 I have bought, everything else is from spins and progressing in the game), only house missing is the 15 million castle, which I will buy soon, and haven’t done a single Goliath type race yet (although I unlocked those weeks ago). Where is the grind?! OK, maybe the Ranked Team Adventure is a grind in a sense to get to higher levels, but that mode is more like a torture chamber. What is the point of having everything done by the end of the first week? The grind was FM3, FM4 and FH2.
Sorry about the off topic.