My first foray into the Horizon world was Forza Horizon 3.
I followed FH2, and watched countless youtube videos of let’s plays with it, but since I didn’t have an xbox at the time I couldn’t play it.
When I first played FH3 I still didn’t have an Xbox, but luckily microsoft added the whole play-anywhere thing so I was able to play it on PC. I loved it. I spent hundreds of hours in it, mostly single player, doing the occasional “playground game” for a forzathon requirement. It had a clear progression of “unlock this festival site, spend some time doing races here, upgrade it, then move on to the next site”.
After you “completed” the story you were given a new challenge - upgrade all festivals to max level. That unlocked a showcase I think (or a huge race).
After that you had yet another challenge handed out to you. Finish all championships for all races. That definitely took a while. That unlocked something too.
I wasn’t even done with that when the 1st expansion launched - blizzard mountain. It had the same type of completion requirements - all championships for all races.
Focused on that, then returned to the main map, managed to complete all championships, shortly thereafter the second expansion dropped - hot wheels. That was a lot of fun.
Anyway, last year I also bought FH2 and started playing that before FH4 launched. It was fun, but wasn’t blown away. Still worth playing it though.
FH4 is definitely a great game, better in a lot of aspects than FH3 and its predecessors, but definitely lacking in others too. The thing that hurts me the most is the lack of progression. FH3 had clear objectives that were given to you. Do this, do that. How long it took you, or the order you did it in wasn’t important, but it was clear what needed to be done. Plus content was unlocked gradually.
In FH4 I feel this is completely absent. You’re given ALL showcases in the first 2-3 hours of playing the game. ALL of them. The progression is not as clear anymore. You can do anything in any order, but you don’t have a clear objective anymore. It’s just… do it for the sake of doing it. I understand that there is not much difference if you look at the practical side of things, it’s still just doing races, but at least FH3 made an effort to guide you in some way. Here it’s just… “here’s some races. do them. i don’t care”.
Because of that I feel that I already reached the “end-game”, of just grinding some races to unlock those final final races. That took me a year in FH3. Now it has taken me less than 3 weeks.
They have “seasonal championships” and other “dynamic content”, but it feels so shallow and lacks a complete sense of direction or progression, I have absolutely no incentive to play them. The rewards are insignificant unless you’re playing on the highest difficulty settings. (I am playing on average/above-average).
I haven’t tried the online so I can’t comment on it.
There still is a lot of content here, and arguably more coming in each month, but I feel that it’s just a bit shallow and lackluster. The seasons are also interesting, but way way more mediocre than they made them out to be. I mean, they really touted them as this complete game changer, you’d have your mind blown, a completely new game each week. No, it’s the same game. Races are wet in autumn. It rains a lot. In summer it almost never rains, roads are dry and sticky. In winter there’s snow and you slip a lot.
But that’s about it. You can do all races in all seasons. Winter doesn’t have its own special races (aside from the seasonal ones), summer doesn’t have its own races, etc… In the end seasons are just a visual change for me, I don’t feel it changes gameplay in any huge or significant way.
Overall I’ve probably spent around 100 hours so far in the game, so definitely got my money’s worth. I think the reason I’m a bit disappointed is that I had very high expectations for the game based on my own assumptions and based on the streams from the devs. Had I remained indifferent I might have been more pleasantly surprised.
I’m still playing FH3 more than FH4. Hopefully that will change.