Reddit must have the worst out of touch takes ever about forza horizon 5

Forza Horizon Forza Horizon 5 FH5 Discussion
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I love dirt rally 2.0 but it’s not without faults. Mind you no video game will be. A faultless video game is something devs must always strive for even though it can never be achieved.

Just for postarity’s sake though:

The tire system is less than barebones. If I can choose 1 and only one thing this team steals from the KT racing WRC series, it’s tire management.

Hardcore damage, while it would be a nice notch on a difficulty scale or option in a drop down menu, is still very tame compared to real life. More hardcore than most games, and all games (that I know of) if you exclude BeamNG, but it still shys away from that full sim experience. It’s also turned off for daily/weekly/monthly activities, and not noted in the leaderboards, which I have some issues with.

I have the callout slider as early as it will go and there is still the occasional callout that is too late to be useful. I’d mention some issues with the pace notes themselves but honestly that’s to be expected considering their excellent detail and need to apply them across multiple racing restrictions. Not really a negative but worth noting.

Career mode is a slog as you get into the higher difficulty, and the team management is shallow. Custom rally does a good job filling the gap as far as racing is concerned, but I’d still like a more flexible career mode with more team management depth (contracts, morale, off calender shakedowns, etc).

That’s just a few things off the top of my head. Still, fantastic game.

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I would agree, particularly given the level the game has reached. I think a perfect example of this would be the ongoing issues with cockpit view animations. Jump in the Sierra 700 & watch your character’s hand as they change gears. These are the types of issues which greatly detract from the experience but also leave you wondering, as you said: “Why? This is just poor”…

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Recently the official Forza Discord hosted a Q&A with Playground Developers about the Rally Adventure expansion.

After reading through all the questions and answers provided in that transcript, and noting that it was held after the official announcements about the expansion, is the scope and timing of the session something you’d find satisfactory if held on the forums?

If not satisfactory for what you’d want to see in terms of direct communication, could you lay out the framework of a plan that would satisfy you for what you’d want from that communication?

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This is actually a really good question, and one that requires a lot of thought even from me, the consumer, before answering. First of all, I’m going to quote a post I made in another thread:

Now I want to quote another post I made in a different thread.

I don’t want direct dev interaction. I’ve been around long enough and seen it go sideways too many times. It’ll most likely end up a waste of our own and the devs time.

What I do want to see is for the devs to mature from being shameless self ego inflators to people willing to tackle tough questions and issues. I want to see evidence that the chain from us, to you, to them is intact. I want hard hitting questions and gameplay design criticisms to be addressed in an open manner, and I mean for the world to see, not for the devs to get flooded with whatever inane nonsense the internet howls at them in a particular moment.

The forums are a good source for some ideas, it wont take much looking around. It’s also a source of that wild howling I mentioned. I want to see that filtered and distilled, then addressed.

To put it in as few words as possible, I want to see you work with them, for us.

Edit: I should mention that by you I mean the community management team, not necessarily you the individual. I have no idea what your job entails, how much you get paid, or what kind of mental health support you get. For all I know you’re getting paid part time wages to act as both site manager and community manager with no benefits. That is one of many potential failures in this clearly broken chain.

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I would have basically said the same thing so just going to quote this. I like the idea of Q&A but everyone knows it will just be filtered down to the softball questions that don’t really say anything or answer anything. I just want acknowledgement of our frustrations. Maybe a gameplan to address them. Something like when they addressed the Boneshaker and Track-Tor in FH4. They gave us a clear reason why the cars are the way they are and a clear resolution. “This is the problem the community wants addressed, this is how we will address it.” I don’t mean that as in pick something and fix it or else either. Even just something to discuss that’s on their mind would be sufficient.

The stream every month is mostly just talking about the upcoming playlist, which doesn’t really need all that much time spent on it after the cars are revealed. Maybe reallocate some of that monthly time to addressing whatever the barometer is swaying towards in the community. It doesn’t have to be all negative, maybe they did something unintentionally that the community liked and they address that. But I also don’t want it to be derailed into patting themselves on the back either.

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Something like that on the forums would be fine. It would be more engagement than has come in years. But there needs to be more than just that. That Q&A, despite coming with a couple of informative tidbits, still read like the extended commercial for the expansion many expect those types of pre-planned promotional events to be. Most of it was regurgitated information, and one of the answers regarding play length was…optimistic, but I digress. There has to be more engagement on the part of the devs. The Forza Monthlies are not cutting it. Too often, ledes are buried in mountains of filler and feel-good quick dopamine boosts that do next-to-nothing.

One way to fix that would be pinning a thread to the top of every applicable forum. “Questions for the devs.” It would be a persistent thread, but a heavily-regulated one meant solely for well-written and thought out inquiries for the developers. Then, once or twice a week, one or two of the devs comes on and answers a small batch of those questions (3-4, tops). Good answers too (I’ll get back to that in a minute), and if a question arises that can’t be readily answered, a promise to get back to it in the next batch. A smaller-scale Q&A, I suppose, for all of the times where a major expansion or content update isn’t coming. Something like that would only take minutes out of the day. There wouldn’t have to be any other engagement beyond that thread. Make each batch themed, if you need to - track design, car licensing, bug fixes, anti-cheat, leaderboards, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Something like that would be so much more than what we’re currently getting.

The second thing (well, second, third, fourth and fifth, really) is as WarmWind mentioned because he’s faster to the draw than I am today - don’t be afraid to talk, and don’t be afraid to answer the hard questions. Real talk: there’s a non-zero chance this game launches in a bad state. Call it doomsaying if you want; I call it the sad state of modern gaming. If or when that happens, no one’s going to want boilerplate. No one’s going to want dodges. They will have to be addressed. Unpopular decisions are going to made in design, in content, so on and so forth. No one’s going to want Stepford smiling as the new and improved Festival Playlist gets pushed out of the door. It’s going to have to be addressed. Either defend the decisions made, or acknowledge that mistakes were made. “Look for a new thread in the Suggestions Hub by mid-week in regards to Situation X.” And you can also acknowledge the good, too, and address the good. I, and many others, have talked plenty about how lackluster the promotional campaign has been for Motorsport. There is so much more that you all could be doing, and very little of it would actually require a Forza Monthly or quarterly XBox presentation (that you have to share with other titles). You have Twitter, you have Instagram, you have Reddit, and you have the forums; maybe there’s even a TikTok I know nothing about. Use them. You should have been using them by now. Use them when it comes time for the Grand Reveal Part 3, in 3-D. Use them after. Keep using them. Be proud of your game.

That’s all I got in regards to this. Everything else is either too far off topic or goes over the same path.

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49

Very well said Clutch & I don’t want to minimize the overall context of your response to just one quote, but this is such a key point IMO. It doesn’t have to be an overly detailed context thread of in-depth problem descriptions & paths to resolution. Simply having the devs occasionally respond to some of the legit concerns that are brought up here would be a huge injection of what the core community is looking for which is simply acknowledgment.

I would much rather see Torbin or the other devs throw in a response occasionally just to show they are involved with the community, rather than receiving an occasional cryptic photo of what they might be working on to leave the community guessing.
“Yep, I was playing yesterday & noticed the same thing; we’ve got it on the list & are working on it. Wait’ll you see what we did with…”

Right now it just seems there’s an imposed hierarchy of separation that divides the community as a whole, which is not completely necessary. I also fully realize that it’s not always that simple, due to a lot of other factors, but since we’re having an open dialogue, well, there it is.

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I’m going to watch this like a hawk! :wink:

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@T10ManteoMax At first let me point out that I think you’re at the right address with @Clutch2009.

The thing I’m wondering about is why this “offer” comes just now? Can it be that you got a nudge from somebody named Luis or is this just because the rising pressure in general? Honest answer, please!

When it comes to what to communicate about with the devs I can give you three examples of what I would like to talk and have a honest discussion about. With the respective leads and/or seniors of the concerned areas mind you. Dragging in some juniors or selected communicators won’t cut it in my book.

  1. The AI behaviour - Why isn’t it possible to fix it. I mean you must know since quite some time that there are massive issues related to it. May this be the swerving, the aggressivenes towards players or the outright PI cheating.

  2. The handling of the cars - Mainly the tire physics which are to my opinion the main culprit of the “borked” handling but also about things like the effects and impacts of different suspension, aero and so forth.

  3. Save slot limits - Why don’t or can’t we get more slots?

I’m understanding that you can’t talk about “company internals” but a general discussion about the topics should be possible. I’m also willing to accept answers like “we simply can’t rework it without braking the game, it would take too much effort, we can’t allocate the needed resources” or what ever in relation to point 1 for example. I just want honest answers so I can get a better understanding, form an opinion and make a conclusion of how to handle and approach the whole Forza franchise in the future.

That said I’d also like to talk about why it isn’t possible to address the bug with the MB 190E Evo wing. I simply can’t get around the fact that we got told “the downforce is so low by design”. That’s simply a lie in my opinion and how it is in all other versions of FH and FM simply proves this. But I can understand if such rather minor and specific things (in the overall/big picture) wouldn’t make it on to a list and would at least like to see the main issues addressed if there’s no time for things like this.

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@T10ManteoMax: any feedback to the response(s) to your question?

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Forza aero, car and damage models. It’s been over 10 years without significant development despite more powerful consoles and other games having more detailed visual damage to the same vehicles.

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We’ve been discussing how to do more with Q&A sessions, and you’ll see more reporting in blogs and in forums on the Troubleshooting and Suggestions Hub items in the future. But there is some expectation setting we need to do here:

There’s a good reason you only see devs every four weeks on Forza Monthly and not a Forza Daily. The idea that they can quickly answer a question in a matter of minutes each day is not realistic. Each item takes back and forth conversation to fully understand the issue and status from all the team members working on it. And the role the devs have is to spend their time developing, not doing the communication - that’s what the Community Team is here to do - so the community shouldn’t want devs to spend a lot of their time communicating at the expense of time to do their primary role.

Everything we communicate comes from internal discussion and consensus, so it also doesn’t make sense to require the dev to be the messenger when we have a team in place to be the messenger of the same message. Part of the communication we’ve settled on is more transparency and efficiency with bug status and feature voting with the THUB and SHUB, so players should not expect the team to set all that work aside and replace it with time-intensive dialogues.

We have in fact stated previously, multiple times, that the main reason players don’t see issues resolved on their timeline is due to caution about breaking something while trying to fix another, that bug fixing and development is not an easy or automatic process, and that prioritization is necessary given a number of factors. In many cases, the more complex the issue, the less the team would be able to provide a target date for when it’ll be finished.

I have passed these comments on to the team, and we’ll be looking at adding a Q&A section as well as a static area of previously stated answers on the forums. Educating the community on the game development process is one of our goals and was part of the reason Forza Monthly was launched. However, I can’t promise when that’ll happen or what that’ll look like in the end. It’s pretty clear that no matter what efforts the team makes, it will never be soon enough or comprehensive enough or specific enough to satisfy some members of the community. The best I can do right now is to say stay tuned for more info next week.

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From my perspective, I think this is being taken a bit out of context, if you are referring to my specific feedback. I did, in fact, make a point of emphasizing this is my comments:

This is more about promoting the cohesion of the community & team overall IMO, without the need for extensive granular details & time.

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You asked for feedback on response(s) and I was including Clutch’s comment that you quoted.

Keep in mind too, my question was whether the scope and timing of the Discord style Q&A on the forums would be sufficient, and the answer appears to be No. I’m also not sure what we’re supposed to do with “Be proud of your game” when the criticism is that we’re doing that already.

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It’s over 10 years re: this aero. We have tried each and every hub, thread and method of voting, too.

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^ Here’s an example. How productive would it be to spend repeated dialogue time opening up all the books on every issue the team is working on (which no company is going to do) and explain the why when the questions aren’t really an inquiry but a demand? (This is, I’ll admit, a rhetorical question.)

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An explanation as to why it’s too complex or why the requests have never been addressed is fine. But it’s not an unreasonable or impatient demand when it’s over 10 years. On some particular models it looks very glaring and dated. Tacked on. We got new kits from rocket bunny but they are not adjustable and people were disappointed about that. :man_shrugging:

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I’m going to play community spokesperson while being fully aware that I’m more talking from a personal perspective here.

We don’t expect answers each day. We would like to sit down and have a Q&A session on discord or the like where selected persons from the community act as our spokespersons.
If that isn’t possible we at least like to have a list with selected questions, issues and problems getting directly addressed and worked off in a reasonable manner and timeframe.

Besides that you don’t need and aren’t in the position to tell us what we should or shouldn’t want. We’d rather have the devs spend time with communicating at this point than them spending time on the next undesired feature nobody asked for like the useless lighting effects with “Tron like” barriers just to give an example.

We don’t expect them to put all work aside but it surely isn’t asked to much to free a working day for something like this in the current situation. The THUB and SHUB are mainly conceived as placebos in the community at the moment.

We know all that. Still other companies are doing exactly that. See CoH3 for example. The devs even admitted that they patched in a bug while fixing an other one but promised to address this in the future. That’s the (re)action we’re expecting. That the devs are open and honest. At the moment you basically hear zero, nada, zilch in that direction from them. Which comes of as trying to sweep actual problems under the rug.

Sorry, but you’re miserably failing with that education approach. The Forza streams I watched are providing basically nothing in that direction. A senior game designer telling how she reworked one of the Show Case races or how she picks the EventLabs is nothing else but laughable because the outcome and selection of what she’s doing is a joke and besides that a job for an intern or a junior at best.

If you would have taken the approach to communicate and interact with the community you’re taking now under pressure right at the start we wouldn’t sit here right now.

You’ve miserably failed your customers, loyal fans and community on not only that issue and don’t understand the actuall problem and the urgency that is needed to address the clusterfield this game is. To me it seems you’re actually not willing to pull the cart out of the mud, only try to do damage control and cover your backside.

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Again, a rhetorical question: What would be the point of having a developer or studio owner explain that my number one task right now is using the THUB and SHUB to feed them the info they want to help make their decisions when the community won’t accept that same message from the person they hired to do that very thing?

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Obviously this was not my comment, but yeah, I understand.