I never did rivals in FH4 as I opted for solo rank instead. But seeing as ranked is currently not in FH5 I’ve started doing rivals and have to say it’s awesome.
The only negative right now are the obvious cheats who have times 100x faster then the fastest legitimate times.
The only improvements I would like to see is when I go to change rivals or even when I toggle through races/classes I would like to see where I’m rated. I.e. ur 10th best on this track in this class.
I also notice when I get top 10 or whatever that my rating doesn’t register immediately. Would be nice to see this shown immediately.
A lot (or all) of the very fast times like a few seconds are because of a massive oversight which allowed custom races to be made very short, and for those times to appear on the rivals leaderboards. Whether they will wipe these times remains to be seen.
Yes rivals is a good mode, though it’s badly designed, no split times, no ability to change car or tune once you’ve loaded, no ability to see your leaderboard position at the end without manually finding the track and class combination by laboriously returning to free roam and going through all the layers of menus. All complained about in FH4, all ignored and just copy and pasted lazily into FH5, as is the way with these developers. The path of least resistance is the one they always take.
Just a few of these changes would make rivals infinitely better than it is now, and as mentioned they’ve had plenty of time to address these issues. It’s been a while since I’ve played it but the rivals experience in FH3 was so much better. Some of the backwards steps have probably been conscious decisions, others are as a consequence of “change for changes sake”. Rivals has the potential to keep players engaged in two years time. but that doesn’t seem to matter at the moment. Maybe it’ll change when the engagement stats hit rock bottom.
I look for the rivals times that are ridiculously long like over 10 minutes when they should only take a couple of minutes, wich allows you to drive carefully so as to ensure a clean lap for the accolades score.
I’m in 2 minds about Rivals…I loved it in FH4 and would quite happily do 200-300 laps a week on it. On FH5 though, I can’t find the same enthusiasm…I have done a fair amount of Rivals (set a time on every track and a lot of tracks in several classes), even had the fastest non-cheat time on one of the Street races but I just can’t get into it. The tracks are a bit too bland for me and not appealing…I do like doing Rivals on the longer tracks though…Goliath, Collosus and Marathon (Titan doesn’t count as I don’t like CC lol)
All the changes FN lists would be fantastic but they’ve shown no desire to actually make rivals better. As it is, it’s similar to FH4 (albeit they do appear to have resolved the broken rewind issue) but with a ludicrous number of cheat/glitched times messing up the leaderboards.
I’m still enjoying it though and with the abject failure to create a competitive online racing experience, It’s the only mode I can see myself playing long-term.
That Rivals event could be so awesome…BUT with all that cons FN has already mentioned its nothing but infinite frustration. What morons designing an event where i ve to go alle the way back to free roam and all the whole way into Rivals mode only to change my car or a tuning. Not seeing my rank after race is completely stupid. Only a guy who never plays Rivals can design such nonsense. So i dont care about rivals…and thats sad, to have yet an other unplayable part of the whole game-experince only because of some (lazy?) morons at PGG.
Since completing a lot of the single player campaign - rivals has been a go to mode for me. I’m not too bothered by all the seasonal championships etc and don’t do much multiplayer at all.
I do like challenging myself to go as quick as I can against friends.
I’ve noticed some frustrating aspects about the user friendliness of it, when compared to the motorsport titles - particularly not being able to see a LB position at the end of a race and being able to jump straight back in for another run with that knowledge in mind.
They have at least fixed the ‘next rival is’ thing. Now if they could get it to do that ‘on the fly’ I.e. choose to continue lapping and have the next rival lined up -that would save doing all the menus and an unnecessary out lap on some events.
Finally - this could just be me but have had some suspiciously close rivals when beating another rival - i.e. next rival is 0:000 - this isn’t random times on the LB these are friends - just seems weird that I’m coincidentally exactly to the thousandth of a second the same time as a friend’s time - I’ve got 3 + examples of this in the last few days.
its something else
i have 0 friends and i get the same 0:000 next rival time all the time
and ...
I would like to see the rivals split up a bit more
~ keyboard mouse rivals
~ controller rivals
~ steering wheel rivals (clutch/no clutch)
the device you use is who you play against.
im not to keen on racing someone with a steering wheel or keyboard or mouse / advantage and disadvantages make for unfair play
I get them sometimes but not often. If there are a lot of times overall then it stands to reason there will be someone very close to your time, if you put in a typical lap.
Man, I miss the forums! What’s up folks! I’ve been in love with rivals since joining up Moss and Kid’s Hotlap Challenges back in FM6 days. Those and the tuning comps we used to do, which are rivals based. Besides just building and painting, all I like to do is rivals. I’m not fast mind you, lol, but I can build a mean hotrod every now and again! I need ro stop giving away cars and make some.credits to build rivals cars but its mostly all I’ll be doing shortly.
Hi xDeaDxZeppLiNx - spent plenty of time on those myself over the years. Those and the Bounty Hunter challenges T10 used to run.
@ Ladylamister - I get with so many users there will be a lot of times with the same overall time. Just found it strange I keep setting exactly the same time as someone on my friends list. Could be a weird coincidence. Just wondered if anyone else had noticed this as it probably should be a bit of a cool thing not a - what again thing lol.
The way I think of it is that Horizon Open is “synchronous multiplayer” and Rivals is “asynchronous multiplayer”. This gives Rivals some distinct advantages if your primary focus isn’t to play live with friends or strangers: no rammers/trolls, no netcode issues, no absurd loading times, there will always be ghosts to race even when the population dies down, you can pick whatever race type and class you want. It is unfortunate that there isn’t any real structure to Rivals as a multiplayer mode – you can probably imagine systems more engaging than just a permanent class-based leaderboard for each official track which will in the long run typically be dominated by meta cars of varying degrees of cheesiness – but it’s ludicrous to think PGG would improve on Rivals in any meaningful way at this point. Still, Rivals is pretty much the only thing I do in FH5 outside of the playlist, so I’m holding out some hope at least for Rivals events with different weather conditions or time of day, just to spice things up a bit.