Lots of good points in here, and good to see that it has remained a discussion since things like Route Creator. My community has given up on the game, to a man, and has been discussing why. Conveniently we were also mainly game passing it, so nothing much lost, might still be playing if I had paid in full! I did play 3 longer, but mainly to get every car just because. And the main race I did was Goliath because the rest were incredibly generic. And so it is here.
I played Horizon 2 on Xbox One first, but have since completed all achievements in Horizon 1, both F&F ones, Horizon 3, and Horizon 2 on the 360 just for completionism. In that order, I went from:
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a wonderfully enjoyable grind of road trips, where all I had to do was choose a destination and a division, and it told me want to do (I’m now over 200 road trips and will be going back to it), to
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an actual progression grind with vaguely interesting characters and motivation to beat them, interesting PR stunts and motivation to beat them due to stricter fast travel, and a popularity system with motivation just because I wanted to see what happened, to
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fun short stories set on a map I already loved, to
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a way overhyped map with a blueprint feature that was not as advertised, very generic races with no interesting towns, fun places that no race ever went, and some very dull playgrounds. I suddenly had to go to effort to set up multiplayer races, not just pick a class but pick a division, time of day, etc. And that made it less likely that people would have eligible cars, so we pretty quickly went back to 2. And I had to make an effort in single player too. Had to set the obnoxiously blatant game-extending championships to be as short as possible just to get the achievement, and once done, had to choose races to grind when I had only done each once or twice and had no feel for them … to
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a bizarre take on my favourite map with much stricter physics making drifting really hard again, and annoying walls cutting off a lot of the open world. The grind of completing every race in every division, mercifully only 10, not 28 as per Xbox One, was real, but it was also fun, and I got to know even more races in that world, some more than others with the stricter “earn 1m credits from rivals” achievement, to
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an even more overhyped map with a season system we all knew would not change everything, poorly designed multiplayer with freeroam rush focusing on offroading while the races were very much on roads. At least road races were more on roads than in Horizon 3 where almost every race went offroad, but dirt races were also almost entirely on roads usually, so go figure.
The map is more open than ever, but as marketed, also much more vertical, so more obstacles with cliffs and a bloody lake in that open world. We are again directed where to jump and where to drift but, while I like the challenges, there is zero motivation to replay after three starring each, as compared to the hours we spent on jumps we found for ourselves on the Horizon 2 highway, still by far the best and longest highway in the franchise.
The credits grind is very real again with crazy expensive castles that we can’t even go inside, instead of something like The Crew 2, where we can display vehicles in our house, or GTA, where I understand we can even host parties there. Crazy. The skills grind is even bigger with car masteries, and has become something you just sit and do for ages, especially with Forzathon targets, and things like the Sagaris FE requiring over 100 points into the Sagaris … rather than just unlocking perks over time with no feeling of urgency, and focusing on racing … weird idea I know!
But it was the “stories” that finished me. Not the difficulty, just the uninspiredness of them. The oops you hit a car in your 1939 classic, better restart the whole preamble with annoying cutscenes and voiceover ahain … ness of them. Horizon 2’s bucket lists got crazy hsrd, and the achievements had us do them in coop too. Horizon 3’s didn’t really bother with hard, leaving that to drift zones and blueprints, but those were either boring or intentionally ridiculously hard, and there was no motivation there. Horizon 4 cleverly took those away but made stories, taking away the do or die of bucket lists, making it slower to retry the events, and making them pretty generic with the same starting spot each time and pretty minimal variation, at least in the drift ones; I didn’t bother with the others.
And then we have the expansions, which still aren’t expansions as they are totally separate. They burned all those resources making seasons, and we’re going to just leave that all behind for yet another island when there are clear bridges on the map that we were expecting great things from. To be honest I was half expecting them to bring in Hot Wheels as a fifth season! The grind in that particular expansion was amusing as they blatantly duplicated circuits just to make it seem longer. The three star systems were actually very cool, except that you could do only stunts and unlock all of the races. With Horizon 4 you at least have to do races to unlock races, but they’re still presented in a random order with no feeling of progression.
This Horizon life thing just seems like a misinterpretation of what we actually want (he says sweepingly), well designed and memorable races on an easy to traverse but not necessarily just bushwhacking map. Horizon 2 balanced all that beautifully, still making us avoid most trees in cross country while fitting a lot into a map that really wasn’t that open when you look back at it. It had seriously iconic roads because we drove them all the time on road trips, an amazing highway as mentioned, an airstrip that was a destination of a few races, and had that wall at the end that we kept trying to get over, so it became a natural as well as an official playground.
Clothes were an interesting addition in Horizon 4, but we see our avatars so little (although loading screens are longer than ever), and we see each other’s basically never, that it seems like a lot of effort for a niche feature. Even Motorsport 7’s gear was more interesting, and that’s saying something. And I even ground out rank 10 on Mixer for that t-shirt, listening to the banal commentators … talk about no motivation to replay lol :).
That’ll have to do for now. Definitely agreed it is the shortest in terms of actually wanting to play. I’m going back to Horizon 2, myself.