In Forza Horizon 4, the solo racing was great. The circuits were decent sized, and they felt like real tracks. You had tracks like Bamburgh and Astmoor, with a great balance of high speed and cornering. There were tracks like Lakehurst Copse, with lots of low speed corners. Even the street circuits were fun.
The AI was decent in FH4 as well. Unbeatable AI was a sufficient challenge, but they didn’t cheat. The drivatars didn’t race with enough downforce to break the earth’s crust. The AI was, for the most part, fairly well balanced. You could have a good race with them.
Now, Solo Racing is a shell of what it used to be. The tracks are tiny, with very few good corners. The tracks make an awful use of the map they are placed on. There are so many great sections of technical road in this game, but almost none of them are used. There’s generally no action or good overtaking, shallow corners, just not interesting racing.
And then there’s the cheating AI. The AI in first place absolutely run away from you at the start, and you’ll never be able to catch them. They also have enough downforce to take a 90 degree turn at 200 MPH completely flat. But once you get first, the AI don’t fight for it. It’s as if they give up the moment you take the lead, and the race immediately becomes boring and predictable.
I’ll leave this here, but keep in mind this isn’t even the worst of it -
Solo Racing used to be the core of Forza Horizon. Now, from the tracks themselves to the AI, solo racing is a shell of what it used to be. It used to be fun, and memorable. Now the tracks and races are just absolutely forgettable.
10 Likes
Agree on the tracks but not the AI, I think FH4’s is better described as ‘less awful’ than 5’s.
The tracks aside from a few really are disappointing though, only a couple of months in I felt like I was getting burnt out on them, I find the circuits extremely boring in particular other than maybe Plaza + Estadio.
I think the game is still missing 10 tracks too, occasionally in the loading screens the ‘Exhibitions completed’ stat will show and it still says 74/84 if you’ve done them all.
Surely if that was just a typo it would have been sorted long ago, I can only guess those 10 were planned but just like so many other things the state of the game at launch pushed it off to the side.
7 Likes
There are actually some really nice, technical sections of road that could make good circuits, but we don’t have that.
I actually think the Festival Circuit is a nicely balanced track. The two tracks in the canyon are pretty good as well, but beyond that, the routes are pretty forgettable.
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I agree about the track in Horizon 5. I preferred racing in Horizon 4. Better map, better tracks. The AI feels just the same to me.
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Both pale in comparison to FH3. I’m afraid things have gone nowhere but downhill.
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I see a lot of people saying the AI is the same and I personally disagree. In 4, the AI drivers were much more realistic. They never went outside the bounds of Horizon’s physics and first place never completely ran away.
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Racing with AI in Forza Horizon series was never tremendously exciting in my opinion, but I agree, FH5 is very bad in comparison to previous games.
I’ve spent hundreds of hours with the series (or maybe it’s 1000+ already?) and I’d never thought that AI may be bending rules of physics or simply cheating. In FH5 I have this feeling almost constantly.
As for tracks, I think both FH4 and FH5 have the same problem: not enough different routes. PGG should be adding new tracks on regular basis (or just “borrow” them from EventLab), otherwise seasonal championships become boring too quickly.
8 Likes
I really was positive going into the launch of FH5, deeply convinced of the AIs inevitably corrected behavior, and that all would be bliss. Not for long though. Runaway drivatars forced incessant difficulty/car/tune swapping and the feeling of being handed an easy win every time you finally managed the top podium spot.
Still, seeing how it was early in the games life-cycle, I had significant hope raised as to the possibility of it being sorted in the near future. Well it wasn’t, nor hasn’t, and I feel doubly betrayed.
1 Like
I’ve experienced more runaway-1st-place AI in this game when I deign to play on higher difficulties, but the most egregious AI problem in my experience has been how they ignore weather.
Personally, I liked the AI better back in FM3-4 (pre-drivatar?). Maybe I’ve got rose coloured glasses for this one, but my recollection is that the AI back then was, for lack of a better description - more professional in habit and less prone to blatant cheating.
2 Likes
You say that, and yet there was an S2 hypercar seasonal championship in FH4 last week where I had to switch up my car choice because one of the AI was pretty much unbeatable. And I don’t even mean they were a pain to track down, I mean I was physically unable to catch them. I was in a stock One:1 (which it turns out is somehow an understeery mess in 4), and the AI in question was in a Rimac, and whatever tune it rolled made it unbeatably fast in a straight line, with far more corner grip than that car should ever have. I managed to just barely beat it in one of the races, but I wound up having to change my car to a lower PI level to reshuffle the AI drivers, because otherwise I was just not winning that championship.
I wouldn’t necessarily call that cheating. Rimac has 2000HP and AWD, and your One:1 was probably spinning its rear wheels in third gear. The Rimac was probably running away while you were struggling to get traction in that silly Koenigsegg.
Trust me, I’ve driven it stock.
I liked quite a few of the FH4 road race circuits, but I especially loved Holyrood. It was quite technical and offered superb opportunities for multiple passes. That last ess before the straight was almost always good for a triple pass if you could set it up just right on the way in. I called it a ‘scissor’ pass.
FH5 doesn’t offer its equal; most of the circuit courses are pretty uninspiring, but Playa Azul isn’t bad, and it’s also the highest payoff in XP and cash of all the road circuits.
In FH4, with its easier difficulty, I almost always had at least a slight speed advantage on the straights and won consistently against the AI at Pro or Unbeatable depending on the car I was driving. I attributed the speed advantage on the straights to the fact that I tuned the gearing for the circuit, but I guess it was probably just the game that was giving me that advantage. In FH5, not only are the difficulty levels harder, that speed advantage has disappeared as well, and if you can’t outdrive them on the corners those two leading cars will likely eat your lunch. Especially if, as I do, you try to drive clean races and don’t like to play bumper cars in the turns.
But I do have to say that the tire friction model they borrowed from Motorsport for FH5 is waay better than FH4’s.
5 Likes
I agree about the AI. If you follow do a good apex with good breaking, the AI always run into my car. If I can find a cheater line through the turn, I fly by them. But if one gets out in front, they are really tough to catch.
I usually leave the difficulty at unbeatable or one tick below, and I win the races that I can get to first place in the first few corners, but if one or two cars are ahead of me, I can’t seem to catch up to them no matter how well I apex the turns.
I think I went with the Pagani Zonda Cinque for that one, that car has a lot of mechanical grip while still maintaining a high top speed for straights tuned, not sure about stock as per your preference.
Oh, I’m well-aware of how powerful the Rimac is, and I’m also aware that being an electric it’s on the heavier side as far as hypercars go and should have struggled more in the corners compared to me (though I struggled enough as it was). I also know that that ridiculous One:1 has a significantly higher top speed, so on the longer portions of the sprint races I should have been gaining on it at some point, but it was still noticeably pulling on me. My car choice wasn’t the greatest, but usually I’m able to take advantage of the AI’s foibles and blow past them at some point. I think I just rolled an unlucky opponent tune that time. After I saw it wasn’t working I did what I should have done in the first place and dropped down to my trusty 918 Spyder which did the job easily.