Stupidity that needs to be addressed ASAP

Forza Horizon Legacy Horizon FH4 Discussion
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This thread is just discussing some of the issues I believe need fixing in FH4

So for the past few days I’ve been playing the hell out of FH4 just like other Ultimate Edition buyers, however in only a few days I’ve come across some either really annoying “features” that weren’t in previous Horizon’s or just straight up laziness from Playground Games.

  1. Forcing Team Adventure PvP ~ If you haven’t played the PVP yet you may be unaware, but the PvP in FH4 directly forces you into Team games only. If you’ve ever played PvP on the other Horizon games you’ve more than likely come across Team Races. These a races that split the lobby into 2 teams that then battle it out against one another.

So why’s this a bad thing in FH4? The issue is that there’s no option to play Solo, even in the Ranked game mode. That means even if you come 1st in a race, you may still lose because the rest of team may have placed lower on the board. Loosing obviously negatively affects you’re PvP rank so the fact that you are essentially relying on others as well your self to win is beyond idiotic, and this needs to be addressed immediately.

  1. Contact in Ranked ~ When playing online there’s nothing worse than a driver that smashes people out of the way to either defend their position or to gain one. Usually when you go into a Ranked game you expect drivers to race respectfully and clean.

In casual games it’s acceptable to smash people out of the way but in Ranked, non-contact should be a forced thing. The race and the end result should come down to the skill of the driver, and not by those that have smashed the most people out of the way.

  1. Horizon Life ~ Whilst Horizon Life is a great concept it is for the most part extremely irritating. Trying to play with just you and you’re buddies has now become 100× more difficult than it ever was.

Before, you simply booted up a Private Freeroam and away you went. That’s not the case in FH4 though. Now you have to invite your friends to a Convoy and then join a Public Horizon Life session, join a Public Team Adventure, or host your own Private Team Adventure. Unfortunately, there’s absolutely no way to host a Private Freeroam for just you and you’re buddies, you have to be connected to public session with up 71 other players.

To make matters even worse. If you’ve progressed further into the game that one of your friends. They won’t be able to join your session. You have to make them the leader of the Convoy and then you’ll be able to join their session. My only idea as to why Playground Games have done this is to stop players that have progressed further into the game speeding up their buddies progression by hosting bigger and higher rewarding races, but I’m not sure if that’s the case. However, it needs to be fixed!

  1. God like AI that are unrealistically fast ~ If like me you play on the hardest difficulties in games, chances are you’re playing on “Unbeatable”. My issue comes in when you create your own Blueprint for an event.

Go to a street race and start it up, create your own blueprint with “Anything Go’s” with All Car Classes, then set the difficulty to unbeatable, make sure you are using a ridiculously fast car. The end result? You get matched against AI’s drivers using the Ford Focus RS, Audi TT RS, and in some cases, a Transit Van.

You may think that sounds easy when your sat in Koenigsegg Agera RS or a Pagani Zonda R, but within seconds of setting off you’ll soon realise you’re going up against cars from a different planet, that, or all them seem to have jet engines installed. The acceleration of the cars is so extreme that they’ll pull away from some of the world’s fastest hypercars, when you get on to the straights, you’ll instantly be matched with a Ford Transit Van travelling at 250mph. The only way to make up any ground or overtake is on the corners where the AI are forced onto 1 or 2 rails (rails are paths that AI are programmed to follow).

In Forza Horizon 3 if you host an event in the same way the game will match you with cars similar to the one you were driving, and if you set the difficulty to Unbeatable, the game created 10 or more rails for AI to drive on that would cut corners in certain areas. In FH4 however, Playground Games have simply turned the speed of vehicles up to 11 which I might add, is really quite lazy.

Hopefully someone from the Playground team will see this and pass it up the chain. Even if only 1 of these issues is fixed, this post will be classed as successful.

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"2. Contact in Ranked ~ When playing online there’s nothing worse than a driver that smashes people out of the way to either defend their position or to gain one. Usually when you go into a Ranked game you expect drivers to race respectfully and clean.

In casual games it’s acceptable to smash people out of the way but in Ranked, non-contact should be a forced thing. The race and the end result should come down to the skill of the driver, and not by those that have smashed the most people out of the way."

Not the case in Forza 7 even if you are in Pinnacle. There is always someone. Part of the problem is that it is too easy to get into Pinnacle. So you don’t always get top quality respectful opponents. I can imagine this is even worse in Horizon. I don’t think even in unranked intentionally smashing people is acceptable at all. It takes time to get better and many just do not want to put the effort in. You will improve faster by racing as clean as possible at all times. It is amazing in the Forza 7 ghost league that they think cutting is the way to win. In time they have become less and less of a problem. I get better but they never do. I am not advocating for penalties in an arcade racer. I think that is a bridge too far for Horizon so it is up to the players to be respectful and clean.

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Im glad someone else has had the exact same issue with the ai. Im doing the same thing driving the same car and shaking my head is disbelief.

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  1. Barely any AI traffic in either modes. It’s a gorgeous map but it feels like the apocalypse is coming or something. It breaks the immersion, more so in the city & motorways, but really everywhere. Also there’s no challenge or satisfaction of weaving round traffic. It’s just weird. I thought H3’s traffic was bad but it was better then this at least.
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You should create suggestion tickets on support page

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The AI is the most ridiculous thing in FH4. How is an Audi TTS with the stock 4 cylinder engine as fast as the 918 maxed. Also they are driving like there is no tomorrow. I would like to set the colission off. That would help very much since the AI and your steering is lagging sometimes when you race with a friend!

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The AI in Forza games took a big step backwards after FM6. I’ve been playing that and FH2 recently to get a last few tier points, and the AI just feels more fair in those games than what we have now. Maybe it’s rose-colored glasses, but in FM6 especially I frequently see the AI make mistakes like a real player would, and it feels so much more realistic than what we have now where the AI will defy the laws of physics in order to stay on the track.

As far as I’m concerned, a blatantly cheating AI is far, far more annoying than an easily-beatable AI with some predictable mistakes and behaviors that otherwise plays fair. The real racing competition is supposed to be from other players anyways. In terms of game progression, the only events that even track how well you did are the Horizon stories which are all solo trials anyways and don’t have you racing against AI racers. The AI difficulty doesn’t even factor into game completion difficulty at all so there’s no reason to make it arbitrarily difficult for the sake of being difficult if it’s no fun to race against.

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I thought the entire point of drivatars was to use models of ourselves and our friends as offline drivers… NONE of my friends are capable of the insanity that the AI is throwing down now… perfect and cheating via unreasonable car performance.

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Couldn’t agree more. With absolutely everything you said.

They fix these issues, and let us change seasons in offline solo, and the game will be a 10/10 for me.

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What’s the best way to get the developer’s attention and ensure they take you seriously?

I’m not entirely sure but I am sure that using the word “Stupidity” cannot possibly help.

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Easy, don’t buy the game. When sales tank they’ll figure out they did something wrong. But people won’t do that and that’s why pretty much every game franchise will get more and more mah as the titles roll out.

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That, and use proper grammar like “ensure” rather than “insure” - unless of course you’re talking about insurance. But agree that calling developers or their game stupid isn’t a good way forward.

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Bah! That’s what I get for typing up three posts at once.

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I see what you did there.

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I know, I know, the mortification was too much to bear.

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This is the most frustrating issue with multiplayer. I don’t know how much time I wasted last night trying to get a MP session started with some friends. First we had to wait for one of us to get through the initial experience; up to getting the first house and the following race. The “error message” that is presented when they don’t meet the requirement is not clear what the issue is. “Not in leaders session”, uhh, what does that mean, why aren’t they in the session, and how do they join? It’s just confusing.
Finally figured out that player couldn’t join US, we had to join THEM, but it wasn’t clear why. I think they should just allow ANYONE to join ANYONE, and show all missions available to any of the convoy members. When a less-progressed player goes back to solo, then they will have to re-do that content when they get to that point in the story, not a big deal, as long as it means the MP experience is straightforward.
It would have been impossible to figure this out if we weren’t on voice coms in an xbox party. Even getting the convoy started was not obvious to me, but I don’t have much experience with previous Horizon games (more into motorsport).
Part of the complexity was probably that I’m playing on PC and they were on XBOne, not sure.

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In singleplayer, it wasn’t even clear if I was racing the AI or not. By that, I mean it felt like the progression of the race is scripted based on my performance somehow. At certain points in the race the AI in front of me will just “give up” and let me pass. Like obviously give up; they would slow way down and pull off to the side to let me pass. It feels super weird coming from FM7 where the unbeatable AI drives very consistently.
I want to experiment: How does the AI behave if I just sit at the starting line and don’t move compared to if I actually race them? Will their times be consistent? I get the feeling that there is some rubberbanding happening with the AI.
I actually felt like there was some rubber banding in the MP races I was doing with some friends too, but that might just be my fragile ego.

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There is definitely rubber-banding going on. That’s not a surprise with this being more arcade-style.

There’s also a notable “grouping” of AI. I’ve noticed that the 1st place AI generally jumps out way ahead, 2nd-4th is in a group, then the rest.

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That grouping is pretty similar to how FM7 AI behaves as well. There is usually a group of 2-6 cars in the lead that stretch way out, and the rest of the cars behind are nose to bumper.

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“Stupidity” did get a response from somebody, though. I have seen no evidence in years that flattery gets anything at all done with these developers.

But #4 isn’t really a thing. If you build a competitive car and drive it well, the AI gets crushed even when on Unbeatable. Even when you are starting last and the event is a point to point race that only lasts two minutes, that is a winnable scenario even on Unbeatable. But if you don’t put your car together the right way, you’ll have zero chance.

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