I find comments like this interesting because I think FH4 was awesome and that FH5 is inferior. But that’s because I only started playing in FH4 so I don’t know what earlier titles were like. I can’t help think there will be the equivalent of me when FH6 comes out who think FH5 is awesome and that FH6 is inferior.
Anyway we can only move forward from FH5, so the other games make no difference.
I’ve spent hundreds of hours playing FH3 and looking back I can say that the characters, the festival atmosphere, the car culture, and the map were all leaps and bounds ahead of the games that followed.
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FH3 is worth getting at the right price right now. £6.99 Ebay.
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There are definitely great things about FH4, I mean looking back on it Britain was a good map, a little stereotyped in my opinion but the roads themselves were great, and me having possibly the world’s worst Xbox One that still worked during FH4’s life can’t have helped my experience.
But certain things that are getting flak now were there in plain sight in 4, I think the playlist + over reliance on it for enticing players back got a free pass by most in 4 because it was new, we hadn’t had it in the series before and only now are people seeing the issues + general stale nature of it.
The start of PG’s sloppiness I’ll always have an example for with FH4, as I always go for the achievements there was 1 that was glitched in the base game at release (which in my book is particularly poor for a first-party game even just once), they then went and made that same mistake 3 times in subsequent updates including 2 in the Eliminator that were frustrating to have to do multiple times to unlock (survive until the final showdown in the Mini + win an Eliminator without any car drops, there’s also RTA being completely abandoned and left in that super exploitable state to get to GM.
I also think people easily forget there was a time in FH4 when we had no ranked solo mode, no Eliminator, no backstage pass, no Super7 and mine + TheWarmWind’s favourite thing to bang on about, no custom championships that stuck out all the more when FH3 was the one that had them.
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I wish I started playing during FH3 as I frequently hear is was the peak of the Horizon series. Plus Australia is close to home so that would have been cool.
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I think I have a weird biase towards FH4 because firstly I only started playing it like a year after it had already been released so presumably most major bugs/issue were resolved by then.
I also never did the weekly playlist because when I started playing I was overwhelmed by the menus and naturally I looked at the playlist and thought well this is pointless so I’ll skip that.
Interesting to hear ranked solo wasn’t available on day 1. But relatively speaking it was available for me on day 1.
They also added Eliminator when I started playing so I was like heck yeah what a cool free addition to the game. I ended up playing it religiously.
I legit had few complaints about FH4. The only complaints I really had was being disconnected in ranked solo and having to win 25 championships in a row to make back those points. Or winning every ranked race and losing rating.
In comparison and in hindsight I started complaining about FH5 before it even came out as soon as I heard they were removing ranked. I was like what… Is this real life…
Don’t forget that at release of FH4 you had to 100% the season/series to get the new car. Plus the seasonal championships had to be done on Unbeatable difficulty as I recall. I actually stopped playing for many months because of that.
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It’s worth picking up a physical copy even if you can’t get the DLC. It’s a beautiful game and yes, it was the peak of the series.
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Unbeatable was easier in FH4. It was easier than Pro in FH5. It was probably the same as Expert.
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I agree, but I don’t enjoy that high of a difficulty personally, I find it too frustrating in combination with the often wonky AI.
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I played all my races unbeatable in FH4. The AI didn’t blatantly cheat as much as they do in 5 so it was much more manageable.
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Yeah I like harder modes in FH5, Pro is OK, but Unbeatable they cheat.
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Unpopular opinion, but Horizon 3 was still weaker than the games that came before it.
The map had great biodiversity, but it was way too flat, and the roads where way too straight. Anything not in A-Class or above was not fun to drive as a result.
Horizon 3, much like Horizon 5 to Horizon 4, also repeated some of the sins of its father Horizon 2 by having a campaign that, while nice and lengthy, was very repetitious and grew stale quickly.
Drivatars were also terrible in Horizon 3. With the large amount of straights and wide curves, it was almost impossible to catch up at times, even on lower difficulties. They were actually somewhat improved in Horizon 4, meaning they actually took a step backward in Horizon 5.
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Well that’s definitely 1 of the things I can’t level at both games, removing ranked was/is just a poor choice that we’ll never properly understand however PG want to spin it, it’s as good as a fundamental aspect of any game where you can go PVP.
I must admit I never really paid attention to the AI in FH4 as I could careless about anything not related to multiplayer. But seeing how multiplayer is lacking in FH5 I have nothing else to focus on but the AI and boy is it stupid.
Non competitive, toxic, ramming, bad lines, rubber banding are words that come to mind when I think about the AI. Anyway I personally wish they focused on MP over the AI as I prefer to race against real players.
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Agree on the repetition of 2 + 3 but look at it another way, take FH2’s 168 championships, you have until your life’s over to do those 168 if you want to.
By the time we was all done with FH4 and also by the time FH5 is at an end I guarantee all of us regular players will have done far more than 168 championships/672 championship races in both games, and they’ll have been in 1 week intervals where those 1 weeks have been our only available time to do them.
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It certainly wasn’t all that great in Horizon 4, but playing them on Pro was a more reasonable challenge than playing against them on Expert in Horizon 5. Horizon 1 definitely had the best AI by far because they weren’t cheap and they weren’t Drivatars. Just standard AI. If we are talking Drivatars only, then Horizon 2 probably had the best. They could still be cheap, but they weren’t impossible to beat and they made actual mistakes.
I do agree with you on that. In fact, I played Horizon 2 over the course of two years after it had been delisted, and I still think part of the reason why it ranks so high with me still despite the repetition is that there was always something to come back to, even if I took a three month break. Also, since there wasn’t a Festival Playlist or Forzathon, taking a three month break meant I never missed out on any new cars. Nothing being gated behind time or wheelspins also helped, since I knew, in time, I’d be able to buy everything rather than grind senselessly till a wheelspin spun in my favor.
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Even the deliberately broken RTA mode was still more fun than anything online in FH5. You could play it in a convoy and encounter some other strong teams (albeit with the near guarantee they’d quit if you were going to win) or just play on your own and use non-meta cars to compete.
Also, the playlist wasn’t such a disaster because the trial was regularly fun, championships could be set to unbeatable difficulty and points could easily be obtained from ranked.
I don’t disagree that FH4 shared a lot of FH5’s faults but they were hidden by much better multiplayer gameplay. Even something like the Top Gear missions was also miles superior to any of the stories in FH5.
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