Reality is FH6 will get over 10 million players just because of the enormous reach of cloud play. So pgg will reap the rewards of that base. Nothing will change. The state of gaming is going into a cloud rut. If a developer puts out a good game it will be great. If they don’t, so what, it will get the cloud plays and look like it’s a good game anyway. And that’s where the game will die. Next game, same as the first.
Move along, Nothing to see here
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Unless they changed it again, it looked to me like they corrected it so that it’s actually counting as 4 points rather than 16 total - 1 per week instead of 4 per week.
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The festival playlist is their way to add new cars to the game. If you don’t like the festival playlist than don’t engage with it.
As it is, you only need 20 points to get the new weekly car, which can be done in 30 minutes and then you don’t have to touch it again. If you’re a completionist than that’s on you.
I suspect those of you that think the playlist is a grind are the people that play this as a car collection game and would just rather they put the new cars in the autoshow every week.
It’s amazing to see so much whining because PG has went out of their way to make sure you can complete the playlist very quickly instead of making you feel like it’s a second job like many other games do to increase engagement.
If increasing engagement was their goal than I can assure you they’d make it much more difficult or time consuming to earn cars.
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The problem is we care more for the game itself than the weekly chore list. Yet every week/month the only thing we seem to hear about from PGG is the weekly chore list and not the game itself. Where are the major patch/updates to the base game?
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If they weren’t trying to increase engagement they wouldn’t attach exclusive cars to a limited time event which means people are strongly incentivized to engage with the game on a weekly basis rather than just whenever on their own time or else potentially miss out.
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It really isn’t chores to me. It was fun buying a stealth black unimog just for a jump. I’m gonna turn it into Time Attruck now so eventually it can be a story in FH25 
They can lie about Passion Wagon’s meta truck that once beat Nalak’s electric Supra going backwards with a drift transmission and LS swap.
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If they wanted to increase engagement, they’d make it take longer than a couple of hours a week to complete the festival playlist.
They’ve even made it easier to get the new cars since launch. At launch you had to get 40 points for the exclusive car and now it’s only 20 points.
Guess what? That change was based on community feedback. Definitely one of the times they should have ignored the vocal minority on internet forums.
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If you think about it every game has been easier and easier. Fh4 was borderline boring and easy, fh5 is aimed at children where the aim is that everyone should win, there is not one “challange” that most good drivers dont get on the first try. A game should be a challange thats kinda the point, to play and improve.
If they did a survey it would show that most people only play about 2 hours on season change and then maybe 2 hours total over the other 6 days. Exp for those 1% who do blueprints and stuff.
They should fire that “woke” person in charge and hire someone who would make the best decision for the game and not think about all the people who get offended bec it’s to hard.
I think FH5 is the hardest ever.
My guess is they’ve done loads of research regarding just how long they can milk the average player without losing numbers overall. It’s possible the more stringent requirements early on for obtaining exclusive cars yielded more losses than gains. I think the time it takes most players to achieve the weekly playlist is absolutely calculated by number crunchers, and if there were a way to increase the average hours/day/week a user played without seeing an overall decline in numbers, they’d certainly do it.
I can’t imagine they’re taking it easy on us. I have exactly 0% proof of anything I just wrote though, so there’s that.
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They researched how much beer they could drink in the Wheatsheaf Inn… and that’s about it.
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hahaha… I never seem to be able to find my research notes after those experiments 
Playing the earlier horizon games, particularly the first one way back in 2012 is really illuminating in how far the series has regressed in some areas over the last decade. Put simply H1 feels more like an actual racing game than all of the others because it has such a razor focus on that single act. Yes PR stunts exist - sorta, photo mode exists, you can make vinyls (no tuning at all though sadly) but all these things have a very minor footprint in the game. The overwhelming majority is racing a lot of different cars across a lot of different courses. The map is tiny compared to 5, and has only about half as many roads yet it is incredibly dense with events and I’d be willing to wager it has more courses than 5 does by a significant margin.
H5 has pushed the “play it your way, be whatever you want to be!” meme so far that it’s diluted under a mountain of crap that is barely race related. Gimmicks that I’m sure have a ton of time and effort put into them but zero replay value. Take the Horizon stories for example; how many people truly enjoyed these, and of those people how many replay them at all after getting 3* on everything? Same with Arcade, with super 7, with playground games? Lord knows I remember all the complaining whenever there was an exclusive car hidden behind playground mode in H4.
Yet things that could add a lot of replay value with very little effort are absent or even removed. There’s no custom championships, hell there’s no championships at all outside of the live service content. Is it really too difficult for your UI designers to figure out a way of having normal and live service championships exist on the same map? I loved clearing all the events in 3 and then doing it again with different vehicles in championships. 3’s DLC was even better having milestones to meet on every race for more replay value. Why are there no reversed tracks? It’s a staple in almost every other racing game made in the last twenty years. Since we still do not know when the hell the DLC is ever gonna happen can we at least get some of these features so we have something to do?
Speaking of live service, I don’t hate the idea of it. A constant drip feed of new things to do with existing assets isn’t a bad thing. But the way it has been implemented across two games now is just shockingly bad and as many have picked up on seems to be a cynical attempt to keep player numbers stable while doing as little work as possible to achieve that. Chiefly I dislike cars being exclusive rewards for it, FOMO is a horrible way to gain player engagement.
So what can be done? Not that PGG ever actually read the forums…
First, reduce the pressure on players. We already have every single system in the game needed to achieve this. Forzathon points and the store. Currently I and I’m sure many others are sitting on a mountain of points we simply cannot spend.
Make all live service cars purchasable for forzathon points and have them always available once they are released. All live service events now pay out FP. That’s it, that’s all you’d have to do. Now if someone misses a week or even a month it doesn’t matter so much because they can simply gather up the points once they do feel like playing and purchase the exclusive cars they do want first and slowly grind out the others at their convenience.
Second, give an actual week’s worth of content to play. 3 PR stunts, 3 championships and a trial is frankly pathetic. Championships are not hard to make, an intern could do it in half an hour. Give us at least 5 championships and five PR stunts a day. Have two trials a week. 1 with tuning available and one that is stock vehicles only. This achieves three things; It gives us something to actually do in the game for starters. It allows people to buy their exclusive cars doing only the thing they want to do rather than the current system of having to do basically everything AND gives people who are behind a means of catchup that isn’t Forzathon arcade.
Importantly, it should not take much more effort than current to earn each week’s car (aka about 6 events total). But if some crazy person decides to go ham and do 35 championships, 35 PR stunts and two trials? Well now they don’t need to worry about attendance for a few weeks. Or they can buy a ton of wheelspins (instead of 2 a week) and stop wasting their lives doing SP farm maps and flipping Jeeps.
You need to do more than just offer a lot of different ways for players to play the game, you need to reward them for playing how they want to without punishing them for not engaging with the content they dislike.
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It’s unfortunate, but added content has to either drive metrics up in some way or be sold for real money. There is a real cost to adding cars into the game, and that cost has to turn a profit in order to justify paying said cost.
This is a for profit company. They have a legal obligation to their investors.
The rest of the stuff I liked though, hence the like. Everyone who wants custom championships back gets a thumbs up from me. The game desperately needs them.
I also agree that the number of races is pathetic. The map is wildly underutilized.
Are we certain that the “exclusive” cars in the seasonal events are “added content” and not just content they’ve specifically set aside for the purpose?
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That’s a whole other can of worms, though I do think we’ve been getting a mixed bag of stuff that was held off the launch list and genuinely new content.
They do deserve criticism for that, but we will reach a point eventually when stuff getting added is all new, probably some point after both DLCs are out.
Wanting to push metrics is fine enough, and I think my system would still allow that, after all you still need to play to earn that FP. It’s fundamentally no different from the current system. The key change is actually embracing that message of player freedom PGG espouses by also allowing the player the freedom to not engage with gameplay they dislike.
This may mean some modes may see less use and could be seen as “wasted effort” but players are picky and fussy creatures. Trying to coerce them instead often leads them to simply dropping the game altogether. We saw this happen with Horizon open, many players including myself simply didn’t engage with the mode at all because we don’t want to have to spend our limited free time playing modes we don’t like all for a chance to then do what we originally booted the game up for.
There’s just too many other games out there competing for time to try such a heavy handed approach and it’s hurting the very metrics they are trying to prop up as a result.
H5 has a ton of different things to do but most of it is very shallowly supported.
Oh I’m all for more seasonal events allowing us to do what we want to earn points as opposed to being railroaded into modes we don’t like.
However making the car available forever immediately after launch I don’t think is a legitimate business strategy. I’m afraid it’s either FOMO or real money. I could see it being both, though you’d need some way to prevent real money purchasers from flooding the auction house. That’s the most consumer friendly option I can think of while still being able to justify the move to investors.
All signs definitely point to the latter. Think about it. In the vanilla game, there were only twenty new cars, two returning cars from Horizon 3, and no new vehicle types. Meanwhile, all but one of the Car Pass cars have been completely new to Forza as a whole, and every Festival Playlist has featured, at the minimum, one car from Horizon 4 as an exclusive prize.
Playground was definitely holding back at launch so they could have plenty of new cars to pad the DLC as well as plenty of old cars to pad the Festival Playlist. The former was done to increase sales, the latter was done to increase playtime numbers.
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This is just a story of a few dozen friends around me, a story that I can say has little statistical impact. But as one example.
I and many of my friends were loyal Forza fans who had been loyal to the series since the Xbox 360 era (or earlier in my case).
For example, we all have hundreds to over 1000 hours of play time in FM4, and some of us still play this title from time to time.
That’s how crazy we were about the series, I would say.
But ironically, everything that T10/PGG/MS have done to increase “user engagement” has turned us away from the series.
It was still ok when FH3 was around. We thought Forzathon was a pain in the ass, but we still played with it until FH4 was released.
FH4 was the beginning of the end. Friends played the game at first, but got fed up with the endless playlists and chores and gradually stopped playing this game.
Then came FH5, and many of them no longer play this game.
Their player level is as low as beginners. I am still friends with them, but the topic of Forza rarely comes up.
Instead, they talk about other driving games like Gran Turismo 7, Snowrunner, and Dirt Rally 2.0.
And these games have one thing in common. There is no such system as a playlist.
Gran Turismo 7’s UCD/LCD may be exclusive in a sense, but in the case of this game, you can buy as many cars as you want as long as you have the cr, and these cars are always resold in a fixed cycle. Naturally, no “chores” are required.
Stable re-release schedule, no scalpers, and you can get multiple copies on one occasion.
I can say this because I’ve played with both, and of course this is more comfortable and user-friendly.
And that’s why it gives me the energy and vigor to keep playing the game.
I feel that the playlist system is in a way trying to control us with the emotion of “fear”. Like a dictator.
I guess in a way it is the right thing to do. The risk of not having access to exclusive vehicles. We don’t know when it will be re-released. Auction houses are full of scalpers and often there are even no listings to begin with. As a result we are forced to play the playlist to ensure we get those cars. The number of DAU will surely increase.
But this style of play deprives us of loyalty to the game and the desire to play it.
One of the most common defenses of playlists is that they are only a few hours a week, so be patient.
That is certainly true if you look at it in the short number of a week. But as it piles up, the games we enjoyed begin to seem like labor, and the sense of obligation only grows stronger.
Let’s say you like building scale models. But it should be fun because you can build the kits you like, when you like.
If you were forced to build a kit every week that you had no interest in, would you be able to go back to your work desk for yourself after you finished it?
That’s what happened to us.
I still come back to this game only once a week because my fear still outweighs my resignation about this series. But how long will this last?
There is no doubt that playlists and similar limited-time live service content is an effective system in some ways.
But there are many games that are successful and well-loved without playlists. Even Forza used to be like that. Have you ever seen a review that said, “I’m tired of FM4 because it doesn’t have playlists?”
To avoid more tragedies like ours, I hope that PGG, T10, and MS will find a form of gaming other than playlists that players will want to play all the time.
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