I only started playing forza games when fh4 came to PC, and quite honestly I had never encountered a game that rewarded the player so much for the amount of time spent playing. Not everyone that plays these games has hours and hours to grind through progressions, because of real life, work , family.s\SO for me fh4 was awesome. fh5 is really awesome it a work of art to be honest. But the rewards for playing just don;t feel the same or anywhere as gratifying as fh4, most cars in the game are not worth spending skill points on, there are very few horizon edition cars, gift drops donât complete,rewards are sometimes not recieved and cars that i have purchased are not in my inventory and on top of that its like the game got turned into a part time job. I donât like making others feel bad but I payed $175 for a game that just makes angry
The gift drops are a fail but I donât understand your comment about the game being turned into a part time job.
Theyâve made it as easy and frictionless as possible to earn the new car of the week, takes 20 or 30 minutes and you have a week to do it.
The rest of the content can be done at your own pace.
Itâs all too easy, in my opinion.
I disagree entirely with the idea that the game is more of a grind than 4 was. This game piles on rewards and wheelspins with very minimal effort per week. 4 did too, but 5 is even more generous, to the extreme.
I do however agree that the fun is being sucked out of this franchise, and that can make the game feel less generous and more of a drag or chore to play.
This franchise has been on a downward spiral since FH3, and PGG have been flailing around clueless not understanding the frustration while they remove essential racing endgame features and replace them with unfinished, unwarranted, and unsupported new modes. With racing endgame completely destroyed, people feel unsatisfied with the endgame experience, and lash out in discontent in various ways, often unsure themselves whatâs exactly wrong.
PGG pretends to listen, they do a lot of polls and pull a lot of stats. But they do little to nothing and what they actually do accomplish is so dogmatically tied to poll results itâs frightening. Iâm going to say something that I hope PGG hears, and they should already know if they have anyone in the company who has taken a business history class.
Polls and Statistics are notoriously bad at predicting latent demand
Latent demand: Demand for a product that cannot be filled because the product is either prohibitively expensive to supply or because the product does not exist.
PGG needs clear vision and racing endgame. Desperately.
There are many ways to do this, but the big essential three are custom championships (for single player and convoy only endgame, though there is potential for open matchmaking endgame as well), Car Meet mode (can also function as a looking for group, but also can just be genuine downtime for some), and a Ranked Racing mode (for the ultimate in open matchmaking endgame).
This. Maybe itâs probably related to several reasons:
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Mike Brown. When Ralph Fulton was creative lead he made what was the basis of Horizon, and what it meant. Once Fulton departed from PGG, the rot that initially was isolated to FH3 paid FH4 an ugly picture. The Festival Playlist, the removal of user-made custom championships, the loss of monthly car packs, etc.
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Microsoft. Because theyâre now a first party studio, MS has exerted COMPLETE control of Playground Games, dictating what content gets to be added and what doesnât. They are permitted to cut random cars for no reason (again, all cars are licensed on a by-car basis, not brand) and reintroduce them into the playlist. They will not allow PG to put them in the autoshow at a later date.
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They are chasing down product placements at a frighteningly fast pace, and is basically a giant advertising board. Yes FH4 had some in the form of TG and Hot Wheels, but those were doled out months apart. This is very much frequent in 5.
And yes, I gotta agree to the whole polls/statistics that dictate whatâs allowed. But Iâm afraid what the new team they got will do at this point.
Asking for custom championships, ranked racing and car meets back is a good idea, but these mechanics take quite a lot of time to be implemented. You might as well wait until Horizon 6, if they ever listen to the community (which is very doubtful). Asking for them now isnât going to do squat because itâs been almost two years since the game came out.
Even more problematic is that PG seems to be listening less to us and more to the people behind âplayer engagementâ. These people should be shown the door, because unless if they are in for the long haul or just cheapening it each month (and sadly, itâs the latter), live service almost never works in a cruising simulator.
Latent demand is notoriously bad because of many reasons, and one of them is related to lavish brands. Lamborghini, Ferrari and various boutique manufacturers seem to be used more frequently, while other brands are completely neglected.
It gets worse: What if the sins of FH resurface into the Forza Motorsport reboot?
The difficulty is the friendliest of all the horizons. Imagine making the radars with the cars visible like in other FH⌠And because we play online but radar+drivatars IA = frustration everywhere hehehe.
Ralph Fulton is still at PGG and working on Fable now.
Gavin Raeburn is the one that left to form his own studio.
They could give these people every car and every item in the game and then pile on cars on wheelspins on gifts on drops after that and theyâd still think it was too grindy. I cant think of any game outside of cookie clicker that dumps more inane gifts to fill your inventory for doing the absolute positively bare minimum, and most of the time, nothing at all. Truly insane.
The way OP talks about not receiving cars from drops, gifts, or even purchases, sounds like theyâre just not paying attention to whats going on at all. The constant micro dopamine fistbagging the game does to your brain mustâve made them go completely catatonic while playing.
I read thisâŚ
How to Maintain Player Engagement in Your Game (gamedesigning.org)
What do you all think?
I think they do need to reign it in a bit given the bots on patrol in the auction house. A bit of trench warfare to get these things is good & fine but it can be a step too hard for that reason. Doesnât effect my desire to play the game mind you.
I think a more fundamental problem with the auction house is the artificial price caps. Yes⌠$20 mil max keeps any car theoretically within reach of anybody. But⌠it also means that the hard to get cars become more of a race than an actual auction, because $20 mil is FAR below the actual value it would fetch in an opposed auction.
The game clearly has mechanisms in place to support higher prices (look at some of the advanced search options in the auction house).
I think theyâre aware and theyâre ok with the consequences. But I feel like a market without caps would see less of the âinstant buyâ nonsense (especially if it was like eBay where bidding continues even after the original end time if new bids are still coming in)
5 > 4
Uncapping the auction prices isnât going to make the issues with the Auction House go away. What it will do is price even more people out of it, because no one is going to spend all of their credits on one carâŚassuming, of course, the bots donât insta-buy that car within milliseconds of being listed.
The Auction House is an idea that never should have been revisited, particularly in the state that itâs currently in and with the amount of time-gated content thatâs in the last three Horizons.
I donât agree with this at all, to be honest. Sorry. I remember doing the Goliath in Horizon 5 over and over again at launch because it was the only race that gave a semi-decent payout because all the other events offer scraps, and the wheelspins didnât offer any good payouts until after I had unlocked everything.
Honestly? Itâs a bit strong to say that there is a âbig step forwardâ between 4 and 5⌠For me the two opuses are of the same generation and both have very good graphics, without any notable difference in terms of graphics.
Besides, I liked everything more in the 4 and I play it more than the 5, except for the weekly chore. Landscapes, weather, a good list of vehicles⌠whatever!
As far as physics are concerned, Iâd agree that FH5 is a major step forward. Itâs the one thing in the series that has been properly iterated upon. Going from 3, to 4, to 5, there have been important physics advancements that have truly opened up the depth and potential of the game.
Unfortunately, each one of those advancements have come hand in hand with an equivalent regression as far as essential racing tools and gameplay design are concerned.
So overall, no, the games have not advanced. Physics wise though it has, making the statement true.
Just completed the playlist for FH4 and while doing so I was constantly asking myself, why I actually play FH5?
So this is my opinion, mind you, I seek fun and relaxation, not some hardcore stuff
Car selection in FH4 is much better, not to mention so much better paint jobs to select from - ok so many people didnât just carry on from FH4 to 5
Car handling, I so much prefer FH4 option - I canât drive no grip cars
Dull washed out look of FH5 doesnât win me one bit
Season OMG, FH4 got it so much better - love the snow
Empty map of FH5 doesnât win any rewards either
DLC - love Lego and Fortune Island, at least there was some thing there to do, FH5 dlc empty as main game, especially rally and bad design of tracks in Hot wheels especially, but thatâs FH5 feature âŚ
No need for online in playlist is a plus for FH5 now, but wasnât when I called quits a year ago.
A bit better menus in 5 also get a plus
Fun ⌠still missing in 5, even after not playing it for more then a year.
I think they donât care about the seasons and never actually did, FH4âs winter is just a happy coincidence, itâs main purpose is + always has been for the live service, not for us or the gameplay.
If they cared about what players thought of seasons they wouldnât be so lacklustre in FH5, other than winter I personally thought nothing of it in 4 but many players praised the whole thing throughout FH4 to the point that thereâs no way they canât have noticed how positively it was received overall.
Like I say if seasons was made to enhance the experience for us the players theyâd have almost certainly built + improved on it in this game, I personally think now they went all out with seasons in FH4 just to rope as many people as possible in to the repetitive loop of the weekly playlist, like making a very glitzy, bright and interesting advert for a bucket of grey paint.
After that objective was achieved in FH4 why bother about building on it for the next game? Itâs served that purpose and now they can just half bake it + solely have it there for whatâs always been itâs main purpose, to dripfeed new content and keep weekly player engagement at a solid rate.
In my opinion at least the tyre physics are worse than theyâre in FH4 and the one of the AI definitely is.
I surely donât see any big steps forward. There are a couple like for example the option to change the vinyl type (material) in the paint editor just to mention one but theyâre all nullified by the unbelievable amount of bugs and the wrong decisions made when it comes to gameplay in general.
I dont think so. I think the bigger issue with the current state of the AH isnt the AH, its the economy itself. Or the lack of one. 90% of player credits are earned through slot machine content. Making the market literally random, And same goes for the cars. An uncapped AH would be fine if what was being auctioned and transacted wasnt literally random and overly inflated.
I donât have an issue with time gated content being the top value. Gives incentive to continue playing. But also gives availability if you did miss it. At a high value, of course. Thats what exclusivity and market forces should be. I somehow missed the Lynk & co cars during their stint and Iâve been hunting for them for a while. I have the rest of the list filled out save for some of the Electric race buggies and those two Lynk. Iâm fine with missing out on that and having to bide my time hunting the AH for it.
You either have a market thats consistent with market forces. Or you have it arbitrarily limited and curated like it currently is. cant have both.
It also goes into the other parts of what used to be the player âstorefrontâ
Where you used to be able to make a decent profit off of successful designs and tunes and price them with how you valued them. Now its like playing in a sandbox with the parental unit of Microsoft telling you how you should play.
I donât believe so. Sure it was a vehicle for seasonal rotations, But it certainly wasnât necessary to facilitate that kind of battlepass. Certainly isnât a part of any other game that has a battlepass.
But the very self evident reason why seasons are the way they are in 5 is in stark contrast to the prevailing theme of unrealism and un-authenticity of the Horizon franchise. Is that they included the seasons AS THEY ARE in real life in the region the game is set in.
Mexico doesnt turn into a frozen tundra. It doesnt have a crisp colorful fall or floury spring. It has the seasons it does as a representation of the region. Just like you wouldnât get a luscious warm green season if the game was set in Antarctica.
Weâll have to agree to disagree there, I think if they ever cared at all about it as an actual feature for us or the gameplay they wouldnât have chosen to go to Mexico for the reason you say, theyâd have picked a location where 4 distinct seasons wouldnât be out of place if they intend to stick somewhat close to reality in that aspect.