Thoughts on FH4 (civilized discussion)

Forza Horizon Forza Horizon 4 FH4 Discussion
#1

Hey,

First and for most I am mainly making this as I have been a absolutely massive fan of the horizon games. what Play Ground has been doing with them has been brilliant.
I am a huge fan of just the fun forza that lets you play around in a giant world with cars doing crazy outlandish races. to be honest I found myself a few years ago getting super bored with the main line forza games, so a game that uses that driving model BUT lets you have burnout paradise kinda fun with it… sign me up.

So first impressions of FH4 was that you nailed it. Changing up just enough things to make it more interesting but also making it a much smoother experience. the seasons were a brilliant idea of making the main games race tracks really have longer lasting appeal. Outside of removing the Datsun 2000 which was my favorite car from FH3 so far FH4 is better in all the ways it could be better. Also the MGA Twin Cam 1959 seems to be a solid replacement for the Datsun 2000 as my A class perfect car.

But… then after a few nights of playing solo my friend an I jump into the online. For context my friend an I played hundreds of hours of both FH2 an FH3 online doing the adventure mode. We would build out special cars for each class for each race type, when the DLC came out we would build special cars for them to.
With all that said I’ll start with what i like about the multiplayer update in FH4. first… racing to the event with the % complete at the top is actually much nicer. The playground games modes are vastly improved by having them be more team focused. the zombie mode now having a in-between state where a infected person can be healed is awesome same goes for the crown slowing the king until they hand it to another player… these changes are awesome.

Now for the less great stuff. Lets face it the lack of voting is crushing. it might actually be the sole reason why my friend an I wont be playing FH4 as much as we did FH3. We absolutely love driving cars in the D-A classes because they force you to make really important choices when customizing the cars. S1 is ok… but S2 is just boring. S2 customizing your car is basically just tossing everything at it and seeing how that worked… no creativity involved at all. So with no voting now in the online adventure means that the chances of us getting D, C, or B seems either low… or impossible. which is extremely disappointing.

After voting it seems that all the online adventure modes are team ONLY now. This is also super disappointing, again we like team modes sometimes they are nice an refreshing, but only when they are a once in a while thing. Every event being a team event also ruins things pretty badly. Problem is that in team events players tend to get more aggressive. they see the other color and push them out of the checkpoints. In one game last night I actually got pinned by 3 of the other teams players while 2-3 others raced ahead. This kind of game play makes me want to never play the adventure mode… and if all the events will be team based that means there is no escaping it.

It really makes me sad that the old online adventure of FH2 and FH3 seems to have been torn appart. I dont love that there is less impact for things like skill points either. You can no longer win championships by skill chaining. However that brings up another point… with less use of skill points to contribute to adventure championships… why have skill points at all. they seem to serve almost no purpose now. Before they encouraged you to drive cleanly just so that you could hopefully score better because of it… I have won championships before purely because I drove clean, and didn’t smash people. but now these days are gone. with no benefit to them and every event being a team event it seems everyone just wants to push each other out of gates.

After all of that you might think I hate the game… and I DONT. I in fact really love the new game, looks great, plays great, the single player is better then it ever has been in the past. The extra focus on character customization is fun and leans even harder into this being the more fun forza game.

I would absolutely love for a Dev to see this. I want them to know I really like their game, it is fantastic… but please bring back the online adventure mode like it was in the past. with voting, and non team events… and maybe even bring back the use-fullness of the skill points.

6 Likes
#2

Bit of a double edged sword really, in FH3 there was always a few drifters out the back of the pack just going for points, making no attempt to even compete and getting snakey when you inevitably collide with them. I don’t mind that the races now are purely positional but, as someone pointed out in another thread it’s a pure wreck fest, with the red vs blue mentality overriding every basic decision. Let’s face it, the multiplayer is a complete mess. I spent too much time looking for online adventure/racing only/A class until I realised it doesn’t exist, in all my online races I’ve only gotten one series in A class, the rest have been S1 and S2 and mostly off-road, I’m yet to get one circuit road race. I’ve given up and gone back to FH3 where options still exist…:confused:

1 Like
#3

Behaviour like this is one of the reasons I don’t touch online racing, at least in Horizon, where it doesn’t seem as strictly enforced as it is in Motorsport 7.

#4

I’ve been trying to put my thoughts into the wishlist/feedback thread since that’s where the moderators have suggested the devs tend to look first, so I’ll just summarize a few things here in case others want to bump the suggestions.

The world map in FH4 is great and is the star of the show. It’s not perfect (I would have liked to see more festival outposts around the map, a few more decent sized towns like FH2, and some proper ocean cliffs like the cliffs of Dover), but it’s been beautifully rendered with lots of great driving roads. Graphics are top-notch, we’ve got some awesome new cars to play with, and I like the ideas of player customization and houses.

However, after now having played the game for a few days it’s looking more and more like the devs didn’t have time to properly playtest the game and were rushing at the last minute to put all the pieces together. So ultimately it’s one step forwards (the map) and two steps back (broken races (championships, rivals, multiplayer, missing route creator) and broken wheelspin economy) right now. It looks like we might almost have another FM7 on our hands where the developers will have to spend the next year or two pushing out updates to actually finish the game (which isn’t a bad thing at all honestly if it breaks the rushed development cycle they’ve been in for the last few games).

The early game progression (other than too many wheelspins up front from VIP and loyalty rewards) is fun up through the prologue. However, the prologue is way too short and the rest of the “endgame” after this is just going back and completing events missed in the prologue. There’s no story past this point and nothing else to work towards other than map completion and car collecting. The Forzathon Live events are fun the first few times but become boring very quickly. Later in the game credit income drops off dramatically due to the less frequent wheelspins which are the main source of income. This makes the late game a grind to earn enough credits to get the expensive cars and castles. Player jobs are a bad joke right now with the supercar rentals only making 10,000 credits per day at level 10 which is about the same payout as one race.

Wheelspins themselves are another issue. Way too much of the game progression is tied up in them with them being the fastest way to make money along with the only source of some cars and most of the cosmetics. In all honesty I would like to see wheelspins removed entirely (or at the very least pushed way into the background) with just being lootboxes by another name. Compared to FH3, we can’t even sell duplicate cars obtained via wheelspins anymore and have to brave the auction house to try to get some pitiful amount of credits for them since everyone else is also trying to unload their duplicates.

Avatar customization is a great idea, but it’s been poorly implemented IMO. There’s way, way too much focus on the goofy/ridiculous clothes and emotes and too many duplicate items with just different colors/textures, and way too many items in wheelspins. To fix this I would like to see more normal clothes added along with some sort of clothes store (kind of like what Turn10 is doing with a race store in place of lootboxes).

Houses are another big missed opportunity. They don’t feel like my house at all right now, just like a festival location without the bright lights that costs a huge pile of credits to buy. Test Drive Unlimited 2 did a much better job of implementing houses 10 years ago on the Xbox 360 where the avatar could walk around inside the house and arrange favorite cars in the garage.

Quick chat was one of the hyped features that’s turned out to be a big disappointment with how poorly it’s been implemented. Why not allow players to create their own messages and just run them through a profanity filter? We’ve already got voice chat so it’s not about limiting profanity (especially if we can block messages from specific players).

There’s still lots of annoyances from FH3 that haven’t been addressed at all like the AI and the Auction House and many of the car sounds. I could write a lot here, but I won’t for the sake of brevity. The UI has also taken a step backwards from FH3 with the cut to white after each race and the general layout of the menus.

Not to mention the glaring absence of custom championships. Hopefully those will return once we get the custom route creator at the end of the month.

Overall, like has been mentioned, I think the two year development cycle has really hurt Forza Horizon as well like it did FM7. Hopefully the devs will have some time to go back and actually finish this game before being pushed onto FH5.

2 Likes
#5

thanks for all the good replies :slight_smile:

Yea I just returned to the forums to see if anything has changed. or if any devs have replied. I will post some of my thoughts in that wishlist thread. I didnt actually know it existed until now.

I guess going forward I would love to know from a dev how hard would it be to patch/update the game to fix some of these online issues. can we reasonably expect that these could be changes that get done… even if it is several months later. To clarify I do not mind waiting for these changes to come… but if they are impossible, low priority or just never going to happen then I wont bother playing FH4 anymore and I will return to FH3 for my racing. My friend an I have been grinding away getting more excellent cars in each class setup in FH4 with the assumption that they will bring back voting and free for all online adventures. I suspect if we found out these features were impossible we would likely stop grinding.

Dont get me wrong I totally know game dev is hard and a two year dev window can be super challenging. but I also hope they have a solid little live ops team to continue supporting this game. the absolute worst would be if this game just got shoved out and abandoned. I would feel really burned if i had to wait 2 more years for the next horizon game.

1 Like
#6

The Devs have made the game they wanted to. Looking at the reviews on the store, the vast majority of the player base are happy with it.

A lot of people that come to this forum don’t seem to understand the concept of an open world playground. Why do you think the devs actually make two different games?

This isn’t motorsport 7 dlc. It isn’t a track racer. Whining on here won’t make the devs turn it into one.

#7

How do you review it on the store? I’d be more than glad to give my input but I just can’t find that option. But early reviews are meaningless because right now the things that give these kind of games staying power are missing. It’s shiny and new and looks nice but the meat of long term playability which are compelling online play and long term goal objects like rivals mean that in a week or two many of those who gave rave reviews will be on to the next shiny and new nice looking game. The real fans of the franchise will still be here pleading for much needed change for that long term playability.

Lets see how they do on DLC and expansion packs before we decide this game is a winner because without those much needed changes nobody will be too interested in future addons.

3 Likes
#8

50k plus reviews and 4.9/5 stars.

#9

Like I said how do I review it? I bought it on the Microsoft store and see no review option? Also like I said see how the future add ons do. Nothing more meaningless than a week one review as many of the major shortcomings haven’t even been discovered.

#10

Go to the store and highlight the game. You should see the review option on the left hand side. You can alter your review at anytime.

#11

I’m new to this series, I started with FH4 So I don’t see half the problems you guys do. That being said I did read over a few people complaining about the game and how it compares to FH3. So I went ahead and bought FH3 with the Blizzard Expansion and played about 2 hours of it.

From an Outside Perspective, FH4 feels like a giant expansion rather then a stand alone game. I’ve played lots of racing games in the past and each one has Completely different experiences. This one feels like copy paste. the Driving “Skills” could have easily been it’s own event, then just driving around swerving left and right and going off road. Drifting could have had it’s own event(Rather then story events) Using these events they could have easily made a co-op/vs in drifting/skill events, the person with the highest points at the end of the event(timed/goal-ed) would win. Drift zones and freeroam skill chains are just tedious and boring. The drag events I’ve complained about a lot already - They need to be completely overhauled for a better experience.

Visually - FH3 is better, it just has more to explore. Driving - FH4 is better, Plus with changing environments each week, Makes it a better driving experience overall.

Now that I’ve played FH4 for over almost 2 weeks I can say that There’s not much left to do rather then play the event week goals, I played the Team adventure events and Not really interested(Other then anything goes) and everything story related is just there, and is over shadowed by Live events which happen on the hour, and if your in an event you’ll want end it quickly just in case you don’t miss the next live event. Not excluding weekly timed events. There are also Event balancing issues, some event which only have a 3-4 take a heck of a long time to build up skill points in order to advance to the next level(you’d think with limited amount of events you’d make it easier to level up that specific event CoughdragCough)

Anyways that’s my 2 cents from someone who’s never played these games before.

#12

Alt account

#13

I’m sorry, I don’t understand what your saying or how its relevant to the discussion?

#14

I just want to drive PVP road racing and street scene races with a rotation D,C,B and A classes, all cross country and off road stuff disabled, all free roam rushing, extracurricular activities and extra games disabled. Just pure tarmac racing with relatable and fun to drive cars with the open world and all the extra stuff still there and available in case I feel like playing them too.

I would also like to blueprint championships/playlists of multiple different races into a one event.

May I please have this?

#15

those reviews on the store are as fake as any can be. fm7 and its disaster at release is a prime example. the rating for the first were terrible until someone at micros0ft made 50k positive reviews to change the rating overnight. there is no way fm7 and fh4 can have a 4.9 and 5.0 rating.

1 Like