I own a full sim rig supported by FH4 but I only really use it for VR racing, I can’t race with the wheel on a monitor after experiencing VR racing, I see FH4 as an arcade game for the controller, but whatever, it shouldn’t matter.
But it does.
I’m super competitive, probably like most of you guys, and I quite like the competitiveness of rivals but I’m pulling my hair out with it. I use automatic gears with the controller and when racing against rival ghosts who are manual gear shifting, the exact same car & stock tune is just pulling ahead with a huge passive advantage which is impossible to compete against.
I’ve just been doing the Ferrari F40 rivals challenge, I’m currently P173 globally and even though I’m far better through the corners than my next rival, I get skinned on the straight purely due to the automatic gearing being artificially handicapped. There isn’t a single person above me in rivals using auto gears.
I get it, the F40 is a manual car but that’s not the point, it’s obviously not just this car, I’m 100% for giving players a difficulty credit boost for using manual gears but does anyone have any idea why the auto mode is so severely handicapped? It’s not like a terrible driver will be able to top leader boards on the strength of that alone. It’s really quite frustrating.
I would be happy to use my sim rig to gain an advantage through more precise driving and FFB, but I don’t see how its fair that I would have to use that to gain multiple seconds per race purely from switching to manual gears with a clutch.
Don’t get me wrong, FH4 is an incredible game, this is just a niche frustration which probably few people really care about, but it seems a bit daft to be this way.
When automatic shifts, it is way before the redline. That is the problem, it is shifting way too early so of course you cannot catch up. I can shift well past the redline and still accelerate. So in that gap you are losing a lot of power that manual would give you. Learn manual first than step up to manual with clutch and get even more out of it. Manual is pushing one button, manual with clutch is pressing 2 at the same time. I use A+B to upshift and A+X to downshift. I no longer even think about it. It will just seem normal after a while. It will literally take you a few weeks. It is not that hard. If I can do it anyone can. I drove auto for yrs and suffered. Don’t make that mistake. Why should automatic which is an assist be better than no assist? The less assists you use the faster you will be. Especially in A class and below. TCS may be a little faster when you get into hard to control cars is high classes but I still don’t use it. Forza has always been like this. That is the challenge and very rewarding when you are able to do that. Just takes practice. It is pretty much universal once you learn it for any racing game.
That may be generally true in real life, but in-game it shifts very nearly at the redline.
The advantage of manual over automatic has always been slightly silly in Forza. It’s been awhile, but I think the first time a Tesla showed up even it was slightly faster in manual and it only has the one gear. Still, manual shifting generally saps the fun out of driving for me (with very rare exception) so I find the cons outweigh the pros.
Is there an advantage to using clutch on controller (aside from the difficulty bonus)? Is it faster somehow? I use clutch with my wheel setup because I have a shifter and because, well, it’s there, but I’ve never really considered that with a controller. I’ve heard people like to do that on Motorsport and am unclear as to what it is I’m missing out on.
I used to use the clutch with the controller back in FM4 but it was like fiddling with a rubik’s cube, it allows you to shift faster if you can co-ordinate your hands well enough, but this kind of nonsense isn’t realistic and not worth the wear and tear on your tendons.
Yea I’m 100% capable of manual shifting, I’ve put hundreds of hours into sims like AC and iRacing, it’s not a case of not being used to manual shifting at all. Maybe I’m looking at it the wrong way then because I don’t personally see auto as being an assist, my real car has DCT which can shift much more efficiently than I can using the paddles… but if the game is considering it an assist then that’s fair enough, nowt I can do. I still don’t agree with how much of an advantage it gives but obviously that’s not up for debate. I dunno, I personally don’t think an arcade style game should give a passive advantage to things like that but if that’s what it is then that’s what it is. Cheers for the post.
Forza 7 is the same with this. Those are real sims AC and Iracing, so they are more realistic than any Forza games. Forza doesn’t care much what the actual car has for gear changing. I’m sure some of these cars don’t even come in manual but that isn’t what they are trying to replicate.
It’s important to remember that at the end of the day, it’s still a video game. MT in the game is more complicated than AT in the game, so it’s going to confer an advantage if for that reason alone. Difficulty ≈ Reward.
The reward in this case should be limited to the, well, reward. Of course, a skilled driver should reap some actual benefit from better shifting than Automatic provides in the same way that better brake control generally wins out against the ABS - a skill based benefit rather than just flat out having better acceleration regardless of shifting (a fact that’s easily tested with the Polaris RZR, which has a one speed stock transmission, in a handy Drag Event).
I agree, the reward should be in-game currency or points IMO though, not an arbitrary artificial performance boost to the car. I’m now using manual on the controller (the FFB wheel feels very wrong in FH4 for multiple reasons) and I’ve shaved 2+ seconds off a 2 minute sprint which in the top 1% is ridiculous, but it is what it is. It feels clumsy and false shifting gears on a controller but so be it.
IMO it’s not a no-win situation, the auto-box should drive as fast as manual shifting, manual shifters get a benefit from being able to control their entry and exit gearing so they can take an advantage from that, and they can be rewarded with +credits or whatever for their troubles. But nerfing the cars in auto mode isn’t cool. To be fair very few will notice it but still.
Well learn manual and you will be rewarded. Really not hard once you get the hang of it. You guys are turning off half the game and the fun of driving. You will be faster and actually have control of your car.
Not sure if you’re trolling now or just trying to be helpful, but to my knowledge, nobody here has said they don’t know how to play manual in the game. The issue is that it shouldn’t be faster in straight line speed, the rest of the manual benefits are acknowledged, accepted and understood.
You hit the nail on the head with pointing out that the auto-box shifts earlier, that appears to be the crux of the issue. I don’t agree that this should happen, that’s the point I was getting at and highlighting in the pointless hope that it gets on somebodies radar but beyond that, happy to just leave it there and move on.
Not something I would expect them to change and I think most would not want them to change that. Every Forza is this way. The guys in the Forza RC seemed fine with it.
Forza Horizon is suppose to be more arcade like, having manual faster than automatic is pretty silly on this game. FM7 I can understand, but even then, most new cars now are automatic/semi automatic. Which are faster than manual now. Using manual on a controller is silly too, if you have a proper setup, that is best… but not everyone can do that.
I would never bother learning manual when I’m always using a controller.
Automatic is coded to shift slower than Manual, and in many cars Manual is coded to short slower than Manual/Clutch. Dan Greenawalt has stated this directly in podcasts leading up to Forza Motorsport 7s launch. It is seen as a “reward” to players who learn the extra button press(es) required to shift manually.
That it shifts slower isn’t a problem. That Automatic is slower than Manual or Manual w/Clutch regardless of shifting is what I take issue with - it’s basically a minor cheat. Mind you, I’m not exactly on a crusade against it. I mention it from time to time when the subject arises, but I don’t expect it will change. At the end of the day, people are perfectly happy with cheating as long as they’re the ones doing it and/or it supports their ideology.
It’s not just shift time, though, it also slows the car down when not shifting. What caused me to learn to use the clutch was a rivals event in FM7 where I was driving against the #1 ghost and he was just pulling away from me on straight sections. We were both driving along with the same car and tune, in the same gear at the same rpm, but his car was simply pulling away from me. I switched to manual with clutch rather than just manual, and that fixed it.
I think it is fair enough to treat these things as assists, though, as I find auto gears really improves every other aspect of my driving, due to eliminating that small mental distraction and allowing greater mental focus on everything else. If auto were as fast as manual with clutch I’d use auto all the time and would definitely do faster lap times.
