Very very disappointed, so disappointed I submitted a ticket for refund

Forza Horizon Forza Horizon 5 FH5 Discussion
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So where to start… 3 years of development just to give us another half-baked product?

I see endless threads game keeps crashing. Yep and when it crashes I basically loose progress on what will be weekly events. There is this point system - some of challenges I have completed and lost points for it, some I did complete and are not marked as complete, even though I received reward for it. Currently I have most of challenges complete, but 0 points in my points’ bar. Few months ago I submitted and thread where I warned other people that FH4 had this nasty bug that corrupted your cloud save and you had to start all over again. It seems they fixed this issue in FH4, but this crashing and loosing points in FH5 is really worrying me. To be honest I am now really afraid this game will again at certain point in time completely corrupts my cloud save and I will have to redo everything from scratch again.

Map… huge map is good thing for open world racing right? Well almost half of the map is plain desert and is so repeating it gets boring after just few minutes of playing. It looks like developers like only cross country racing, rest of the events are completely unenjoyable compared to cross country. So far I unlocked most of festival, but from events I only completed Goliath, few road racing events and all cross country events - cross country seems to be most enjoyable from all events in the game, others are simply bland and the main issue that hinders enjoyment is drivatar AI.

Drivatar AI - they took the bad aspects of AI from previous titles and made it even worse. I remember one video few months ago where they were saying how greatly the physics is improved. To be honest I really think the physics is non-existent in this game, How is it possible to cut almost 90 degree corner in 250+ km/h without sliding? How is it possible to go over a sidewalk and just not “suffer” some sort of bump, rebound and sliding? How is it possible to jump of some high hill without any rebound when landing - I just loose speed that’s all… This was there in previous titles and it really made player aware of the road. Not here and I believe it might explain a bit why drivatars on higher difficulties just fly over the bends and get so much power boost I have no chance of catching them. Lowering difficulty is currently only option, but then the game is completely unenjoybale because there is simply absolutely no challenge from drivatars. By the way when they catch you in the corner, they just ram into you, you get rolled out of the road and loose a lot of time and in the end it will cause you lost race - so time rewind is only help here. I try to play at highly skilled, every assist except manual shifts turned off, but have mixed results from drivatars, so mixed this game is completely undeterministic. This is bad thing because you can pick a car from same class and within same performance level, one will win every race by far and with other you just loose and have no hope of winning.

Graphics - I am on Xbox series X just to have worse graphics than what I had with FH4. I have to stay in performance mode, because high quality mode is like watching slideshow with noticeable transitions between slides. Not to mention the graphics is really blurry, expecially in areas that are brightly lit by sunshine. Btw you can see how low quality the textures are when you approach objects really close. Cars are far from being shown as realistic as they were in FH4. They appear like plastic models of original and basically whole game feels like I am playing cartoon and not a racing game. Btw we could have gotten at least one more bigger city and one more highway on such huge world…

But the worst part is how devs represented Mexico. I am not from Mexico, but to be honest most of the houses and sceneries in this game just portray Mexico is poor country which I believe is not true. In the end I submitted a ticket to Microsoft asking for refund - I do not have high hopes to be successful, but it is very sad for such highly anticipated Horizon sequel to turn out a great disappointment for me.

I understand some parts of my thread could and will be seen as very subjective, so for all people out there who like the game, pls do keep enjoying the series and support developers. For me I am going back to FH4 now that they fixed the cloud save corruption issue.

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I think it’s perfectly respectable to voice your disappointment about a product and that you requested a refund, as long as you don’t offend people that like playing the game or the devs. I was just installing FH4 right now, because I’m curious about doing an A/B test on the Series X. I have a feeling the only thing that’s actually improved is lighting/skybox, other than that from what my memory tells me FH4 actually looks better - like you said.

So kudos to you, congrats on your decision and hopefully you’ll come back at some point and fall in love with the game when the very obvious teething issues have been hopefully fixed.

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Teething issues? Remember when games used to almost never release a patch to fix game-breaking bugs because they’d been worked out while in the studio, well prior to release? What the hell are you implying? That in this modern world we live in things don’t have to be complete before they hit the public? That ideology is part of the reason people, namely companies, get this same idea driven into their heads. You’re supporting “teething issues” when they shouldn’t be there at release in the first place.

Lmao, “teething issues” in a triple-A title. I don’t think I’ll ever get over that.

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video games were also way, way less complex back then.

I’m not denying the issues. They are bad. Very bad. And clearly more QA needed to be done. But it’s a different world for a lot of reasons, and expecting modern games to come out without any issues on any hardware is unreasonable at best.

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You want to go back to that? You want to go back to games that never change and what you get us what you get? Seriously that’s a silly take. I love that developers keep updating games long past release. Why anyone would prefer to return to a time where you get bored of a game after a month or two is beyond me.

The game runs acceptably on my Series X. There are a few bugs but nothing deal breaking. The map and feature list in this game are gigantic. And without an open beta they had no way of doing any stress testing before launch.

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At least you managed to play the game. I can’t even get the game working as I my wheel (G923) doesn’t work, even though it says its supported. I put in a support ticket only to be told that the issue had nothing to do with the game, well that’s funny seeing as the wheel works fine with FH4, and the dozen or so other racing games. So add me to the refund list. I should be successful as I haven’t even started the game outside of the menu’s.

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  1. Lets start saying that I completely respect your point of view, expectation vs reality is always a tough point. I’m a super, huge, sucker fan of Forza and Forza Horizon and i’m that kind of guy that gives up a car game because cars sound totally unrealistic (FH4). BUT…
    The only thing that I 100% agree with you is the crash matter. There are many bugs, I manged to fix them all apparently(freezing at loading screen, grey bars with SSAO etc) but yeah, I get your point. I spent 99 euros and I pretend a finished, well working product. Fair enough.

  2. The map is great tbh, there’s a great variety of biomes but again I’m with you about the “only crosscountry events”. The game seems to focus a bit too much on offroad events, also single-player mode is limited, Playground aims to push a lot online events.

  3. Drivatar AI is not the best, but not even the worst I’ve ever seen. The AI is a bit dumb but in higher difficulties it gives me a lot of challenge, and I personally love to fight for the first position. I play in PRO difficulty with everything off except for TCS, the trick is the car tuning and I manage to complete all the events in 1st pos.
    Physics is always an hot point when it comes to racing games…but this is not Assetto Corsa. FH5 has the same arcade physic I saw in the whole franchise…nothing to complain here. Nobody ever complained about “physic” in NFS franchise…
    PS: Drag races are totally wrong tho, AI can beat you in a class D car even if you are driving a Spaceship.

  4. This is the most controversial point. FH5 is clearly a next gen game built to run smoothly on Series X. To be fair I play in ULTRA setup with an AMD 6800XT (RDNA2, same technology as the Series X) with capped 144 fps and the game IS MENTAL, easily the best graphic out there between racing games.
    So, you are disappointed, I’m more than happy. Who’s right?

  5. Same as above…this is an arcade game with a story plot that is 100% “happiness, fiesta and fun”. Mexico “by PG” looks even better than reality (ive been there) and they approched the subject trying to scale down a whole huge country removing all the bad aspects. That’s the same thing they did with the whole franchise, do you remember FH2? Im Italian and I live close to the places they imagined (Castelletto etc) and they did a good job, but ofc they painted everything as if it were perfect…which is clearly not.

The biggest disappointment for me is the campaign. I cant even feel the sense of progression, there’s rivalry, the plot also is incosistent.

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At a glance it looks like there’s about 20 races in each of four categories. Two of those categories are road races. Only one is cross country. The last is a mix of dirt and regular roads. Not only are most of the races road races, but it looked like cross country had the fewest events of any category - like 16 or 17 unless my eyes missed some.

I’m playing on an XBOX Series X and it runs buttery smooth for me in Quality mode and definitely looks better than FH4.

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Can’t agree with the graphics part, i have an amazing pc, i9 10900k, 64gb ram and a 3090 !!! Yes the game is beyond amazing, with everthing maxed out in 4k, but i have to say, my series X does a great job .

Still i agree with most of your other points.

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We live in a very rural area and our satellite internet actually limits how much we can use a month. So I bought the physical copy so I wouldn’t have to burn up our internet just down loading it to 2 consoles. Insert disc, load game. Won’t start without a 97 GB update. What was the point of shipping a disc with 23 gb of a 110gb game?

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How do you put in a ticket for the refund? I’ve tried the game 4 different times and crashed within 3 minutes of trying to play on pc. I’ve sent them all the info they asked for with no fix! Please tell me how to get the refund. Very Disappointed in Turn 10 to say the least!

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Generally speaking, you contact the store you bought it from (Microsoft, Steam, Amazon, your local retailer, etc.) and try to avail yourself of their refund policy.

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Well damn maybe just write a book about it then.

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Well, after amassing 64 hours, I can clearly agree to some of the points the OP lists. Blatant rubberbanding is something absolutely unworthy for a premium racing title in 2021. What’s the point in skillful driving if the AI can catch up simply by cheating? This reminds me of darkest mid-2000s with a game like NfS Most Wanted having probably the worst rubberband AI in gaming history.

Long loading times - even from SSD. Why does downloading and applying a livery take 20 or more seconds?

Why does my skill chain end abruptly when the servers time out? I’ve lost so many chains because of that.

Why can’t I see from my collection which cars have been already photographed? And why can’t I switch cars from the Horizon Promo menu? Why do you have to make this so highly unpractical? I’m 38 years old and have better things to do than wasting time by navigating a once again horrible menu structure. Oh, and please add a filter option to only show yet undriven cars.

Why can I download and apply new tune settings from anywhere on the map but when it comes to liveries, I have to visit the festival (which includes another loading screen)? Nonsense. Fix that!

Why does the game not run in 60 fps on One X? FH4 does. Fix that!

Why has the collection of logos and and stuff in the livery creator practically not changed since 2007’s Forza Motorsport 2? While I can understand that getting the rights of third parties can be a pain, including the logos of Microsoft’s own games should not be an issue. No Halo. No generic Forza logo (without a numeral). No Fallout. No Doom. Nothing at all. Here you can clearly see the laziness of the devs.

Why can’t the game respect my decision and keep the bloody radio turned off permanently? No means no!

I’m stopping here before completely entering rage mode. I’ve paid 100 bucks for the game. I start to regret this. And this was my first full-price game since Fallout 4 back in '15.

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I agree with everything said, except for the graphics part. Even the OG version has better graphics than FH4, so I’m not sure what you’re going on about there.

But I do agree with the map being plain & bland. Big map with very little to do. FH2 & FH3, you had many things to do. The FH3 airport had stunts all around, FH4 had drift zones, FH2 had the docks to tear up, FH3 you had the shipwreck site, construction site, logmill and so on to go tearing up. Online actually felt alive and active back then too.

Then here we are in FH5, there may be a lot of biomes, but once again very little to do outside of the races & achievements.

The AI’s are nonsense in FH5. I’m only on Above Average difficulty and it’s like they’re driving on highly skilled or sometimes above. The physics have gone downhill. Even after changing the settings, cars seem to slide too much, fast cars barely turn, even when you slow right down… like what?

I’m also highly disappointed with the campaign. FH never has a decent story to tell, but FH5 is next level disaster with story telling. There’s not much cut-scenes going on, unless you’re playing the stories and even then, the characters just stand there… makes me think I’m watching a PS2 game.

My passion also for FH is coming to an end.

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FH5 has numerous drift zones. One of which I’d call ridiculously long.

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Playing on my Xbox One X i have had no issue with the game at all and it looks beautiful apart from the texture pop in I have played the Forza series since day one and knew what to expect as it’s pretty much same old, same old, release the game full of bugs and iron them out with patches…it’s how it is and has been for 15years. As for losing saves ?..Grrr i’ve lost count over the years!

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I cannot speak for the inner workings of how FH5 was created and released in this state. But in general i’m afraid it’s another case of meeting deadlines for release (crunching vs meeting a game publishers deadline), QoL Quality of Life.

As games becomes more complex and more big in size, the hype, demands and expectations from a game becomes more big, the working times&development becomes more big. basically everything becomes more big but the time they actually need, the deadline or release becomes less. so it gets rushed to release in a half-polished stage.

Unfortunately the world is all about money, consumption versus demand, circulation and in time, the world speeds this up, or society. I can only imagine how complex and fast this is going to be in the year 2030 ~ 2050. Games will have a size of 5 Terabyte, and the deadline requirement to release a game will be 1 year or less lol.

In a perfect world, everything would be free, and development would have no rush or pressure of any kind, but yeah, maybe in a alternative universe :slight_smile:

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Yes. they are under budget and they will release whatever it comes out at the end. Turd , GOTY or someting along there, doesnt matter. We are talking corporate here. Rest asured they dont make games for fun they are doing it for the money. It’s not the dev fault or even small leads, they may really love what they are doing. But at the end of the day is about money. The rest is just talk ,fake smiles and broken promisses.

Look at the FH4 and you’ll see where FH5 may lead to.

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its just the usual thing with new games, some like them, some dont.
the game industry has a severe lack of quality nowadays, if you cannot handle that , dont play the game asap, wait a few months after some patches.
this is very simple and absolutely not new, the wise ones tried it out on the gamepass before deciding.