Weirdest decisions from the devs

Forza Horizon Legacy Horizon FH4 Discussion
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The game is absolutely great for the most part, I really do love it.
But there is soooo many weird decisions taken in FH4, I don’t even know where to start. Those decisions obviously drive away players from the game, I spoke to many of my friends playing FH4, and we all agreed on the very same topics, this is crazy.
First of all, we love to play S2 ROAD/no free roam/collision on. We (almost everyone) wait for summer races, because… heh, it’s S2 ROAD.
Out of 10 games, I get maybe once summer races, every other game is slippery and this isn’t fun (I mean, over and over again ??). When you get 3 times in a row winter races, you see the lobby slowly emptying until nobody remains for the rare good weather races. This is annoying, I spend 85 % of the time waiting to have good games, this should be the other way around!!
Next, it’s ALWAYS the same races, I can’t count the amount of time I play derwent reservoir lakehurst forest sprints, I must play them like 10 times before getting a race that I love better. I love all the races, but again, 5 to 6 times in a row the same races it’s just annoying? and other races pop in once out of 40 or 50 races? On 2 days playing each time 1h30, I never got bamburg coast circuit!! My favorite circuit in FH4. But I got 20 times the same sprints in winter…
There’s circuit races, and sprints, and again, 85% of the time, it’s sprints, again, why can’t it be a good old 50/50.
Everything takes sooooo long to play, in dirt racing you have 6 events (3 races + 3 free roam that I absolutely hate), but in road racing, you have 3 of the shortest events ever. So you gotta wait between races, to join races, to fast travel, to everything, but the races are only 2 minutes 30!! The slightest mistake, you are done, why can’t it be for example 6 laps for circuits, and/or have 6 events in Road races : 3 circuits/3 sprints.
You are totally killing the “street races”! They are awesome, but there’s nobody playing them, literally nobody. This is such a waste, they should be bundled in the Road type. I don’t understand the devs, there’s so many things that are good in this game, but it’s buried under so many bad decisions that I can’t comprehend why those decisions were taken.
For competitive, there should be Road/Dirt, I’m totally not interested in dirt races, and since , again, 85% of the time you play dirt/country in competitive, I’m not interested to play at all.

Then yeah, there’s the technical decisions, forced to bind some buttons that you don’t even use. The slow downs when someone pushes you in a wall, the “rewind” when someone pushed you away from the checkpoint takes a million year, and you always appear right before you miss the checkpoint, you got to rewind 2 times, or just wait those 23978 seconds before you’re put back on the road, and again, in a game of 2 minutes, you’re just done, that race won’t be fun at all, this makes absolutely no sens. The ramers win in this game, pushed in a wall, YOU slow down, pushed out of a checkpoint YOU lose time, absolute no sens.

2 Likes
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Don’t buy a wheel. The button mappings are bugged, and it means you generally can’t rewind more than 1 time, which as you noted, often doesn’t take you back far enough.

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I would start by says dev do develop they don’t decide, only the guy game designers do. I agree some decisions are weird but we should be careful at not considering it is weird just because we don’t like.

Not having always summer S1 is because it would quickly end with a core of experts preventing any new comers to have any single chance to win. That is why there was no B button to leave proposed championship at game launch even if that was kind of a bad idea. Honestly I would only have to cope with clicking on B button to find another lobby, I would cope with it.

I agree that there should be a mechanism blocking having to championships of same road type or season in a row. same way free roam is race type, it should have its own championships and dedicated cars. This would have opened to using low top speed cars for championships with short circuits and improve the balance of time spent on different types of races as well as improved pace by having only 3 races cs.

More than 3 laps, it will lead to first players having to deal with last players which often tend to be the worse when not rammers.

If we go for weird choices about FH4, I have quite some in mind at the moment, help yourself

  • stuff and dances in a racing game
  • triggering car position reset when the car lands on its four wheels,
  • having Raptor still going under ground more than a year after release
  • having all our tickets tagged solved when no action was taken
  • having community guys not ever reading a single feedback shared on this forum except if MM takes care ( he is our modo, not is job afaIk)
  • considering Discord as good place to share information and feedback
  • not putting back B road races championships after removing Freeroam for road races
  • not having included user created tracks to regular list for online.
  • not replacing the online wheelspin at the end of championship by, “you won a wheelspin”. It would have stopped the filling of garage with garbage and improved game speed online.
  • few weeks ago, being pushed to wall was penalty for pusher and now back to penalty for car pushed and none for pusher.
  • raising the number of cars in garage but offering no filter to identify duplicates or new cars except having to browse 750 cars 1 by 1.
  • creative hub showing number of downloads for liveries and not for tunes. Weird is My designs not considering the selected car while My tunes does.
  • being proposed to report/download my own tunes/liveries but not being able to share/unshare/delete them instead.
  • putting a limit to the number of tunes but no indicator of how many used nor indicator of which car has.
  • having rivals leader board without any mention of the track, season and weather (same for race lb).
  • negative points on ranked suggesting someone level is worse because he loss a race ( raising players aggressiveness ),
  • promoting ramming & road rage over clean racing,
  • not allowing to start custom championship with a single player (feature killer ) and allowing to remain single the whole championship if all other left 1s after first race start.
  • considering user profile being lost on a sync is a not important,
  • bringing Tracktor to game without anticipating the impact,
  • releasing the game without rivals, and free for all,
  • not having fixed the tyre filter after more than a year when simply always on would have been enough.
  • removing club weekly score board,
  • considering cheated glitched scores do not require administration for a game based on score boards.
  • is adding season to game and not in rivals.

… That’s would be my list just coming in a shot, I am sure I learned to cope with so many no sense things that I forgot some important ones.

8 Likes
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Weird decisions for me are…

1/ Fixing one menu to search for car brand, but all the other menus remain the old way when you are only supposed to program one menu for a game.
2/ Having an auction that enhances Legendary Vinyl Creators, but can’t display their vinyls properly.
3/ Taking out words from songs like the word ‘high’ in flying high.
4/ Cars can roll onto their wheels, and then get reset.
5/ The vinyl editor allows you to flip horizontally, and vertically, but this breaks the scaling option.
6/ Allowing vinyls to be worked on at night when you can’t see properly.
7/ Having stories with time limits that you can’t complete in the Winter, so basically having seasons not fixed.
8/ Not knowing which tunes people are downloading.
9/ Having blueprint download info that always says zero.
10/ Your HUB tells you that your vinyls have 1 star, yet the vinyl selector tells you that they have several stars.
11/ Not having Likes shown in your HUB
12/ Having to go outside to read a message.
13/ Having to go to the Festival to apply a vinyl, and then it doesn’t tell you what car you are supposed to apply the vinyl to.
14/ Not knowing what cars = what vinyls in HUBS.
15/ Having damage that breaks your glass so that you can’t see where you are going.
16/ Not allowing opacity changes for grouped vinyls.
17/ Can’t turn the music off completely.
18/ Some parts of game still force cars into your garage that you don’t want.
19/ Sorting cars so that a gap appears between the same cars.
20/ Setting a route, and then changing the route if you enter a speed zone, or a drift zone.
21/ having keys locked to Anna, and Rewind, and other things that you don’t want.
22/ Editing Blueprints doesn’t let you go to a specific checkpoint without going through them one by one.
23/ Jumping to houses positions you away from going into the house.
24/ Having a camera inside part of your house.
25/ Taking a photo of your car works fine, but the cars on display change colour.
26/ You can only see the right side of a car in a vinyl image.

Probably enough for now.

3 Likes
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wow, yeah well, let’s hop they at least “try” to fix that for the next forza. I understand track rotation and weather rotation, but I believe their “random generator” is really bad, and is stuck in a bad place. They should find a way to balance it. I agree to most of what you said, but the rest is “too advanced” for me, I’m not going that deep in the game. Yeah, developers develop, sorry for the devs, I tend to call devs whoever puts his hand on the product, so sorry for them. Great game though, beautiful, feels good, but arg… all those little things remove a lot of enjoy - ability.

I think it would be helpful to compile this and make it a sticky of some sort, is it even possible to do ?

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not a democracy here, it’s already a thing this post has not yet been closed as related to online discussion or wished features and buried there like so many posts of this kind so no one will find it.

Anyway, far too late for FH4. Concerning next FH, given what was FH4 at release I would recommend not to bet on having an online racing feature.

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I do not understand why they don’t have a filter by current car feature in My Designs. There are all-but-identical cars, like the Hoonicorn V1 and V2, and the standard and FE versions of some cars, which you would think would have interchangeable liveries, but they aren’t. And then there are the various look-alike Mustangs, Renault hatchbacks, Vauxhall hatchbacks, etc, that are so similar that it is very difficult to tell which livery matches a given car model by looking at the thumbnail. Filtering by current car would solve this confusion.

1 Like
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Oh man there are so many things.

Removing custom championships. This one really stings. It was my favourite thing to do in horizon 3, and the feature was removed for no other reason than because. I’ve been banging the drum on this since day one with posts and tickets, and gotten nothing back, not even an acknowledgment. Thank goodness we have that mind-numbing busy work of photographing cars back instead am I right?

Forcing seasons onto single player. Or seasons at all.

Forcing multiplayer onto the majority, making people who don’t care about online waste resources while providing an objectively worse experience for people who do care about it. And then to be so ostensibly focused on multiplayer yet provide 0 online support for the expansions.

Not predicting the need for a much larger garage pre-launch.

3 Likes
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Well, I wanted to breakdown my fh4 experience online, because I’m mainly an online player, here is how it went for 1h30 min of game.

When I cut the footage of my session to check everything, my jaw dropped, the only reason I had more playtime than waiting time, is because I had a duplicate event including the colossus, otherwise it would have been 50/50, again, I was shocked to realize the amount of time wasted, this is PlayStation 1 loading time LOL

Actual play time → 48 min
Waiting time → 42 min

I had 75 % amount of sprint, 4 duplicate sprint, 2 “truplicate” sprint, and 3 duplicate events. I had summer once (on almost 20 races). This is very unbalanced. So many races I haven’t got. This has been 3 days that I played 1h30, and I never got some races.

I won 90% of the races, once second, once 6th. The matchmaker was a total joke, let’s be honest here.

The technical things, well, I did rewind once, and I reappeared not moving in 6th gear (weird bug probably), got pushed out once, nothing much, the rest of the time I was in first place.

I’m a number guy, and this isn’t what I was expecting. The waiting times are distilled so they’re not really jumping into your face, but when you do the count, it’s wayyyyy too much, crazy! For the races, well more diversity would be hugely welcome, I don’t understand why the same events keep popping up while others, sometimes more interesting never appear.

1 Like
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I don’t know what takes the time. I play on PC, with an NVMe SSD. It has a spec of 3.5GB/s read speed, so even if it were exchanging the entire contents of my 16GB of RAM (and I think the game uses a lot less than that), it should only take 4 secs or so.

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I would bet on protections against piracy, this is always consuming huge time.

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The “loading time” by breeminator and you is what bottlenecked by performance reasons; the “loading time” by nfectnfinite is mostly what introduced artificially.

It can’t go that far.

Something hardly works vs. something doesn’t work at all… How should one choose?

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Wrong guess. (and wrong context actually…)

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Please elaborate your opinion

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As we see, there have been many weird decisions made. But I can live with that shortcomings to some extent.
What really bugs me, is the developers decision to bring a Lego Speed Champions expansion to this kind of racing game.
The decision to bring such an expansion, which many ultimate edition owners never would have bought, destroys the immersion by a big amount.
And the developers decision to allow that ugly Lego cars into the normal game world makes it even worse.

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@nfectnfinite
Well, there are predefined playlists of races and only those rotate. That’s why the same races always appear together. Since the playlists were never changed, it has become a boring and predictable experience.
There would have been countless ways to improve this part of the online racing experience but PG simply didn’t care. Change the playlists, adjust the amount of races, create and include new races (like Ubisoft does for The Crew 2) or add verified community created ones like Rockstar did for GTA Online.

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The community seems to matter less than ever now, even having the community championships back appears to be asking too much.

Though truth be told I too would want to stop them if I was a developer and seen regular players creating better, more enjoyable routes in just a couple of days than I’d come up with in 12-18 months.

2 Likes