What do you think of Forza Horizon 5 now compared to release date?

Forza Horizon Forza Horizon 5 FH5 Discussion
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The game was launched in November 2021 and has since received 2 Expansions and a number of updates and (hot) fixes. A bunch of cars were added as well. 534 cars were available at launch, now there are over 750 and there is still more to come.

I think the game has been greatly improved. I love all the new cars and content. I especially love the recent updates that really brought some welcome and well requested changes like upping the car and tuning limits.

I love how active the devs try to get feedback from us players through this forum with the new voting system. The last updates show that they do care and listen! I’d say keep it up!

I’m curious about the next Series Update(s) to see what they will bring.

I do wish we could start a New Game+ to properly enjoy the new content we got these past 2 years.

The only thing I don’t like are the bland maps. I think FH4 was a better representation of the UK than FH5 is of Mexico.
The GUI should be improved too. It’s still using the same system from FM1 which came out in 2005! It’s outdated and makes the games look like heavily modded versions of FM1.

What do you think of Forza Horizon 5 now compared to when it launched? Is it more fun? Better? Or worse? And why?

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better, definitely, except for the PR stunt restriction change

there are still ancient bugs copied and pasted from previous games that continue to bemuse and confuse me and there are various aspects of it that have a lot of room for improvement but it’s a very good game overall

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While the recent updates have been good, they haven’t made enough of a difference for me. I’m very happy about the new cars. The return of Stellantis and highly requested cars like the Nissan Z, GR86, and Lexus LC500 has been amazing. However, the game at its core is still a disaster. The map is very bland, with almost no interesting areas. That becomes a big problem when you have so many new cars, but no good places to drive them. I’ve said this many times before, but there is no Solo racing endgame since the removal of custom championships. Instead, they’ve doubled down with the addition of these crappy stories.

I will say features like increased garage space and save slots are huge additions for this game and I’m happy they were added. But this game is so broken beyond repair that I just can’t help but think; what’s the point?

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I don’t care for the Open or Eliminator stuff so all the big issues for me have been resolved. The game is basically what I was looking for when I bought it which was an arcade style racing game that doesn’t require a grind to race the type of events you want to race. That said there are still things that can be improved like:

  • If only one person is in the arcade event the one shouldn’t need to wait for the mini-mission timer to hit zero before getting the next mission
  • I still like the drivatar capabilities in FH4 better than FH5. Yesterday I did an S2 goliath race and an Atom somehow was in 2nd entering the Cooper Canyon and it is about that point in which the drivatars stop racing each other and the Atom is one of the few vehicles that the drivatars seem to follow a realistic top speed for.
  • I would like some new tracks or maybe the same tracks but in reverse
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Good but still some areas where the work has to continue, cheating is still a sizeable issue despite the leaderboard purge + they’re still infesting the Eliminator (where’s the supposed big update that was getting as well?)

I’ve stuck up for the game when people have a go at it for this particular thing but Backstage Pass has to return soon, within the next 3 months at most to match/improve on when it arrived in FH4’s life, outside of the new cars the playlist rewards are poor + useless to most players, if that’s the road they’ll continue to go down fair enough but for newer players there needs to be better access to previous/missed exclusives soon in some other way other than the AH.

The game is also prone to being bizarrely unstable, I’ve been dashboarded so many times out of nowhere with it I’ve lost count now, in the past I’ve even paused it, went downstairs for a few minutes, came back up and found myself back at the dashboard, so it’s somehow managed to get itself frazzled out when it’s not doing anything.

It’s much improved but I don’t want to see FH6 repeat the trick of being empty + buggy at launch then improving to finish in a good state for the 3rd game in a row, call me too black and white but I believe the level FH4 finished at should have been what FH5 began at, and where this game finishes is the minimum we should expect from the next one, it’s the natural logic of progress.

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The game is definitely better than it was at launch but there’ a lot things that were better in Horizon 4 that have been removed e.g. ranked online racing, hourly Forzathons with multiple people taking part compared to the virtually solo Horizon Arcade.

But the map is still rubbish. No way to improve a poor design.

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It’s definitely better than launch but I also think all of the issues I had with the game are for the most part still here because they’re structural. The playlist, event lab, multiplayer “ranked” solution, eliminator, the “story”, progression, etc. They’ve added more cars and some more events, fixed some of those big initial bugs, but it does nothing to address why this series feels stagnant for so many players. I don’t dislike the game or the series, just disappointed.

I say that as somebody who can overlook half of those issues if at least some of the other issues could make up for it instead. Multiplayer is great but single player is bad? I can deal with that. Single player is amazing but multiplayer is non-existent? I mean I don’t like it but ok, at least I can find something to do. I hope for the next game the devs at least find that FH1 passion again and make something everyone can be proud of.

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Pretty much this. Most of my misgivings with Horizon 5 (and, well, Forza as a whole lately) have more to do with puzzling game design decisions and game elements that were deliberately left out. As a result, my opinion mostly hasn’t changed. It’s still the best racing game available at the moment (at least on Xbox, I can’t really comment on the PC space), but that’s still not saying much given Horizon 5’s issues and the general lack of competition (maybe The Crew Motorfest will change that). In fact, I can safely say that Horizon 5 easily doesn’t make its way into my top ten racing games of all time. I’m not sure if it would even crack my top twenty.

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I hope so

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Well I can actually launch the game now. So there is that.

The game was such a disaster at launch, and continued to be for months, all while the devs refused to even acknowledge major issues.

So yeah, no more of that. Game still has bugs and issues but they pushed compared to the launch issues in terms of severity.

The game design direction has suffered from similar issues (major problems that the devs refuse to acknowledge) and has persisted. There are minor signs that the devs may be past the influence of Mike Brown and the game direction will turn for the better, but this company has raised my hopes only to dash them with half-finished and quarter-thought game modes too many times for me to give them the benefit of the doubt, regardless of the shift of internal influence.

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They are making headway. I’m happy about the new cars. I was pleased to see the new GR86. But once it dropped there is now no use for it. Will there be any need for the new Alfas and Fiats once the series is over? What good are all these new cars if they just sit in a make believe garage gathering fantasy dust?

Will good changes continue? Will event lab 2.0 really be 2.0 or will it be 1.1 in a smoking jacket? Will “won’t fix by design” ever become “fixed it!”?

Will they keep moving forward? Let’s hope so.

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Well, FM8 is still using the same old Forza aero, and it won’t even have the Nordschleife, so don’t count on that being any good. We wait for FH6 now.

If PG can prove that they have moved on from the Mike Brown era and are onto better things, I will give them another chance. I love this series and I want it to do well.

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Yeah, Nordschleife isn’t my most beloved track but given the wimpy track list of FMhate and the looks of the “ground up” :roll_eyes: build I’m not expecting big things there. I’m waiting to see what event lab 2.0 has in store. I’ve found some bugs in event lab 1.broken that has me wondering if I left TC2 too soon.

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I’d say we already notice that with every update. The people we see now in the live streams seem like actual car enthusiasts. They can also control a car as opposed to whoever was driving before and crashing all the time and losing races. I remember when they introduced the Bentley Turbo R and said that it was known for its thicker anti-roll bars. Eh… what?? What about the turbo???

That makes me curious about FH6. If you see the kind of updates and content that’s released after Mike left, FH6 should only be better than 5 is now. But that’s still a long time away of course.

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Just read the article about the Nordschleife.
Its absence at launch is the first big letdown for me. Having driven it countless times irl and being there at least once a year it’s a must-have in every modern racing game for me.
I sure hope it’ll be included as advertised.

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I’ve seen a few surface level changes, but nothing that represents the fundamental shift in game design philosophy that the franchise is in desperate need of.

These things do take time, and throwing out the roadmap the instant Mike Brown left would have likely wiped out hundreds of hours of work, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to be understanding towards them and the company when we’ve recently received not one but two unnecessary stories, one of which was basically an advertisement for a YouTube channel, while things like custom championships or adding new races to the map go untouched.

And there are still worrying signs that things haven’t really changed at PGG. Yeah, the streams have changed a bit, but at the end of the day we’re still wasting extremely precious dev time going through playlist activities, which is a task pretty much anybody could do. They also still reek of PGG’s usual unearned positivity. It feels more like a different flavour of the same disappointment (albeit a more appropriate flavour for the game) then a real change.

Even stuff like the Italian Automotive update, which is definitely some earned positivity and a phenomenal update to the game without a doubt, isn’t really what the game needs. Yes, I understand prioritizing it, they got the licensing and did the work, holding back would have been the wrong decision. But it represents more of what they already did well, just more and harder work. I don’t want to see them work harder, I want to see them work smarter. The Italian Automotive update doesn’t disprove that they are working smarter, but it doesn’t actually prove it either.

The company, the legal entity, has completely lost my trust, probably thanks to the influence of Mike Brown, but there is no realistic way to know for sure it was him and him alone that was the problem. Until tangible, fundamental changes come to the game, I’m not giving them the benefit of the doubt, nor should I. EventLab 2.0 could be that kind of change I’m looking for, but this company has lead me down the path of vague and open-ended promises before only to release a half-baked and inevitably unsupported idea like convertibles, Horizon Tour, or even the Eliminator, a game mode that I hate I never really wanted in the game but I have to admit, it’s never recieved the updates that it clearly needs to stay relevant. That last one is a situation that I’m ok with but this game isn’t just for me.

I’m in wait and see mode right now. My tone had softened a bit and I recognize that transitions like these take time. But I’m not going to take for granted that a better tone and attitude is going to translate into better action, and I’m not going to let off the pressure because this company needs to understand not only that the situation under Mike Brown was unacceptable, but why it was unacceptable.

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I mean, they built it from the ground up, they just didn’t build very high.

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:joy: :joy:

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FH5 was pretty much not fit for market when it was released, so it would have been difficult to do anything but improve from there.

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I guess I haven’t weighed in here yet, so… :wink:

I think the fairest I can say is overall it’s about the same. The differences being, largely :

At launch I had high hopes and I thought, at the time, reasonable expectations, that it would be an improved FH4.

Those rose colored glasses stayed clear for quite a while, even though others were reporting problems, some of them huge, I managed to avoid anything game breaking or even seriously bad. And there was a belief that support was listening and fixing. And maybe they were.

All that wore off eventually of course. And more issues arose. I got more bugs personally, still mostly minor. And things were still being fixed, sometimes. A kind of plateau had been reached it seemed. All imo of course. Not so much 1 step forward and 2 steps back, but 1 step forward and 1 step back. And then a step to the right… :wink:

So, yeah, the game feels flat in a lot of ways. I guess it could be worse. I fear it may become worse. I hope I’m wrong.

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