I think it’s ridiculous to say there’s not much new with FH3, especially if you know the Forza series (which I am assuming the OP does as he referenced past features)
The new world, for one, has a lot more varied terrain and a lot of it is never-before seen. It’s not like Forza Motorsports where the same legendary circuits will be the same each game. You can make the argument for that half of the franchise (to some degree) but definitely not here. This is the first Horizon game with the storefront/auction house, blueprint events with a different non-linear focus to how you progress.
“Immature antisocial stuff”
Nevermind, you clearly have your mind made up about the game and probably made this post to hear people agree with you. Other people above have pretty much covered serious answers to your post.
And how radically different do racing games get between editions.
It is cars on a road, how different can it get?
Edit: In my opinion for the types of game they were NFS Most Wanted (original) and Burnout Paradise nailed it. Every sequel since went too far away from the winning recipe.
If there are major problems with a game then a sequel needs to fix it.
I eoukd suggest some of the innovstion in FH3 has made it worse and i would prefer something closer to FH2.
I dont think horizon 3 is a bad game i just think its too similiar to its predecessor. The best “new” feature they added was the blueprints. I dont expect a sequel to always be revolutionary, i firmly believe in a if it aint broke dont fix it approach, but they did mess with things that werent particularly broken. Multiplayer should have been the focus of this title but it wasnt. They added one new playground game and kept the online roadtrips the same, im sorry online “adventure”(new name makes it new i guess). Ive said it before I think it was a wasted opportunity. The only other new feature possibly worth anything is going to be the snow expansion, which is messed up because theyre locking it behind a paywall.
Most of the “under the hood” stuff for Horizon is brand new, hands-down, and this is covering everything surrounding progression, to the map, and even perks. The progression system is new. It’s no longer a repeating road trip around various destinations to the map. It’s been replaced with festival upgrades and the player deciding what and where to race and how they want to get their fans. The entire structure of the campaign (which is now optionally co-op, which is also new) was revamped for the sake of providing the player something both less repetitive and more open-ended. You can’t really deny that it’s not something new considering that it’s the core of the main game, outside of multiplayer matches.
Then there is the map. Water is new. The map in general isn’t even a reskin of something we’ve seen before. It has never-before-driven terrain and all significant sections of the map have clear distinction between them. This is also something that’s going to be difficult to argue against, considering an example to counter anything Horizon 2 had would be that the outback and rainforest are polar opposites of each other yet both of them managed to make it into two ends of the map.
For staying with the Horizon theme, there’s not much more to be done for giving it a focus on multiplayer considering the massive single-player community. And as a matter of fact you could beat the game through co-op if you wanted to, which is optional, and thankfully that is the best you are going to get. And for practicality’s sake that SHOULD be the best you get when it comes to the multiplayer focus of open-world racing games. Look at NFS, for example. Always-online ruined it for a lot of people and everything else was filled with rubber-banding AI that makes any kind of “unfair NPC advantage” Horizon had look like power-ups for the player.
There’s only so much the developer can add/change (and this here was more change than we’ve ever seen among the past 3 Forza games hands-down) without having it be written off as a gimmick. And no, having an expansion be released as an expansion doesn’t really count towards “ooohh, those darn greedy developers messing up”. It’s an expansion you can buy for an already massive main game. Not much more to it than that. And better said, it’s an expansion that likely expands the game to include something totally new, which is what DLC should be used for in the first place. So it comes off as odd to me that you are hinging part of your point on snow being “locked behind a paywall”, this is precisely what DLC is and DLC is not a concept unique to Forza.
Unfortunately your post and the one before it is extremely vague here so it’s hard to refute anything directly. You said they changed things that weren’t broken, but gave no examples, and then said that not changing these things was a wasted opportunity… your post may be rightfully wordy but it doesn’t make much sense without fleshing it out a bit more.
Edit: Also it’s kind of expected for the sequel of a game to be alike it’s predecessor. It’s called a sequel for a reason. Your insinuation above that a list of what’s similar being longer than what’s different being a defining factor in this argument wouldn’t actually support either point as it’s all subjective to how vast the changes are.
It is subjextive and my opinion is that when i played this game it felt like a continuation of horizon 2. I dont feel as though it was a bigger leap in progress or ideas than horizon 2 was over horizon 1. Things that i think they have broken in this release are the pi system, drivatar skill and rubberbanding and the ffb.
Imo online road trips that consist of xp championships are not particularly fun and should of been revamped or replaced with a hopper system similiar to horizon 1, many people had issues with this online mode in 2 and they chose to copy/paste it.
Playground games should have been expanded upon, they only added flag rush or whatever. What better place than horizon to add an old fan favorites like car soccer and cat and mouse to the multiplayer.
As far as the structure of singleplayer, yes there is more freedom but as with other games too much freedom in my eyes just means a lack of structure. It is a racing game so you just drive around and grind out races. I think the whole festival expansion thing is stupid and adds nothing but a map cluttered with icons. At no point did i feel like i accomplished anything when i expanded an expansion, if anything i waited as long as i could to not expand them until i was done with the first set of races.
My point with the snow expansion is not to complain about dlc, its about a new feature being locked behind one. Ive said it before, and with a quick look around the forums you can see the size of the expansion threads. The game is two months old, im sure many have not beaten the base game and theyre already frantically waiting for an expansion.
If this game was so huge and so new, why do they need an expansion so badly. I dont remember people doing this in horizon 2. It just shows me at least that the base game obviously cant hold peoples attention for very long. So for the “biggest” horizon ever to be causing this much fatigue so soon i think it points squarely at the lack of new things.
While technically things may be new, it is a sequel after all, i find many “new” things to be gimmicks like He cars, funny horns, the hire a drivatar system and the thing where you beep your horn and the drivatars follow you, drift zones, even stunt jumps to a point because theres larger jumps to be had elsewhere.
Im not trying to change anyones opinion cause i can guarantee no one is going to change mine. Ive owned and played every forza, and ive played this one the least. Ive also said in another thread that this happened to me in forza 6. Odds are ive grown fatigued with forza and barring some major revamps ill continue to go down this path. If you like the game thats great, if youre having fun thats awesome, thats what games are supposed to do. I just dont find this game as fun as horizon 2 was to me.