I am a Forza addict! I’ve played all Forza titles till the cows come home but fear that I’m aleady nearly finished with Horizon 4.
Why you may ask. On the surface it is an exceptional game with great graphics, map, and range of cars.
The thing that keeps drawing me back for more Forza is it’s unique class based PI model that encourages players to endlessly build, rebuild, tune, and retune cars to extract the maximum performance from them on any given track.
This is where Horizon 4 falls down:
There are no class based event leaderboards;.
There are only a VERY small number of class based rivals leaderboards, 12 Road Races, 11 Dirt Races, 8 Cross Country Races, 8 Street Races, most of which are limited to either a car division, car class or both.
There is no opportunity to download car setups from leaderboards
We should have realised that the game was up when the Tuner’s Garage was left out of the forum at launch. Who needs car builders and tuners in this game?
I keep trying to find ways to love this game but there just isn’t enough in it to hold my attention for too much longer.
I feel like I’m running out of events to complete. Sure there are a few offshoots like the Horizon Stories I need to complete, but races are limited. I remember it taking me a long time to complete all the races in FH3. I know there are seasonal championships, but still seems lacking in races.
I’ve finished them all, but it wouldn’t matter how many they provide unless we have an incentive (other than grinding for credits) to rerun them. If we had class based leaderboards for each event I would never stop running them!
I’m almost out of new events, just the drift ‘story’ left that I haven’t started.
I’m not sure how hard it is to add the class based leaderboards considering it took nearly 12 months to add them to FM7, but I wonder if they ‘copy and pasted’ the code from FH3 whether the class based boards would work. Surely that would save rewriting it.
Another thing that seems to be missing is championship events after completing the exhibition.
That’s not missing, it was a pointless implementation in the first place. In 2 it was always another series of races in the next town, and we were just along for the ride, but in 3 they were just silly, random sets of events that most of us blueprinted to be as short as possible just for the achievement. It was really just covering up the lack of different events. Worst was Hot Wheels where there were several circuit events that were exact copies of each other, just to get a decent number of races in. The championships were all we had for “progression” in 2, were just an inconvenience in 3, and thankfully they are now relegated to seasonal challenges just so that system actually has some impact. Change everything, it does not.
This thread was not a complaint about the number of events. In fact, with the introduction of Route Creator there are more events than you can possibly run. What I miss are the event leaderboards that will encourage me to build better cars. There are none so where are the incentives and possible rewards for Tuners.
One of the key skills associated with Forza games has been massively downplayed.
Sometimes I wonder just how much Playground has ever prioritized this aspect of the game. From what I’ve heard, the best balance was in FH2, but the Horizon franchise didn’t allow any tuning at first. Tuning in Horizon is an Xbox One thing. Then FH3 came out and penalized tire upgrades, now FH4 hides the tuning box in a corner of the menu…
In fact, the car mastery perks box is bigger and better highlighted than the tuning menu itself, which indicated where the priorities lie. FH4 is as much the latest Forza as it is a testbed for their new RPG game.
Even when taking competitive play out of the equation, it’s weird to see tuning not highlighted like before, because, to make all those stance cars with huge camber angles and spacers, you have to fiddle with tuning a little bit, even if all you’re gonna do is add camber and a drop.
Then again, the type of cars Playground has been promoting in the game (Liberty Walk, Rocket Bunny, even RWB to an extent) aren’t exactly known for their relation to engineering perfection. Liberty Walk in particular is all about stance, these guys aren’t the least bit concerned with speed, they make cars worse with their mods, it’s all about the looks. In a world where looks overcome speed, there’s not much room for the engineering side of things.
Custom championships were good though in FH3. I really miss that feature. This is something that kept/keeps me going back to FH3 after completing the “story” mode. In a perfect world for me I would make custom championship races, where I would compete with my team against other teams in seasonal point system, fulfill sponsor objectives and manage your team at the headquarters (similar to GRID career mode + Forza upgrading, tuning and designing features). That team feature, where you beat some drivatar and then you are given the option to add it to your team, in FH3 was completely half-baked and missed opportunity to implement something similar to GRID. This kind of features would add tremendous amount of replayability to the game after you finish the “story”.
The cheaters have ruined it for me, I just dont feel like grinding it out knowing that lots of people have 100’s of millions in credits bought everything and prestige over five times already. All cheaters should be banned.
I earned up to a million credits to just buy and make S1 Class cars in mass production. I’ve got a Vauxhall Monaro, 08 Dodge Viper, an Audi TT, 92 Honda NSX, and a BMW M5, all tuned to 900…but I can’t race them online. I spend hours just finding an S1 Team adventure…I feel like I’m wasting so much time doing nothing on this game. The devs took stupid pills I think.
Yeah, I am pretty much done as playing on from where I have gotten seems pointless as there is no futures. I like building and tuning and running rivals but they decided to delete that from H4? After I would build tweak and test on rivals I would take my favorites online but I’m not going anywhere near this team adventure nonsense and really only want to play online if I have a CHOICE of what class and car I play in. I would also like to blueprint custom championships for my favorites but that is out now as well.
The route creator has potential but can be tedious and unforgiving. The ability to tweak checkpoints after the fact is desperately needed. As it is the route creator isn’t enough to keep me interested. I will continue to check these boards for the much needed reinsertion of class based rivals and an online mode with class CHOICE. But unless those show up my H4 days are pretty much over.
Lack of Class Rivals has killed the possibility to compare multiple cars. Regular events are unreliable.
As a fan of racing cars “as they are”, the Horizon class system has never made much sense to me, but ABC and some S1 usually allow you to build interesting stuff that appeals to my tastes, so they make most people happy. S2 class sucks, though.
One thing I would have liked to see in FH4 is each user-created event having its own leaderboard, but it might be too ambitious an idea in a game littered with Fortnite dances.
The route creator, as said, is way too awkward to use. It might sound harsh but having to draw the racing line with your own car is one of the stupidest ideas I’ve ever seen in a map tool. The only popular events right now are those that abuse the in-game faults, and I don’t think this was the intention of the devs when coming up with the tool. Not to mention its further limitations, such as not being able to make a reverse variant of the standard events.
Moss, you didn’t put it with these words, but you’re definitely onto something here. Sometimes I feel as if this game was made for children and preteens, really, which are the public who couldn’t care less about competitive tunes and high quality designs. Dances are silly, as are most costumes. The D-pad “chat” thing is extremely fake. Grown ups like us don’t really care about “Drift Club” or Sea of Thieves-themed blabber.
The fact content creation revolves mostly around drift tunes and Touhou itasha paints should tell you all that’s needed.
(I have Koshiro’s Fate/Zero BRZ but that’s because Fate and his paints are awesome)
Read the following statements a couple of times. This is the state of the game and it is a sad for those of us that enjoy cars and racing. There is no excuse, no other explanation of their design choices. Horizon 4 is beautiful and fun to play, but utterly broken as a RACING game.
Horizon is my favorite franchise but man I don’t understand why I can’t build my own championships or do classic rivals, at this point the only events I have to do are the weekly championships and I can knock those out in an hour.
I’ve started feeling the same… I’m trying to slow things down knowing that once everything on the map is done that’s likely to be the end for me.
The HLR weekly competitions ran for a full year in FH3 due to class based rivals, and I kept playing until FH4 released as there were still some other rivals based competitions going on. FM7 took a while to get them back but again it has some longevity. I really do hope FH4 comes good too and they come back before it’s too late. I love so much about it, but in its current form I don’t see me playing it still in a year’s time, let alone two.
For me the fundamental thing that keeps me coming back to Forza is the “simcade” driving. The driving model is realistic enough to capture the feel of driving the plethora of real-life cars, but accessible enough that I can easily play the game using a controller and don’t need a full wheel setup. A close second is the gameplay progression popularized by Gran Turismo (at least that was my first experience with this gameplay model) of buying, collecting and upgrading cars for increasingly difficult races. The Horizon series opened up the game and added the awesome ability to just drive around and explore an open world and enjoy the scenery between races.
FH4 still largely retains the simcade driving model and open-world exploration that makes Forza Horizon games great (although the efforts to hide the tuning menu are disconcerting), but falls completely flat on the gameplay progression and goes a step farther and makes wheelspins the main mode of getting cars and credits. This is the biggest failing of FH4 for me.
I think the accessibility is not necessarily related to physics. Believe it or not, but I was able to get workable controls out of an old Xbox 360 controller in GT Legends and GTR2, both infamous for their difficulty, and I’ve even met people who were competitive with keyboard! In Project CARS, which is their spiritual successor, it was not all that difficult either, though a wheel is still better of course.
The “difficulty” with a controller, which is a flaw in the filtering model of a game, ends up praised when people talk about games like Assetto Corsa. However, Kunos is a small team and not at all interested in perfecting the filtering of inputs in an Xbox One controller, so they don’t have the same demands as Forza, a first-party title that originated in a console and remains primarily console-focused. The areas where Forza needs to improve with regards to physics would not necessarily make driving any harder.
Nevertheless, it’s a bit of a shame that the Rivals mode is underdeveloped in FH4, as it has the best physics in the Horizon branch so far. Weight transfer and tire behavior are much more forgiving than in FM7, of course, but in FH4 the sense of speed mandates easier controls. Let’s hope the devs listen, as I too keep coming back to FH4 (and Forza) by virtue of its unparalled blend of graphics and gameplay. We only need the features to support it.
