It’s a testament to how talented the world builders, artists, programmers and sound engineers are at Playground when you can release a game that’s so fundamentally shallow and unengaging but despite this, still give players a somewhat enjoyable experience. It’s painful to think how good Horizon could be if that level of polish and thought could be applied to the series’ basic gameplay loops. I was really looking forward to Horizon 4 in the hope that all the same issues I had with the 3rd game would’ve been accounted for here, especially after the DLC of FH3 made some positive steps in the right direction. Unfortunately, I’m struggling to see how anything AT ALL has changed. I guess when your title is selling well, why reconsider anything at all outside of a new environment and a new set of races?
This seems like a hyperbolic statement but it really isn’t. Where is the actual GAME?? This is not a game. It doesn’t have any of the key elements that literally every other game I can think of has. I’m not sure I even know what the overall ‘win state’ is of Horizon 4. Grind enough XP to hit some arbitrary threshold then roll credits? Complete all the races? Collect all the hats?
There’s no fail state whatsoever. Come first in a race, who cares. Come last in a race, who cares. A slight difference in XP between performing well and performing badly resulting in what, a slightly longer grind to the end credits? Which other game is like this? Which other game lets you progress regardless of how badly you perform? This is pretty damn fundamental to maintaining an engaging experience over any amount of time. As soon as your brain works out that nothing you do matters, things get boring real quick. But Horizon is for the casuals! I hear you scream. Right, sure. But that’s what difficulty sliders are for (which Horizon has a BOATLOAD of!). What is the point of difficult settings when your performance doesn’t matter at all?? It just changes which position I finish. That’s it. Appealing to casuals does not impact your ability to appeal to people who want some kind of consistent challenge - the two are not mutually exclusive.
Your performance isn’t even recorded outside of a few instances (drift/speed zone stars). When I finish a race, it’s marked with a gold trophy, regardless of how bad I did. A GOLD trophy. Even if the game doesn’t care how well I do, I thought I’d at least be able to challenge myself and set my own criteria by not moving on from a race unless I got say, top three. Nope. Everyone gets gold. Move on. I thought I could get some kind of consistent challenge from doing events with the RIVALS option. Nope. The game pairs me up with a ‘rival’ (how can they be my rival when they’re different every time?) who took SO long to finish the race, I thought they’d stopped to have a cup of coffee! Almost 4 times what a reasonable person could complete the event in.
None of your choices matter. The car you pick doesn’t matter, the mods you install don’t matter. No thinking required. We have a plethora of complex mods and tuning options and none of it matters. Why would I install any of the numerous performance tuning options? They don’t change the car in any meaningful or strategic way. A dozen different mods that just bump the engine power up. I’d trade all of these for an exhaust mod that actually changes the tone of the exhaust.
Now, this is a criticism I’d level at a lot of racing games but… the AI is a monotonous parade of overly consistent drones. I actually lied about point 3, there is a strategic choice you can make to improve your finishing position - choose a slow, easy to drive car. The AI can be driving a 700bhp, RWD muscle car on ice and they’ll be as consistent and clean as if they were on tarmac in a Fiat 500. Essentially, the AI drives with all the assists on, so if you have them off, you’re going to get a wildly inconsistent ‘difficulty’ across car types/conditions (not that it really matters).
Remember that great feeling of progression in Gran Turismo when you saved up to install a few performance mods onto your cheap MX5 that gave you the edge over the other cars before working your way up to afford a slightly faster car, like a Honda Prelude? Nope, not here. BOOM. McLaren Senna right out the gate.
Redundant systems. What is the point of the skills system? It’s constantly ticking away rewarding me for my awesome driving skills such as falling off the road and smashing through a wall or driving behind someone. And what do I get for such skill? I get to pause the game and tediously add some perks to my car that increase the rate I get XP. Yay? Why would I care about this?
Please guys, more time thinking about the core gameplay of the series and how to appeal to a broader audience. I really can’t see just adding a new environment each iteration is going to cut it in the long run when the game is so utterly shallow under the surface.
p.s The UK is the best map you’ve ever done, kudos on this.
The rival chosen is one slightly faster than your posted time, thus the first one is always the most ridiculously slow time. After you post a time you get a better rival (who is slightly faster than the time you posted).
How is that a good challenge for the player? A really bad time followed by whatever time I did plus 0.5s isn’t a rival, it’s just a basic time trial. The game knows how I perform in general and what difficulty I’ve selected, why can’t it offer me a meaningful rival to compete against?
Always striving to catch the next fastest is definitively a good challenge in racing. Rivals mode has always been a sort of time trial in this series as far as I can recall.
The lack of a sense of progression and challenge made this singeplayer the worst of all Horizon’s for me. After the prologue the game doesn’t provide a goal. All show-races are done and ranking up for the sake of ranking up to get more lootboxes seems to be the only “motivation”.
On top of that your result in races doesn’t mean anything, they are “gold finished” anyway.
At times this game felt like a mobile game. Just a “happy-place” without competition, with shiny bling-bling-colours and constant rewarding for everything you do. I would love to seem them go back to a more challenging, competitive (you actually have to win/top 3 races) and serious Horizon. Where you actually can achieve things. Like Horizon 1.
The #1 worst aspect is forced music in load screens. Turn it off. Kill it all. I only came for the cars.
#2 might be, hidden times in team adventure. Am I driving worse under pressure? Probably, and I have no way of knowing exactly how much worse.
Rayne I get the same feeling from the load screens and menus+sounds. Everything that isn’t gas/brake/steering is trying to force-feed me something. I have around 300 hours in-game now, I’m sick of the same music clips, I’m sick of the bloated menu full of pictures, I’m sick of the camera flying all over as I move through the upgrade menu to build any given car (and it makes it hard to compare different wheels in 3/4 profile which is mostly where you seem them when driving in 3rd person).
I LOVE point 5. I miss that so much. I was hoping we could have seen that again with Forza (motorsport) but no such love. Then I thought oh, Maybe GT Sport… no career.
That is the kind of achievement that I seek and miss the most. Current racing games have almost no real sense of challenge or accomplishment. The “storyline” for FH4 is just a joke. Your only sense of accomplishment is completion. oh look I did all the Speed traps, or I found all the danger sign, or I completed all the event at this one place. sigh
Customer: We want more Mods: Exhaust Tips, Bumpers, Spoilers, Kit’s etc. maybe add stuff like this to the wheelspins
Game Designers: We added Emotes to the Forzathon Shop with the upcoming Patch. Plus: More Clothes!
Customer: …
I agree with most of the points here, there is total lack of progression system. Hovewer I disagree with #3, your car choice and tuning/upgrades have BIG impact when racing against unbeatable drivatars or in multiplayer, at least when racing with steering wheel. This is one of the game aspects which they did right.
It’s actually one of the most productive ways to make money in the game. You buy the 1982 911 Turbo for 150k and for 20 skill points you can get 1 wheelspin + 300k, giving a guaranteed net gain of 150k plus whatever the wheelspin gives you. It’s a major source of extra income.
Why would I elect to go through that? It’s neat don’t get me wrong, but most of the perks in the tree pertain to earning more points to buy perks with! The cash/rep perks are worth little. If the entire “game economy” could be friendly enough to give the player access to all cars beyond a frame of time or work, by measures such as compressing the cost spread of the cars from 20k-10 million to 20k-1 million, wheelspins could be done away with entirely, and all clothes/horns/emotes could be free from the start, except those granted by discipline levels, loyalty rewards, and tuner/painter rank. Especially, considering the aim of clothing is (possibly) aimed at appealing towards casual gamers who might not play Forza otherwise… why make them think they have to play for x00 hours to have all the clothes? And according to RNG? When wheelspins were only cars and cash, it was a welcome boost to “progress” that wouldn’t have suited FM’s more serious take on money. The whole wheelspin aspect of the game has become so bloated, there’s a cutscene with car and driver waiting for the magic wall to draw cards. Is that necessary?
If Clubs were more functional/integrated, racing against human players and not their drivatars would help some of your gripes…
An active club where rules are enforced on race conditions, etc. would help, or something like the homologation rules in Forza Motorsport 7 will give you freedom to wisely choose your build (fixed tire compound, raise the index to the cap)
Unfortunately programing AI is a tricky thing (my experience is centered around old Papyrus Racing games and GTA3). The rubber-banding mechanic to create interesting finishes is annoying, but easier to code than :timed.lap-.05; grip+.01;etc. (my apologies that I don’t have my line code from NASCAR Racing 2003)
The bucket system in FM7 kinda addresses this, but it’s not perfect…
We can only dream the the next ten systems will allow for smarter AI in FH5
Edit:
side note: As someone with over 1500 hours, you can make this game into what ever you want (that still involves cars). I choose to collect all cars, role play as a highway patrol car, recreate epic car chase scenes from movies, rock crawl over obstacles, take scenic pictures like it’s my job and have fun racing with friends online. Add me (GamerTag Fuzzy Belvedere) if any of that sounds fun
There are 500 cars in this game, I don’t have time to grind out cash for every single one because you want to relive Gran Turismo,;if thats what you want conveniently enough you can go play Gran Turismo on PS4 and grind for cars right now!
Truly the best review i have ever read for this game man. I couldn’t agree more in your points.
You make things clear. The level of difficulty is beyond easy.
—I bought Super Smash Bros Ultimate
and i played these days and man it’s so hard from the beginning of the game. You only start with 8 out of 76 heroes. 8 MAN!!
this is perfect i unlock everything and everytime i win a match it is like i was fighting(irl) all sweating and stuff. With this game i
felt the true gaming. ----
-In forza i just finished 1st. just that. no point in anything else. This game is for kids(no offense to anyone me included)
but it’s easy its full of mircocrappy customization(clothes,hats etc) and the whole idea of the game was to be easy.
I remember the old days with nfs underground 1 and 2 or the granturismo era where you started with a kei car.
freaking KEI CAR 50HP and every race was bringing you closer to the honda civic 1.5 . those were the days.
Now just get the agera rs put some offroad tyres and let the kids have fun. I dont want to be mean to kids
but we want our games to be hard. to have a challenge.
-Everyone can complete the first race but not everyone should do the game 100%.
it must take some skill to go up the ladder.Each race each track getting harder and harder. to feel the true gaming feeling. to feel that you achieve something
Thats the point. Thats why we all play videogames. to get better and better and achieve greater things. This is how life also is. We weren’t born with 10m in bank account
2 buggati’s and 4 houses in Monaco(not the majority at least). We scale up and achieve goals.
And i will agree that this game is irrelevant. at this point i play it just to excuse my self for the money i paid. i will go for 100% which
is not that hard and then i will stick to super smash, red dead prolly and rocket league.
– And an advise to the devs. call psyonix and tell them to show you how to communicate with your customers and players.
psyonix devs are responidng really fast in reddit and the fixes are fast and good. Its my advise trully i talk seriously no
kidding. –
Agree with a lot of this but mostly the lack of progression. There is no story. The little mini stories are not a story and took about a day to complete. Possibly the shortest single player game I’ve ever played.
PG need to hire someone to actually create a fun story surrounding the festival. Something that takes at least 40+ hours play time to finish. This should include progression through buying better cars, upgrading your cars etc. The only time I play this game anymore is when I want to do something completely mindless and drive around a map. I want to be challenged by a story. I want to be immersed in a game and actually feel like I’m at this festival for a reason beyond just driving.
I don’t even think there was any introduction into who I am in this game. At least in Horizon 3 I was the boss, I had to go around and unlock new festival sites to grow the festival. This at least had some progression, although I still would not call this a story. I keep wishing for something like what NFS can achieve through their stories.
There is so much potential. Each race type could have a progression based story behind it with some nice cut scenes and narration beyond just “oh wow mate you look at you go, we gave you some more races!” Start us out with a crappy D level car that we need to build up to compete in each discipline. This would give a sense of accomplishment.
And, if children don’t want any of this, let them just go online like we have now where there is no progression or anything to work towards. Think about like GTA. They have a story mode and an online mode where anything goes online. I’d like to see something like this where if I want a nice story to play through I have it, but if I wanna just go drive a Senna around, I can have that too.
Not to pick on you, but there is no solution that will make everyone happy…
I find it totally ironic that a month ago I suggest Hot Pursuit in place of the absent “Head 2 Head Bounty” from FH3 only to get blasted that “This is Forza, Go Play Need For Speed…” and now some want a fleshed out story like Need For Speed
The Gran Turismo like progression was in FM7 at launch and people complained… the unlocked (almost) all cars…
If you want a greater challenger, stay with stock tires and stock brakes, race with sim damage… I’m able to beat Unbeatable AI on all but tight corner races around buildings… I find myself gimping my builds making them heavier to make things more interesting or race online against adults that don’t believe in ramming or pitting/punting.
My next challenge I plan to take on is creating rock crawling races for online (screw AI at this point) -think King of the Hammers
I’m not expecting them to please everyone. Obviously that isn’t possible. But I think my solution of a story mode and online mode would probably make a high majority happy. You get the best of the two that people are looking for.
And I’m not saying copy NFS. I don’t need police chases. It would be cool, but not important. What I mean by a NFS type story is the really great cut scenes, the characters you meet, the progression…basically having a purpose to play the game besides driving cars around a map. Horizon 4 is not a rewarding experience at all unless for some reason Xbox challenges get you off. I would love to feel rewarded by this game.
