Why does missing checkpoints in online still force a rewind all these years later?

Forza Horizon Forza Horizon 6 FH6 Discussion
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I’m actually kind of impressed on the psychological mind games at play here. Never in any gaming experience ever has a game immediately just vanquished any desire to keep playing in a second.

But for whatever reason (likely out of pure laziness) they force you to rewind when you miss a checkpoint in online racing. It makes sense in singleplayer racing, it’s offline with AI so they simply just rewind with you. But online? Everyone else keeps going while you are literally forced to go backwards.

The most puzzling thing is, they already have the scripting for slowdown penalties. If you hit a wall too hard it slows your car down for a second. Horribly implemented but it’s just frustrating rather than ultimate defeat.

Why the heck have the developers not implemented this into online? I was doing a Spec Race, last in the championship, taking positions and on the final lap I apparently missed the checkpoint flag by a millimeter. The second that “MISSED CHECKPOINT. Y TO REWIND” showed up, I just sighed and quit the race right then and there. There’s no point in continuing, it’s so punishing that coming in anything past eighth is a miracle.

It’s just. I don’t understand. Slow me down. It stings but does not make the race immediately a garunteed “bottom 6 placements” like actively forcing a rewind does. What on earth is the design philosophy behind that? Is there even any or are they just too lazy to make a five min change that could be rolled out in a hotfix? EVERY Horizon game has done this and nothing has changed.

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How would the game determine the duration of the slowdown? Cutting the apex and missing a checkpoint gate by a millimetre is substantially different to straight-lining a downhill switchback or cutting through a field in the midst of a bunch of 90-deg corners.

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I assume it’d be the speed you were going. Missing a checkpoint at 100mph would slow you down way more than missing one going like 50.

Alternatively, maybe it’d punish on the angle of the turn. A wide, fast turn would punish you less severely than a sharp 90 degree one.

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Putting aside the fact that the penalty implementation for hitting barriers or other objects slows me down, which can be irritating at times — I suspect this was done because in Forza Horizon 5 setups using drag race tires gave players an advantage. You now have to take corners much more carefully.

Anyway, missing a checkpoint should result in a teleport back onto the track, along with a slowdown penalty and a flashing car so nobody crashes into you. I’m not sure how long the slowdown should last, but it would still be less irritating than rewinding.

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It makes sense in singleplayer racing, it’s offline with AI so they simply just rewind with you.

Nope, you’ve got it wrong buddy. AI never ‘rewind with you’.

You don’t even ‘rewind’ at all.

Singleplayer and multiplayer work exactly the same: you get teleported (NOT rewound) back to the checkpoint while everyone else races on. It’s perfectly fair and logical.

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No, you’re the one that’s wrong. Unless you reach the reset timer countdown, you do rewind along with the AI in single player.

In multiplayer you can also rewind, but the AI and other players obviously carry on without you.

In both you can also let the countdown run out and get teleported to the checkpoint you missed, where you’re ghosted until reaching a certain speed.

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The fun thing in SP is when you rewind and the AI suddenly forgets what it was doing and spears off the side of the track (would often happen in Motorsport too if they were off the racing line, they’d instantly try and get back on it which would often result in them crashing)

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Ai rewind when you hit the rewind button in single player.

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Rewind is faster in MP (usually) than trying to turn around or waiting for the countdown timer. I don’t see anything wrong with the system though - we know missing a checkpoint is a heavy penalty, so don’t take any risks.

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Racing games set on closed tracks don’t even need a checkpoint system. Even the original Forza Horizon didn’t because all festival events were 100% boxed in with barriers.

I think the checkpoints are part of a larger issue of the terrible design of the routes where the actual corners aren’t bad but the way everything else is set up, absolutely. Each route should be a proper boxed in street circuit rather than tossing barriers on the outside corners and calling it a day.

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That’d feel awful to me. Outside of temporary street courses, real-life dedicated race circuits have empty space outside of the track area, and drivers are penalized for exceeding the established track limits. Checkpoints accomplish the same thing in-game.

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The track limits are clearly defined with a painted line, in game it’s an infinitesimally small space that’s impossible to judge flag that lets you go fully off the track so long as you still brush it

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Yes, you’re right, and figuring out how to just barely brush some of those flags while taking the most inside line possible is a big part of what makes racing fun to me. I enjoy racing on “boxed-in” tracks like those in cities a lot less. There was that one circuit in Guanajuato in FH5 that had a sharp corner with a concrete bollard right on the edge, and I swear I smacked into that thing every. single. time.

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There are multiple problems stacked together.

When the game is built around very short races on tracks with many choke points, for example, S1 street races are only around 1:30 to 2:30 long.
no one is going to back off and wait for another chance. Even if one player does, the player behind them will usually just dive in.

This becomes worse because the crash physics still make it too easy to push other players from the side.

Another problem is that there are still too many easily breakable walls and fences.
Because of this, the game has to place a lot of checkpoints, but it can still only show two checkpoints at a time.

Players see checkpoints and breakable fences as"ramming points."
That is why I prefer invisible track limits, or more"boxed-in" track design. or Invisible boundaries.
("Boxed track"does not mean the wall has to be close to the road. You can have a wall far outside the road as the final boundary, while also adding a smaller inner boundary that applies drag/slowdown as a punishment.)

Right now, the game mostly only detects whether you missed a checkpoint.
So when you get rammed off the road, down a hill, the game does not really do anything that actually useful automatically.
You now lose even more time before respawning, and in a 1 minute race, that basically means your race is over. You cannot catch back up after losing that many seconds.

Because ramming is still very effective, people still keep willing to do it than actually play the racing.

There are also some cases where the checkpoints are unnecessarily narrow. For example, on a straight road, why is the checkpoint still drawn tightly within two lanes?
In FH2 and FH3, the game did not need to do this, so why did this change from FH4 onward?

In city races, the game sometimes only uses half of the available road as the track. Why?

I think there should be multiple levels of off-track punishment:

  1. Light punishment: drag,“magic glue,” or reduced acceleration when slightly off track.
  2. Medium punishment: slowdown without forcing a respawn.
  3. Heavy punishment: forced respawn only when the player is clearly stuck, very far off track, or gaining an unfair advantage.

Respawns should also be improved. Sometimes the car should not respawn in a complete stop. In short races, the car should sometimes respawn with some speed.
Some fences and walls should have different durability during races. Not every fence needs to break so easily, especially when breaking it only creates more checkpoint and ramming problems.

Also, I have to ask: why do street races place smoke grenades at almost every apex to block visibility? What were they thinking?
Even the finish line in the street race is a choke point. (When it is 2 lane. it draw so narrow. When it is 4 lane the game put things that take up 2 lane for ramming.)
Why? are you building the game for rammer?

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Got a lot of thinkers in this thread, the game does not need to create a slow down. In Online racing it should be the driver who slows down imo.

Checkpoint penalties in multiplayer races, especially Street and Crosscountry is buns. The penalties are terrible, they have no place. That’s just a straight up fact. The ways opponents abuse checkpoints are too numerous to list too. FH does not determine a safety rating for going out of course or breaking limits, its encouraged. So to me, for online, a penalty should be a “slow down served” like RFactor or iRacing if you gained time by cutting, if you lost time from a miss there is no need to serve a penalty.

If you don’t serve your penalty by the end of the race you go to last place. Yes, that means that people will tactically use slowdowns/black flags. This happens in real racing/iRacing too, just another racing skill at the end of the day.

Simple, real world and game world tested Black Flag system would be the best way too go.

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Do keep in mind that Horizon is very much an arcade racing series, not a hardcore simulator like iRacing or RFactor (or even a simcade that’s more towards the sim end of things like Gran Turismo is). Applying black flags and penalties seems a bit too involved for this sort of game.

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Why is it too involved?
We already get forced slowdowns for touching walls, and thats “new” (as in six months into FH5.) So, why pray-tell would a black flag slowdown be “too involved?”

I feel like its more “I wont be able to boot people out of checkpoints anymore.”

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No, it’s “if I wanted to play a hardcore sim I’d go and play one.” I play Horizon because it’s good arcade fun, not to deal with a whole penalty system. Honestly even the wall slowdown seems incredibly silly, because most of the time it’s applied to me I’ve already been penalized by mucking up my line and hitting the wall in the first place. I don’t boot people out of anything; in fact the only time I play online races is when they’re Playlist tasks. Otherwise I don’t care much about the gamemode at all.

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I really dont think taking your foot of the gas qualifies as “hardcore sim” but you are entitled to your opinion.

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The only problem with the current system is the fact that other players can too easily push you outside the flags. I was getting repeatedly griefed by someone across multiple races with this behavior. The ghosting doesn’t work when you are close to another player’s speed.

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