A number of Forza Horizon 4 characters will be coming back. Of all the Forza Horizon characters, why any of these absolute garbage bags of characters? You literally have a football team of well loved and classic characters from earlier games and yet you bring back overtly enthusiastic man-child who somehow has a street racing crew (why is he in Mexico now? he doesn’t even work for the festival)
You have so many characters sitting in your back catalog and you decide to take the game in the franchise with the worst characters? Duke Maguire is easily still my favorite racing game character and he’s been left to rot with all of the other actual interesting characters like Warren and Ali. Due to the fact that this is the first Forza Horizon that canonically has you playing as the same racer from the previous game, having already attained reputation and become a festival-wide celebrity, I’m just expecting to have every character verbally kiss my rear when I so much as show up on the same plane of existence as me.
I get that Forza Horizon is just a racing game and doesn’t demand major storytelling, but please try to have an overall sense of coherency and realism. I know it’s too late to suggest major story changes, but an EASY fix could’ve been that we’re playing as a new character like the other games. Although Forza Horizon 4 failed to do this properly, we could once again work up the chain starting as a rookie by winning races and such? you know, like a conflict? A goal? This game franchise is continually getting better with it’s car list, graphics, map, and UGC. But with every entry the soul and story continues to nosedive, and it hurts.
Stop going out of your way to appeal to five year olds by making an intentionally overtly friendly and conflict-less atmosphere. If you want to keep the kid audience (which I don’t advise but I think that’s out of the creative team’s power due to higher-ups wanting to appeal to a wider audience) can we go back to a grittier and harsher atmosphere that simply lacks swearing and lude references? With characters I need to earn respect or knock out of the competition? That’s all I’m asking for.
(also i know you guys are going to do it DO NOT make EVENTLAB tie in to the story i don’t need Hayley saying “Oh HeRe At HoRiZon We HaVe GrAvIty-ChAnGiNg TeChNoLoGy” IT IS JUST A FUN MODE. YOU AREN’T REQUIRED TO EXPLAIN EVERTHING. PLEASE STOP. DO NOT MAKE IT CANON.)
Sadly, there’s no one from team reading on the forum. Imho, FH is diving in cancel culture and quick to play mini challenges approach. I guess few would deny FH is closer from a Disney ‘Cars’ stroy than from a GTA V story line. It won’t change unless a challenger of FH rises to propose something with more taste.
Amen to this. I’m fine with Alex coming back as I actually liked him, but Jay coming back? Ah, heck no! Also, that new Mexican dude, Rami or whatever his name is, already annoying as heck. I don’t like him, and the fact that people were defending him on the subreddit was baffling to me. At the least the car sounds will be good, and hopefully the music as well this time around, because I am sure that Horizon 5 will take the cake for worse voice acting in a racing game after the Crew 2.
Hi Tilo, team member here. Reading the forums and engaging here is part of my role as a Community Manager. (While I recognize opinions here won’t always be positive, I have to insist that they not be formed in a way that will misinform the community.)
And while I can’t guarantee that every user will get everything they want to see, I can assure the community that I’m reporting community sentiment regularly and working on improving our feedback loop.
Good to hear that, and thanks for saying so. It’s nice to know that the forums aren’t getting overlooked as an engagement platform. I feel like forums have lost ground to social media outlets, and as someone who refuses to engage in social media (for a lot of reasons), it’s nice to know that forums aren’t getting ignored.
To add to the thread, let me just say my peace and say that this is a non-issue to me. I assume the format of 5 is similar to 4 and 3, and I won’t really have to engage with characters in the endgame anyways. I don’t really mind what I’ve heard so far, they’ve got good energy, and though they easily could wear out their welcome, so could anyone getting between me and driving cars. I’d rather the focus of the devs was on gameplay systems and mechanics. I’ll play through the most grating voices on earth if those two things are good.
I’m not trying to contradict the OP, I can certainly understand how for some, this might be a bigger deal. Just felt a second opinion would be nice.
Stories, okay sure…but I can do without all those characters, and the only reason I pay attention to those wonky cut scenes is for chapter-specific instructions. I couldn’t even tell you any of their names, save for annoying LaRacer, and only because I will never forget the guy that had a crush on a cut scene…
We don’t even see their faces, just their backsides… I just don’t see how this even registers as an issue.
I cannot be more happy to read that MM, I had identified you as master of cars info wish list but not as a community manager. I hope NDA will allow you more communication on the forum about players concerns.
For nearly a decade now (maybe more, I’m getting old!), Max has been doing this for free, and now they’re paying him to hear your feedback (maybe one or two other things as well). Point is, we should have the utmost faith in him as a player-facing community manager, and honestly, couldn’t be happier T10 and PG are finally rewarding a FORZA Community member with the opportunity to run it his way.
I expect him to remain engaged w/ this community, and I hope we get to see him in this - or expanded roles w/in T10 and PG for a long, long time. We’re a lucky community - with representation coming directly from a guy that enjoys and understands this community from the inside.
We are extremely lucky to have this kind of representation. Let’s not take it for granted.
since the game is basically complete there’s not much to be done in relation to the cast but one thing that in my humble opnion to make the cast more memorable would be to ditch the generic cutscenes with them, it would cost a lot more but do like FH1 have mocap or computer animation give the characters a FACE you can relate to the voice and have them make gestures and all that.That’s why even after all these years i remember DAK, RAMONA,ALLI HOWARD, HALE, DARIUS FLINT,DUKE and his show crash max and how they were introduced and their trash talk before races and banter after they lost and their respective driving styles and cars with some prefering off road while others high tech cars.All that was lost since FH2 wich have only like 2 cutscenes with only 1 forgetable character but that’s just me and it would go a long way to make me invested in the story of this festival music and fast cars
None of the characters in 4 particularly bothered me. Unless you count the AI/GPS. Indeed, I would say they’re by and large as equally forgettable as the characters in 2 and 3.
Honestly, I can do without all the stories and characters. Just give me the list of things that need to be accomplished without all the cut scenes and other time wasters. While they may be cute the first time, they get really old after awhile.
I’d definitely be up for seeing the return of Ben Green from FH2. Hold up mate, you missed a checkpoint!
Although that line only played consistently on the 360 version of the game, so people might not be so familiar with it. But yeah, he was pretty cool, and from the best game of the series of course
I can sum my response up to one statement: I turned off voice chat in FH3 and FH4 two years ago.
The daycare element didn’t get super common in either game until early 2019. I don’t care to smoke four or five no-driving players all in X class Cents with an S2/998 F50 GT with a 20 second gap to second, then be called racial slurs (among other things), ironically enough none of which actually apply to me, after all of them DNF. The Horizon series broke loose with FH4, then E L I M I N A T O R was crammed in and for a short while the game became ForzaNite. Ever since then it just continued rolling down the mountain. I haven’t been on FH4 for several months now. You gotta realize FH4 and FH5 are marketed towards those 17 and younger. Now, the S T U N T M O D E that was added to FH4 some time ago idk where the idea for that came from. Also, not to mention… the L E G O E X P A N S I O N. I enjoyed Fortune Island simply because I like rallying… but a majority of my time spent in the past two years Forza-wise has been painting. I race in DiRT Rally 2.0; I shamelessly advertise my designs on Forza. Well, except for FH3. There’s still some real troopers willing to run 3+ lap Goliath on there occasionally. Nonetheless, even on FH3 there’s people with the most basic Spoder and Batman designs that have always blown my liveries out of the water. That’s been going on since I bought the game in 2016. I guess there’s never really been a huge number of race livery fans on Horizon. Ya know, it’s the streets, and all? Always plenty of kiddos riding walls and slamming into the barrier on turn one. :')
EDIT: Perhaps I should clarify how all that ties into storylining an open world racing game: this isn’t NFS. Whenever story dialog came up in FH3 and 4, I never paid attention. FH2 was so-so. FH1 was killer. I don’t know why… just seems like I had more of a perceived connection to the characters because there were fewer of them. That, and… there weren’t a hundred of them. I’ve not cared for what any character had to say in either FH3 or 4, I expect the same for FH5 (which I won’t be buying until I know for sure I’ll be able to import all my designs from FH3 since T10/PG/Microsoft/whoever decided not to fix the FH4 import issue (which remains to this day). Having a ton of characters just leads to trashy content for all of them, instead of a few really good characters. Now… if you’ve a low attention span it’s no big deal. Me, I don’t have a great one but I pay attention to what people say (most of the time). That being said, bear in mind most kids <17 nowadays have the attention span of a house fly.
I dont even feel these games have a story. More so an atmosphere of eternal festival. As such l dont really care about the ‘characters’. It would be great if most of them didn’t seem to be stunted at the level of 10 year olds. But also for me there are 20 other concerns before this.
I did always like Kiera for some reason.
I found the various stories in 4 to be so cringe-worthy, superficial and half-hearted and a lot of that was down to the cheesy wooden characters. As bad as these are they don’t come close to the detestation I have for the radio DJ’s! Scott Tyler being the pinnacle of my loathing, just way too try-hard and annoying.
