I thought about this thread while being frustrated by the AI blatantly cheating for the umpteenth time in last week’s cross-country Trial, and then this week’s amusingly broken rollout of the repeat series made me want to dig it up. Given everything we’ve seen over this game’s lifetime, I think @Runoff1999 has it right: the engine has built up a large amount of technical debt over the years, which should probably be expected given how many new systems have been bolted onto it. The development team has been either unable or unwilling to do a thorough house-cleaning on the engine when making each game, and as a result we’ve seen certain issues persist for a solid decade now (like the glitched car thumbnails that have been a problem since at least FH3). And once the main development of a game is completed, I’d imagine that most of the team is reassigned to development of the next title, leaving a comparatively small group left to handle bugs that crop up during the game’s active lifespan.
It’s obvious where the priorities lie, given what actually gets added and fixed. There’s enough of an art team to work on modeling new cars added to the game (at least those that weren’t modeled years earlier and held back for later release), and in turn a lot of the issues that do get fixed in patches are asset-related, like missing textures on a certain car’s trim. There are technical fixes for immediate new issues, like this week’s broken Playlist completion, but beyond that there’s little to no effort put into addressing many long-lived bugs that have persisted across multiple titles. Most frustrating of all are the clearly-documented issues that are labeled as “won’t fix,” despite affecting much or even all of the playerbase. Even on a smaller scale you have certain errors that would be trivial to fix, things like that missing Explorer experience in FH4, or the numerous infoboxes for cosmetic items incorrectly stating that they could be obtained via Wheelspin. But for whatever reason no one bothers to make them right.
Honestly the thing that frustrates me the most is how even when we get a response to certain issues, it often comes across as tone-deaf. We all know how bad the AI can be in this game, and in particular how it’s straight-up broken in many Trials. I still remember early on when players were complaining about the AI weaving drunkenly across the track at the start of Trial races, and the official response was along the lines of, “Well changing the AI could affect balance, so we’re not willing to do that.” Um…you’re running a live-service racing game. It is literally your job to patch the AI if it’s misbehaving, and yet you refuse to do so. I’ve never played the Gran Turismo games, but I follow content creators who do, and nearly every major update they talk about has patch notes that include some sort of AI tweaking. Because again, that’s the developers’ job. Hell, GT7 even tweaks car balance to encourage more competitive racing in certain classes. Meanwhile FH5 releases new cars that are terrible no matter what class they’re upgraded to, and no effort is ever made after the fact to adjust their performance or PI values.
I want to make clear that I’m not blaming individual developers for this. I’m sure there are plenty of talented and dedicated people working on the Horizon series. But I also believe that they’ve been put in an impossible situation by the higher-ups, one that doesn’t allow for the type of active development that this game sorely needs. The fact that an update like this past week, with universal bugs that would have been instantly caught in a few minutes if they had been tested on consumer hardware before launch, was allowed to get through is proof positive of that. Horizon is a series with so much potential, but unless there’s a fundamental change in development philosophy, it’s never going to live up to it.