It’s not even about the map, for me, it’s that I’m just tooling around maybe heading to a particular event I want to do or smashing boards and the game (FH5 in this instance, but it was true in FH4 as well), is constantly interrupting me with random shit - barn finds, adventure unlocks, Forzathon or Arcade or whatever the fuck. Just let me do my thing for a little while! Horizon should be a perfect podcast game, but it’s not because it just won’t shut up. It’s petrified of losing your attention for even a second.
I don’t disagree with anything you said, and I think 5 is markedly worse in that regard. I generally don’t even listen to the radio anymore in 5 because it seems like after every single song I have to hear the obnoxiously happy DJ talk about my amazing feats in the game or new events that have popped up.
One thing I thought was funny / disgusting is that if a skill song comes on the radio and you change stations a little message comes up on your screen asking you to please change back to the other station.
I didn’t make that up. That’s a real thing that happens. That’s some kind of audacity, and proves your point that the developers are desperate to hold your attention and make sure you’re doing things the way that their myriad focus groups and empty suits in management told them you would enjoy the most.
I mean, who would intentionally want to miss out on 4 minutes of double skill points? The mind reels with confusion!
It’s the same kind of developer mentality that infected id Software when they made Doom Eternal, which feels like a game designed by a focus group full of people with attention deficit disorder. That game is unplayable for me, but I still enjoy Forza Horizon 5, which gives you all the freedom you want, even if you’re inundated with options.
“Would you like this car delivered to your location?”
-Tom
That’s is such a nice option! I don’t think they had that in earlier Horizon games, right? Only added in Horizon 5? Or maybe it was added in 4? Before that it used to be such a pain to switch cars, you had to first go to a festival or a house.
I was dunking on the game’s dumb interface. After you’ve confirmed the car you want to swap to, Forza Horizon 5 throws in one final and utterly unnecessary confirmation dialogue because “WTF Playground?” Yep, the same people who force useless binds onto your controller and who can’t imagine you would change radio stations away from double xp also decided you needed one last chance to decide, “No, I don’t want to swap cars even though I just went through the seven specific steps required to swap cars.”
-Tom
EDIT: Oops, I’m in the Forza Horizon 4 thread, so everything I’ve written might be moot.
That was in 4 as well, so it’s not a moot point.
I’ll say that with everything I noted that irks me, 4 and 5 are still my two favorite racing games ever. I just hope they pull back on the in-your-face, check-this-out, no-play-it-this-way nonsense that’s creeping ever further into the franchise.
I don’t know, if anything, the games seem to be slanted the other way to me. As in, play it however you want, here’s more options so you can do what you want to do. It irks me because I want them to tell me what to do more.
I like the DJs, especially Amy Simpson, with her relentless enthusiasm towards the most asinine aspects of the game. It is endearing. Different strokes for different folks etc.
I have a silly newbie question, but does the game work properly if you aren’t subscribed to xbox live on the console? Is it lacking a lot of content if you can’t MP? Same question for Horizon 3 ;0
I don’t know for sure what features are missing. I’m guessing only multiplayer and cooperative features. I know you can play the games offline once you have them setup with the latest version. I’m guessing you won’t be able to download other people’s liveries, tune setups, or buy things from the auction house. Or run races in the open world that require other players. But that should still leave you to be able to play 95% of the game.
I’ve been playing the demo, and I love the driving sensation. Perfect arcade feeling in this post Sega Rally world.
I ordered the CD of 3 and am gonna bite on 4 which is on sale right now, I am guessing!
I hope that Disc of 3 included the DLC (which is no longer for sale, just like 3 not being on sale except on disc). The Hot Wheels DLC has you go to an island with these huuuuuuge hot-wheels-like tracks built on top of the ocean that really give me vertigo. Very cool.
Sadly, not, and there is no way to get them apparently, but finding the lucky unused redemption code :(
I got Horizon 3 in the mail yesterday, and while I enjoyed 4, I can’t get enough of 3.
The engine is a bit more rough than 4, but boy, that Australian environment is gorgeous.
It seems as if they wanted to crowd the view with tons of elements at all time in 4, while they let the wide spaces express themselves sometimes in 3.
Also the harsh south hemisphere weather is fearsome.
I also like that the actual races are more directed than in 4, where you can just do whatever as long as you pass over those checkpoints flags. In 3 there is an audience on the border, and it’s protected so I have to be much more careful with my driving.
While Horizon 3 doesn’t try to hide its loadings, I prefer its restrained presentation to the corny one of 4 and its horrible, ever present, human avatars. I even prefer the slightly lowered angled cockpit view of 3.
I’m really sad I won’t be able to experience the expansions. Oh well!
I reached the Winter Season in Forza 4 meanwhile.
I was disappointed to understand finally what it meant that the game was limited in offline mode: most season events are online only.
Now the Winter season is a whole other can of worms on its own: for some reason it seems that every category of race got a “cheat car” (usually looking barely like any of the other cars in the category) and the CPU in that car will always win the race with a few seconds to spare. I was playing on highly qualified difficulty for a mild challenge, so I decided to lower it and it still holds true.
All this to say: indeed, Horizon 3, vaaaaastly superior.
Interesting, thanks for your perspective.
See this is why I didn’t like Dirt 5 - it was clear that the ‘border’ between the audience was in fact an event horizon beyond which reality did not extend. The effect was that of playing bumper cars, since there was no possibility of your car extending beyond these imaginary walls, and in fact the ‘best possible’ way to play Dirt 5 was to bounce off the walls like some kind of motorsports based chemistry experiment gone mad.
It’s an interesting give and take. The original Forza Horizon was much more directed with narrow courses you couldn’t leave. I felt a sense of freedom with 2, 3, 4, 5 getting progressively more “wide open”, but I agree it ended up being a mixed bag since sometimes you want to be more directed on a course. The games all still have a mixture of the two, but they have been tending toward more and more freedom, even in individual races, not just in the open world.
It’s tough to design!
I was disappointed by the rails in 3 at first, but the open design in 4 got some issues: one which is that any destructable prob you touch takes 10km/h out of your speed, and a wall bump takes off a whole 40 or 50km/h each time. It can lead to interesting trade offs, but for some hairpins, just rushing in at max speed and getting a full stop from the collision is more interesting than breaking!
Given that irl damage would be show stoppers, 3 is forgiving but asks me to do clean races 100% of the time to be competitive, which is a win-win for the game: I don’t get the immersion blown by the super walls, and I still get crowds on the sides, which is quite a big mood maker.
I really wished I could still get the DLCs for 3, because there are a couple of cars I’d love to have in that game.
How do seasons work in offline mode? You still cycle through the seasons, even though you don’t get the seasonal events? I never thought about how that would work offline.
The seasons work even without live, although I have no idea what’d happen if my internet went down for a week! Forza 4 seasons would be the lesser of my concerns then, probably XD
It is my bad, I didn’t phrase it properly: a lot of the seasonal events championships and races are xbox live only, which locks out a bit of the content. I have not seen such locks in 3 yet.