Don’t get me wrong, I actually love Forza Horizon 5 and think it’s the best of them all. But did you seriously release the game in this state?
we still have many people who can’t even start the game (thankfully, my friends and I can start it. We all use the Steam version)
the servers are still unacceptable and unstable as hell, we can’t even play together for 10 minutes
traffic and other players are invisible 90% of the time if connected
skill chains are impossible due to the disconnects, horizon solo is the only solution
mostly defunct clubs since they demand an old, buggy and discontinued Xbox app on PC
How on earth did you think it’s a good idea to release the game with these major flaws? The multiplayer, one of the main aspects of the game, is unplayable for most of the players and I simply can’t play with my friends. Neither can they play with anyone else. What makes me sad about it: We had early access that showed you these problems. And yet that’s how the game comes out.
Was that how you really wanted to present Forza Horizon 5 on Launch Day? And I’m not even talking about the many smaller bugs.
I think people complaining about load times should be thankful that they even let you play on your decade old Xbox. Either get an SSD or a Series S/X and stop complaining. Honestly I’m annoyed that people are still playing on the old HDD consoles because it slows down my online loading. In solo the loading is instant.
You gonna get the new Xbox into stores or make chips out of thin air, perhaps you can increase manufacturing has well or maybe buy us a new one when you get your chip problem and supply issue resolved.
There is no shortage. You are seeing scalpers. It’s extremely easy to get a Series X if you actually look for them and download in stock apps. It took me 1 week or actually trying to get one at msrp from Walmart. My buddy just got one too. Same story.
And there is really no shortage in SSDs. There are tons of them on sale right now. Buy yourself an nvme ssd and an enclosure for a total of 100 bucks and plug it into your Xbox One (not the Series S or X).
Honestly I don’t know how anyone games on the HDD. I had a One X before the Series X for FH4 and I still used an SSD. Fast travel is instant. Loading is instant. Car swapping instant. You don’t need to have a Series X to load fast, just need to have something that isn’t a 5400rpm hdd.
Again though. There is no shortage. Stop accepting that narrative. Easy to buy a Series X (super duper easy to get the Series S) in the US if you try.
Easier said then done, bucko. Getting your hands on an Xbox Series X is still nigh impossible to those who can’t spend every waking hour trying to get one.
I had FH4 installed on the internal drive of my Xbox One S. It worked fine at first, but eventually started getting map loading errors that increased in frequency over time - the map textures would start glitching / disappearing, and then the car would come to a full hard stop while it loaded. That got worse over time. So I moved it to a fast external SSD, which helped but never got rid of the problem completely.
FH5 is doing the same thing from day one.
I don’t know how fast the maps are loading for games - as far as I can tell, there was absolutely no difference in the pregame screens from playing it on the HDD to the SSD. But those depend on more people than just me.
I assume there is something going on with the game and the One S, bad optimizations of some sort. This is the sort of thing that should not be happening - my laptop where the graphics have to be turned all the way down to play either at least doesn’t do the tearing. If anyone could suggest a fix that wasn’t buying a hard to get new Xbox, that would be great. I intend to do that at some point, but this will probably remain a device that is used for a while.
The game was designed to work on ALL xb1 & series s/x consoles so it should work on them all, regardless of age. Microsoft would love it if we all spent many $$$$$'s every few years on a new console, but that is not going to happen.
Not everybody has the money right now to buy next gen consoles, which is why a lot still play on the older gen ones. I agree that the newer gen is better for loading times and stuff, but unless people can get higher paying jobs, it’s not their fault their console is slow. Go easy on them. Also, SSD’s aren’t cheap either. At least high memory ones. And this game requires a lot of space. Once again, it boils down to money issues. And I partly agree on the shortage thing. While yes, both consoles are in abundance, only the series s is currently the easiest to get. You just got lucky and people haven’t been targeting the stores in your area yet.
At the least, it was clear to you that early access was debug phase. I guess they ignored experience of FH4 concerning the quantity of bugs at release. I prefer to consider that option than the one they considered that the FH4 release was ok to reproduce. End of the day, globally, FH5 release is following very closely the one of FH4 scaling up with PC related issues.
Personally, I consider that not fixing issues inherited from FH4 copy/pastes and not being clear on the possible/expected issues regarding early access can be tagged with shame. Nevertheless again, having in mind the FH4 release, no surprise.
I am ultimately frustrated by the disregard of thousands FH fans of racing in opened world who did get zero improvement and even major regressions on the features they love to play.
The popups like messages urging you to play this or that are the most annoying addition to the game from my point of view. We already had to put with the wheelspins and clothes stuff and blablabla and here is a new annoying thing to ignore …
UX/UI. UI ( User interface ) is super shiny, I don’t like it but ok, the UX ( User Experience / scenarios to access and achieve actions ) looks as if it had been designed so that players spend the longest time possible in menus and watching scenes rather than driving cars. No lesson learnt from previous FH again despite they did copy paste the skip button for the feature imported from FH4. Just why all the newly added intermediate stuff has not followed the same rule ?
Anyway, all FH players are aware of it, nothing will be made to improve players experience all that count is selling the game so that we can expect fixes only for the issues impacting influencers/youtubers etc and of course for issues related to sub-contracted things like car models.
Concerning the legacy devices, they should have been clearer on the experience the game would provide. that’s where a gamepass trial can help by allowing to test the game before buy.
If you expect something to be fixed or want to follow fixes, don’t forget to log ticket and follow the list of known issues. If your issue is not there, call for friends to log more tickets. Don’t forget guys from support are not players, they need to know the scenario to reproduce the issue, “online is not working” won’t get to the known issues list, 'I am using PC with config …, my network stats are … and when I click the button YYY I get the message ZZZ" has much more chances to reach the list and get fixed.