I like a lot about Forza Horizon 4. I like the updated physics, the fantastic graphics, and the expanded car collection (despite the lack of Toyota). However the more I play, the more I can’t help but think: Horizon 3 was just plain a better game.
Horizon 3’s mentality of your fun, your way was brilliant, and it left a ton of ways for the user to create their own fun in the end game. Custom championships where it was actually worthwhile creating your own car restrictions. A rivals mode that you could actually sink your teeth into. A superior online experience. All of that on top of the fact that there were more races in Horizon 3. Yes yes, I know you can do custom routes in Horizon 4, but without custom championships they just turn into one off novelties, and the lack of starting positions is baffling, especially in some particular areas of the map (eg it is impossible to make an all tarmac race through the ruins in the top left of the map, despite looking like an amazing road race course).
Don’t get me wrong, the community championships can be fun, and I’m even ok with the fact that exclusive cars are behind them, but I have a hard time imagining ANYONE who will be happy with the series 7 updates. It’s ok to pull me out of my own fun for a bit, but to be so demanding of how I play this game is the antithesis of the reason why I love Forza Horizon in the first place. The game remains stagnant, you are just updating the service.
I know that what I want specifically updated isn’t shared by the entire community, but I know we are all tired of these service updates being passed off as game updates.
Maybe it’s to late for Horizon 4, but please, when you start the planning stages for horizon 5, focus on making a great game, not a great service. If at next years E3 you announce Horizon 5 and are speaking more “game as a service” type language, I will steer clear of your franchise. It seems obvious to me that the game as a service mentality is destroying the core experience, and committing company resources away from real improvements.
Please speak for yourself, dude. I actually like seasons and new seasonal events. Call it “as a service” or whatever you like, I think it is cool to have regular new events that make me want to log in each week. Without them, I would be long gone. And putting 3 random races together and call it “championship” is not content, it is lazy. This way you could put in superchampionships with 4 random races and world championships with 5 races, mix it all like crazy and you have content for hundreds of years.
But most importantly, do not use “WE” unless you somehow have measured all the opinions of all players.
Thank you
P.S.: I am looking forward to the update 7 content. Not sure if I like it, but i look forward to it and actually TEST it myself before ranting.
I actually like the seasonal championships, and seasons would be great if you got to choose your own in offline mode, but you can’t because the game designer is a fan of torturing the player base with their “way to tame to make a difference but still annoying when you’re trying to tune cars” winter for no good reason whatsoever.
These features do not replace the content that was dropped between Horizon 3 and 4 though.
I bought into the Horizon series because it sold me on the idea of having my fun my way. The seasonal championships went against that mentality, but they were tolerable because they were quick and easy to complete. Now with the series 7 updates, PG is dictating “You want the new cars in this game you paid for? Well f your real life schedule, you take three days off from playing this game and you’ll miss out on this exclusive car.”
Meanwhile the “make my own fun” content, the stuff that I actually bought the game for, has completely dried up, with no news or hope of improvement in sight. I played Horizon 3 from launch to the launch of Horizon 4. But I’m already struggling to log into Horizon 4. It’s just so discouraging to go from a nearly unlimited endgame powered by my own creativity to such a restrictive endgame in 4. The worst part is, Horizon 4 is SO close to achieving everything Horizon 3 did and much more. The Devs just need to stop expanding this seasonal content, and instead work on helping us unlock our own fun.
Those of us that like rivals and championships are already long gone. I don’t object to having content added weekly to extend the life of the game but the game was already on life support when it launched by removing previous modes and content. Casual gamers aren’t going to keep this series alive. It’s the gamers that have been there since day 1 that do and by removing what we loved about the game means we have very little reason to hang around. T10 learned from FM7 but so far it seems PG has their fingers in their ears and refuse to accept they messed up. That will be their downfall.
The Route Creator offers more of a ‘creativity-fueled make-your-own-fun endgame’ option than repeating a handful of existing races and calling it new content. You can still do the latter in FH4, too, of course, it just won’t give it a meaningless “Championship” label for you.
With no leaderboards to set times on there’s no point in doing them. Without championships to complete and no rivals/leaderboards to set times in there’s no long term interest for me. I don’t care about MP so without the things I like doing there’s no point playing.
What’s hilarious is your total ignorance of why people other than yourself play these games. All you do when anyone has a legitimate complaint is to be as condescending as possible. We get it, you like what they’ve done. Guess what? Lots of people don’t and their opinions are just as important as your. If you see a topic that you don’t agree with - don’t post in it. Pretty simple concept that even you should be able to figure out.
This. I’ve seen complaints where the same championships show up again yet people complain that’s what they want ALL the time, I did championships for the achievement in H3 and never did them again. I prefer the H4 way of doing championships, I get something for doing them.
Imagine there would be a three-race-championship behind every starting-point and for winning the championship you would get an exclusive car. You could play in your own pace, get the reward and PG is not forcing you to play the way they want you to play.
I understand the feeling of being rewarded and I like it too. I also like a challenge - and a reward. I don’t want get gifts all the time. But let me play in my own pace, don’t force me to play like in f2p-mobile-games. In these games you have to play, because you are needed as an opponent for whales. This isn’t the case in FH4, so why aren’t we the big boss in a game (!) we payed for (!) to play (!) with it? Image, you are 5 years old, have a LEGO race car and week by week a LEGO manager says: “Play with your car for 6.3 minutes and I give you a new yellow helmet for your Minifig. But if you don’t do it, you will never get the yellow helmet. Play now!!!” It’s interessiting that we like being treated this way by PG …
Instead of making us want to play them, they pay us a car for playing it. I don’t get that design approach. This is not for the players, this is for good numbers …
@Ti Hsien I thought the Route Creator would fill that endgame creativity gap as well, but the implementation has been terrible, particularly in the way routes are stored and shared. The community challenges have been great, but outside of that it’s a cesspool of cheats and quick money schemes. I’m just not motivated to create my own because without custom championships I just don’t feel like the time spent creating is worth the emotional payoff, just like with custom car restrictions.
@Archie Tulip I get that, I really do, and I have no desire to remove the seasonal championships. But why not both? Seriously, why are custom championships so hard? I don’t need wheelspins or any prizes other than the cash for races. Why does Horizon 4 have to be so restrictive about how I choose to race my cars?
What I do have an issue with is PG doubling down on what are for some, anti-fun time sinks, and moving further away from the freedom that Horizon 3 enabled that made it such a great game. If we had both I wouldn’t be complaining about the series 7 update. But here I am, I’ve been asking “What happened to our freedom of play?” since day one, making forum posts, sending in tickets, only to get complete radio silence from PG on the subject back. Now this update roles out and it feels like a giant middle finger to me and players like me.
I would like Bugs and content fixes before anything…
I have been playing since day one, the last couple months I have been playing less and less pretty much just logging in to grab whatever the seasonal unlocks were… have not even logged in for that the last couple weeks (doesn’t help that I wasn’t interested in the prelude or Nissan last week) can’t imagine this new thing is going to bring me back.
Don’t get me wrong I want the Capri but I already know I am not going to 100 percent everything for the month so no use stressing over it. I got plenty of other games to play.
Both would be great but I wouldn’t play championships that weren’t seasonal. have a feeling custom championships will be coming though.
I agree H3 was a great game but after the release of H4 I have no need for it. I get everything I want and need from H4 and am really looking forward to the new update.
I very highly doubt that without major fan uproar, this will happen. If it was going to happen, why hasn’t it happened already, or at least been talked about?
I get where you’re coming from. We have lots of processing power on the new Xbox One X that should be utilized in such a way that obviates the need to rely on the Studio’s “service” version of fixed weather where our sessions are constantly being disconnected for lack of activity such as playing in solo races. I appreciate the seasons, but the it could just the same have been implemented in the user version where we have the ability to select how long each of the seasons last on our own running copy of the game. I think they took the easy way out of on this by creating a service version that rely heavily on server-side rendering. But I hope they’ll iron that one out and not follow the way of the office suite of applications that have all been turned into services. But I totally see your point and agree with you 95%.
You can create a custom adventure for you and your convoy that is any season at any time, and includes the stupid freeroam rush events so you’re free to roam around. There just isn’t much to do or motivation to do it.
It is also possible to play this game without a server connection. Season will be based on system clock.
There is literally no reason why a player shouldn’t be able to pick their own season when choosing to play offline.