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It’d be a little ridiculous for them to consider those two modes as being “the center of the game” when they have to effectively force people into playing them. I’ll appreciate the efforts they’ve made to make them more palatable, but the fact remains that a majority of the playerbase were not playing those modes before the playlist was implemented (and I’d wager a good number still don’t now).



See above for the different take. As for the 2nd part, I’ve never once said that the playlist wasn’t about the rewards (because what else would it be for?); I’m just raising the concern over mandating multiplayer game modes that players either cannot and/or don’t want to play in order to acquire even a fraction of said rewards. Either an alternative event or optional AI could solve that issue completely, but people on these forums would rather tell others their concerns don’t matter while mocking their alleged want of “getting the cars for no effort” (which nobody is even arguing, so I’m not sure why anyone is bringing that up).

I understand that not everyone will be impacted by, or may have different opinions on the severity of, a given issue but that doesn’t justify callously dismissing those complaints without at least considering their potential validity. Except that’s exactly what’s been happening across 43 pages. It’s lightweight disgusting



No guessing about it, I’m not at all amused at the choice to suddenly require MP modes to achieve any level of rewards that were previously available without that mandate. Even if not considered a “top prize”, those types of rewards were entirely possible to acquire without having to play through the toxicity that is FH MP. Also, this isn’t about rewards not being “at all for” me, as I immsensly enjoy collecting rewards regardless of how trivial; I just think the effort necessary to unlock a reward should be equal to the reward, itself (which is why I avoid ranked adventures as the effort needed absolutely dwarfs the benefits from any potential reward). By necessitating MP modes to gain the 80% needed to unlock *insert reward here*, the balance has shifted heavily in favor of more effort for no marked gain. This effectively makes the end result feel less rewarding, overall.

I guess I’m just wondering why effectively forcing their MP modes onto players was in any way required for to complete their playlist feature. I don’t mind the playlist, per se, just the way it has been implemented so far (although it is admittedly getting better, even if slightly).

Edited by user Friday, April 12, 2019 8:55:36 PM(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified

Now I know you guys are probably going to flame me up for saying this but I'm new to horizon and I'm really not that good at the game but I love the idea of unlocking new cars for the horizon playlist and it adds more of a reason to continue playing the game but I can not beat these avatars on expert is there anyway it could be done on just above average difficulty?

I hear ya, man. I find Expert to be pretty much the butter zone. I can beat it, but not consistently. Meanwhile, long term series veterans are complaining that it's not challenging enough, and want them to make it even harder to unlock cars. Seriously, guys; turn off all your assists and play wearing boxing gloves or something, if you want a challenge that badly. Some of us are barely getting by as it is. Not all of us have been playing for 10+ years.

And don't get me started on Online Adventure.

I was about where you are when the game came out; average to above average. There are probably a few cars I missed early on, because I wasn't even bothering to try on Expert.I'm probably not the guy to tell you how to get better. Keep practicing, don't be afraid to increase the difficultly if you find you're winning consistently, that sort of thing.

But try not to sweat it too much. I can count on one hand the number of must-have exclusives that I actually use regularly, so you're not missing out on a whole lot.

The main reward i want this time around is the bunny ears. Too bad its probably a S2-998 co-op race against unbeatables.

On the off chance someone had the same issue as me highlighted above... I logged a ticket and the 2 missing cars were gifted to me. This suggests it wasn't an intended consequence. Panic over!

I don't really care for the cosmetics (still have the default clothes I picked out at the beginning of the game) and I already have the Crown Vic. I still don't like the Festival Playlist.

It's not about the rewards. It's about compromising the design of the game to drive a metric that does nothing for the players. If they're willing to do it now, them they'll be willing to keep doing it next time.

I don't think anyone can be blamed for being "bad" at online multiplayer, its the wild west out there. Last adventure my team was clearly going to win, until I was shoved out of a checkpoint by my own teammate, dropping me to last place and ruining our points. Thanks team!

Edited by user Saturday, April 13, 2019 10:52:53 AM(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified

See i getting the same problem, but for some reason im going down percentage every week. last week i couldnt reach 60% , now this week and i cant even hit 50% and ive done all the events. wth is this forza? how do i claim all the cars the game has denied me? im missing the 2019 Z4, 65 GTO, m3 gtr, and now i cant get my mercedes gt4 2018. Oooff forza.

I'm having a similar issue, as well.
Thought i was the only one, up until i found this thread and some vidoes about it..

Unable to reach the peak percentage in order to get the now 80% cars, though i can usually get the 50% ones alright.
I've finished or golded nearly everything on the list from series 7 til now, (save the Hudson, since i was busy) and am only managing at most, high 50's to low 70's on all expert/unbeatable..and all but one daily challange here and there; to which, it shouldn't bar me from reaching anywhere near 80% with everything else done.

Honestly, i'm not terribly annoyed..but it is still extremely frustating when you put in the required work, to the point where you can't do much else, and have it unobtainable at the end of the week.

Exactly this. Far too many AAA games, including FH4, are heavily compromised in terms of good, fun, and rewarding game design in order to create more opportunities for DLC/microtransaction profits and to cheaply extend the game playtime/boost player numbers without adding any real content.

I can think of a lot of examples of this right off in FH4. Game progression is completely out of whack with deluging players with goodies at the very beginning to get them hooked on the game, and then suddenly having that dry up after the prologue and quickly degenerate into a grind. On top of that, race payouts are actually quite low compared to wheelspins and even worse without VIP, not so subtly encouraging players to spend more money on the VIP accelerator. Wheelspins seem like they were originally intended to be part of a microtransaction system with the high credit payouts and tons of exclusive cars.

Locking exclusive cars behind online challenges, time gates and wheelspins is another compromised design since none of those really reward player skill in any way and just serve to drag out the game (keep those gamepass subscribers paying) and force players to log in regularly (make those player participation numbers look good) and play online (encourage players to buy Xbox Gold) so they won't be punished with missing out on a car.

The idea of the festival playlist and weekly challenges in and of itself isn't a problem, but locking exclusive content behind these events is. I don't mind having new challenges each week and a reward for completing a large percentage of them, but as soon as I'm being compelled to do so or I'll be punished by missing out on exclusive content it becomes compromised design since it's not respecting me as a player or a paying customer.

Sure, the devs have said that exclusive content will be available again in the future, but that doesn't address the core problem with the current exclusive content. For missing one week of play, I'm not put back one week of progress. I'm put back months, a year, maybe permanently. There's no guarantees of if/when a particular piece of exclusive content will ever be available again, punishing players for missing out more than rewarding players who could participate.

Overall, I continue to play FH4 because I enjoy the core gameplay of collecting, driving, racing and tuning cars (and I would like to get more into the photography side as well). However, FH4 is very much a compromised game that feels like it caters more to the desires of the devs/publishers than the players and I hope we see some changes in the future to make it more player-friendly like FM7 has done with unlocking exclusive content.

You're part of the problem then. By continuing to play a game you claim is compromised you're endorsing this behaviour.

If it really bothers you, you should stop playing and boycott all further iterations until the practice is stopped.

Of course that will never happens because it would require more effort than complaining.

That's because Online Adventure, #Forzathon, the track editor and now this new Festival Playlist were designed as after-the-end-game material, meant to prevent the players that have completed every single other thing from leaving, the answers to the question: "I finished Horizon 4, what now?"

Hence the playerbase's reactions being so radically different:
- the difficulty is too easy, or too hard;
- 80% completion is reached within a couple of hours, or never at all throughout the season;
- the new car looks nice but is uncompetitive, or it's the solution to all of your problems;
- the community challenge is effortless, or hopeless;
- opponents in playground games drive like seal pups, or clones of Ken Block;
- etc.
with no middle ground in sight...

I for one made sure to find and complete everything on the maps of both Great Britain and Treasure Island before chasing the current week's latest exclusive car. Free fast travel was a solid investment.

How is continuing to play a game I legitimately enjoy (in spite of its issues) being a part of the problem? The real problem is players who are bothered by it and say nothing, and also those who blindly defend the devs and dismiss valid concerns as complaining. If nobody speaks up about the issues with the game, things will most definitely not get better.

I speak up because I've played and enjoyed a lot of Forza games over the years and I don't like what this Games as a Service/mobile game mentality is doing to the franchise and how it's affecting the fundamental design of the game. If you legitimately think it makes the game better that's fine and I'd like to hear your arguments in favor of it, but if not, why are you wasting your energy to put me down and add nothing to the discussion?

Edited by user Sunday, April 14, 2019 7:51:15 AM(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified

I feel like horizon is more for like fun and light play I think they should let Motorsport be for the hardcore gamers

What part of what I said don't you understand? At least we know PG/T10 will be ok as long as they have people that will continue to play and purchase a game they claim is "compromised"

I couldn't care less what you do. If you enjoy the game , more power to you. Just stop getting on your moral high horse unless you're prepared to put your money where your mouth is.

Actually many of us how are forza veterans dont like horizon playlist at all. I have say on this topic earlier that playlist feature is not good because for some players reaching 80% is almost impossible or really hard and some people it's just boring chore that need to done if want to get new cars. I would like to personaly see somethink more challencing but i dont want new cars locked behind those kinda challenges. And i have feeling that seasonal PR stunts was more challencing before playlist while now seasonal PR stunts are barely higher than 3 star targets.

I am fairly new to FH 4 and the Forza ecosystem in general. I began playing FH 4 shortly before the playlist feature and was having good fun. When the playlists started, I noticed that to get any of the events 'golded' you have to go in there and complete it at the top level, or 'expert' driveatars which aren't the most difficult, but they might as well be.

A big thing I enjoyed about the normal game was the scalable difficulty, play until you beat the difficulty level and it prompts you to increase it if you want to. I think that principle should be followed with the playlist feature. If you complete it on 'average' difficulty maybe it could turn Bronze, 'highly skilled' then Silver and so on.

As it is at the moment, if you don't play at the uppermost difficulty level it doesn't even aknowledge that you done it. It shows 'not complete' even though in many cases I managed to complete them in both low and intermediate levels. I found that incredibly annoying and a disincentive to go through the playlist because, at the moment I haven't a hope in hell of getting even close to beating the expert level.

Expert is not the Uppermost level. In fact it is 2 levels down from Uppermost.

She mentioned that in the first paragraph.

Edited by user Tuesday, April 16, 2019 4:37:47 AM(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified

I don't like the "Expert"-prerequisite neither. Completion in 1st place on any difficulty should be enough to mark them "golden". "Expert" can be a tough or even impossible challenge for beginners, especially in Cross-Country races where the AI has advantages over the player. Co-op helps a lot but not everyone has access to someone to play with.
The Trial on "unbeatable" is fine because it's forced co-op and there are enough drivers to compensate the less experienced ones.

I'm often helping a long-time friend with "Expert" races (especially Cross-Country) because he isn't able to win some of those on his own. It's not a matter of lacking motivation or training - he simply can't do it. And I see no reason why such effort should not be rewarded. He needs way more dedication and time than I do to complete those tasks.

It's a tricky one. Many people like a game to have some element of challenge. I've been playing GT Sport and the circuit experiences would be hard for someone to score gold on if they can't beat expert drivatars in FH4. If you can't fairly quickly get gold on them all, it's going to really slow down progress in the game, as you get a free car when you get gold for all segments for one track, and a lot of credits on top of that. For me, it's set at a nice level. I sometimes get gold on my first attempt, others have taken me several attempts, but it never feels impossible. Some people would get gold first time every time and think it's all too easy. Others probably just can't get gold at all on some of them. BUT a big difference vs FH4 is failing to get gold doesn't stop you progressing. No matter how slow you are, you can grind out credits and buy any car, it will just take you longer. So I think that's the problem with FH4, the way that content is locked behind both time window and ability barriers. It's not a problem if they want to have challenges during specific time windows that require a certain level of ability, but all content should always be available to everyone at all times, if they're happy to put the time in. So the reward for the challenges should just make it quicker, either by giving out free cars or credits, they shouldn't be the only way to obtain content. My initial impression of GT Sport after the first few days of playing it is that it gets a large number of things like this right that Forza doesn't. It has some of its own niggles as well, but in terms of racing online, it does a massively better job of allowing people to quickly compete on a level playing field (and having all cars available to obtain all the time is part of that).

Most importantly, the GT series teaches entire generations of rookie players to drive with licenses/driving school/etc. The Forza series does not.

Edited by user Wednesday, April 17, 2019 12:43:41 AM(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified

The timed exclusivity (at least for an unknown amount of time until a certain reward comes up again) is the main reason I have this point of view. If the challenges would always be available I wouldn't see a problem with "Expert" difficulty as prerequisite. GT licenses on "gold" or challenges (for example the Nordschleife Mercedes challenge in GT4) were tough ones but with unlimited time they were fine. Beating them within 1 week, no chance - at least for me.

New cars in Horizon are the main drive for many players and having them locked behind a time-limited & for a good amount of people hard skill-check is something I was against from the beginning. Either time-limited or skill-check, both together ..."meh".

I gather from the information here that the only way to "complete" The Trial is to be an online player and play co-op. Is that correct? I don't have an online pass, so I just race all Seasonal challenges as Solo. I've been really frustrated with the seasonal events of "The Trial" because I've managed to beat the "Unbeatable Avatars" in the first race, but I can't get the game to advance me to the next even in the series of the three events. I thought there was a glitch in the game and there aren't any instructions on how to "Complete" certain challenges like The Trial. This thread is the first one I've found that seems to talk about it. So the best I can expect to achieve is about 68%, depending on the season? I've completed all of the challenges except for The Trial, and I'm guessing that the Challenge with the skull: Seasonal Playground (Winter Games, currently) is only accessible if one first completes all of the other Challenges, including The Trial?
It sure would be nice if there was a set of game guidance somewhere.

Unfortunately, the Trial and Playground Games are online only. If you don't have Xbox Live Gold, you will be unable to complete those challenges.