We are not fans of Forza Horizon 4’s Festival Playlist, introduced in Series 7. However, after a backlash from the community, it looks like Playground Games is exploring a patch to make it more palatable. The question remains though, is it enough to fix it?
According to the Forza Week in Review for March 22, the new patch will lower the 100% completion reward to just 80%. Sounds great right? Well, it still poses a problem and continues to force players to play the way PG wants you to play.
In order to get an 80% completion, you still need to participate in multiplayer events. This means you’re still relying on other people in order to complete the events.
The Luck of the Random Teammate Draw
For example, let’s look at the Trial. For the Autumn Season, players need to team up and beat another team of Drivatars on the unbeatable difficulty. You also need to turn up in an S2 998 class hypercar, which adds to the challenge just a bit.
In theory, completing this event seems like something rather straightforward. However, if you get put on a team of players that don’t understand what a co-op championship is, you’re out of luck. Over the weekend we tried the Trial six different times with similar results in each session.
While there were two or three players who raced cleanly, the others made the experience dreadful. When they were not ramming you to get a position, they were simply sitting in the road wait for the event to finish. Due to this, our team never achieved enough points to win the event, despite those who tried finding their way into the top five every race.
This makes the game downright frustrating, especially when you’re trying for a prize car.
While we can certainly appreciate PG listening to the community, this isn’t the answer. It still relies on the luck of the draw to win events. Also, it continues to alienate users with poor internet connections who can’t play the multiplayer portion of the game.
However, credit where credit is due. The new 80% figure means you can skip the time sink that is the Online Adventure along with a few of the dailies. In addition to this, PG said it would retroactively award prize cars too. So if you hit 85% in the Summer Season, you’ll still get the Porsche 914/6.
Our Solution
This leads up back to the question of how would we fix this? Well, as we previously mentioned moving the reward cars down to 25% and 50% is a good start. The 75% and 100% marks could then get credits, wheelspins, or Forza Edition cars to supplement.
We still think this is the ideal scenario that continues to make the game challenging, but not a chore.
Understandably, this might go against what PG is attempting to achieve though. As a result, another idea is to remove all the multiplayer content from the Festival Playlist except for the Rivals. It could then replace those events with single player championships or PR stunts.
Conversely, PG could also just add more events to the Playlist as a whole. This would allow players to have options to get to the 80% mark with both single and multiplayer events on tap.
Hopefully, PG continues to listen to its community and make further changes to the system. The Festival Playlist is something that can work in the long term, it just needs some help to get there.
Featured image courtesy of Casey.
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