What do you think the next Forza Horizon needs?

[Eunos_Cosmo]

Thoughts from the last few weeks of play:

• Allow filtering of the car list by TYPE of car (i.e. its purpose, street/rally/offroad etc). I've taken to painting my cars different colours according to their purpose, so I can recognise the street cars (navy blue/silver wheels) from the offroad (matte green/orange).
• Proper offroad suspension as a tuning option. Currently you have to put the same "rally" suspension on an Audi TT or a Baja truck.
• "Winter Tyres" are a silent switch as you go in & out of Winter. I was surprised as all hell to get in my 900pp Vette this week and find it was on Rally tyres. I'm guessing this car was built for winter racing and it's been put on rally tyres automatically for autumn.
• Sort out the ranking of cars in the Eliminator. The Level 6 Subaru is slower across moorland than the Level 4 Subaru. The Level 4 Supra is slower than glacial erosion.
• Show the track map as an option in the pre-race menu screen
• Auto-filter the map based on the event type. i.e. "Complete 3 dirt scramble events", there should be a button press to take you to the map, pre-filtered to just show dirt scramble events.
• Longer races that aren't just the 4 blue-riband events. Seriously, every race being 3 minutes long isn't a challenge.

You reminded me of another grievance. When you hover over an event/course icon on the map, often the course details info box will partially or completely obscure the actual route of the course, if it's small. If it's instead a big route, then it goes off the visible extents of the map, and you cannot zoom out enough to see it! What's the point in displaying the route if you cannot see it? It's kind of crazy to me that some UI/UX designer saw this and said, "yep, that's exactly how we want it".

I don't know if this one is in my head or not...does anyone else get frustrated with the rewind feature? If I blow a braking zone for a corner (not uncommon, as I'm paranoid about the stupid drivatars dive-bombing me) and try to use the rewind feature, I feel like it more often than not rewinds to the exact point (or close to it) where I applied the brakes. While that sort of makes sense superficially, it really doesn't make sense when you think about it. So then you have to rewind further, only when you rewind a second time, it seems to go back much further to some seemingly arbitrary point in the past. Can anyone think of a legitimate reason to not have the rewind feature be implemented such that the player picks the exact moment to recall? For instance you would just "hold" rewind until you reach the spot you want, and press resume. Maybe this is some sort of memory limitation and the game saves discrete positions every 5-10 seconds rather than holding onto everything? I would buy that, but I hope they can improve this mechanic in the future, because it frustrates the hell out of me.

Level of care item: Cars are very clearly placed procedurally into decade based categories. Most often, this works fine. But does the Ferrari 512TR really belong in the 90s? Does the Acura Integra Type R belong in the 00s only and not the 90s at all? (it's borderline absurd that the Acura Integra, in LHD no less, is featured when the game is set in England, I digress) If there was a genuine level of care on display, the decade lists would be more carefully curated so that cars that straddle decades slot into the one(s) that make the most sense. Of course, if we could create our own car lists, and save/name them, I wouldn't care how the out-of-the-box categories are organized.

Related to level of care: Why are the car names handled so sloppily throughout the game? The font size is all over the place, the naming conventions are inconsistent (why do some cars display their model year and others not in the same interface?), and they don't even bother to provide unique names in the auction house browser. If you're lucky you get a model year to help you out, but that's not always the case. Some car names are shortened in arbitrary ways ("Caddy limo") depending on where you are seeing it. Could they really not design the UI in a way that can report the full names of the cars in all situations?

Similarly, why are the car thumbnails all over the place? Some cars are zoomed way out versus others (particularly jarring when you compare two vehicles next to each other which should be close to the same size) for no clear reason - at first I thought it was related to the size of the vehicle and scaling the image to fit some pre-defined rectangle, but the extents of the cars are also pretty inconsistent. Not even the angle of the car seems totally consistent - it leads me to believe that they are actually manually captured, which blows my mind. The rendering quality of the thumbnails is also pretty bad - shiny materials are rendered almost pure white and the exposure of the image itself isn't consistent either.

Here's another detail gripe: Why doesn't the game list the engine configuration of standard cars anywhere? As far as I can tell, it only lists the cars engine displacement. The only mention of engine type I've seen is within the engine swap menu. It feels conspicuously absent in a game like this.

Again, none of these things are really disruptive to gameplay, they just drive me nuts. Part of my job IRL is to communicate information in a clear, unambiguous way, with no duplicate or competing information, and with consistent graphics and consistent language. I don't think these things are unimportant, and many (most?) video games do an admirable job of it. Horizon 4 is not one of them.

 

[GilesGuthrie]

I switched Rewind off. It somehow never worked for me (probably exactly in the way you describe, actually), so I've been taking the extra 5% difficulty (or whatever it is) ever since.

Playing last night, I was able to really figure out how badly the frontal-impact-of-destructible-objects is implemented. You should be able to use the stone walls in a similar vein to a snow bank in rallying. If I am running the left side of the car through the wall, it should be pulling me left. Instead, it just slows the car down, as if the collision detection just detects "impact:front" and thinks "Good enough for me." So Horizon 5 needs to fix that.

 

[GilesGuthrie]

I would really like it if the devs sorted out their strategy for managing human:AI collisions. I'm fine with the current status where NPCs have a Scalextric like magnetic attraction to the road, and they largely ignore contact. But it's pretty galling for that to be the case while the AI can punt me into the middle of next week.

Also, AI really needs to learn when to give up on a corner.

 

[btccfan]

I would really like it if the devs sorted out their strategy for managing human:AI collisions. I'm fine with the current status where NPCs have a Scalextric like magnetic attraction to the road, and they largely ignore contact. But it's pretty galling for that to be the case while the AI can punt me into the middle of next week.

Also, AI really needs to learn when to give up on a corner.

Yes, in FM7 it's actually pretty easy to push a ai car off the track, whilst in FH4, it's almost impossible, feels like you hit a concrete wall.

 

[Eunos_Cosmo]

I would really like it if the devs sorted out their strategy for managing human:AI collisions. I'm fine with the current status where NPCs have a Scalextric like magnetic attraction to the road, and they largely ignore contact. But it's pretty galling for that to be the case while the AI can punt me into the middle of next week.

Also, AI really needs to learn when to give up on a corner.

Speaking of AI, does anyone else experience suicidal AI blowing through the highway barriers (outside of events) and driving into oncoming traffic on a regular basis? I'm guessing yes. Why do they do this? I really don't understand.

Also, PG, pal...buddy...please do not feature autoscrolling text on tuning menus next go around, yeah? Thanks. Maybe let the right thumbstick do the scrolling, manually.

 

[sesselpupser]

The next game needs a lot of work put into almost everything short of the graphics and physics, but I think for me the biggest one is stuff to do in free roam. Burnout Paradise had leaderboards for things like drifts, jump distance, air time and stuff and it was fun having impromptu competitions with people even if you were nowhere near each other because you'd get a message saying "xX_genericName_Xx beat your drift score", so why not let us compete on PR stunts and skill score? I'd also like more work put into Forzathon Live, just something like a counter to keep track of how many you've done or a contribution leaderboard, maybe a Horizon Life thing where you can unlock things other than Forza points just to get people to engage with it more, although obviously it'd also be good if Forzathon Live goals were reworked too.

And on a more general note, something to work towards once you've got all the cars would be good. Right now I play every Thursday for the 20-60 minutes needed to unlock the new car, last week I played a bit longer to do the five playground games team adventures to qualify to finally unlock my second Capri FE, if I had something to do that had some impact on basically anything I'd probably play it a lot more because I really like the game, I just don't have anything to do in it so I always just feel like I'm wasting time when I play it.

Also: some tighter paved roads for class D-A cars would be great. Driving a slow car around FH4 is so dull, like doing a lap of the Nürburgring in a Beetle, which has resulted in me building the cars I like out to S1/S2/X and there's basically no point in building a car for handling instead of speed.

 

[Eunos_Cosmo]

The next game needs a lot of work put into almost everything short of the graphics and physics, but I think for me the biggest one is stuff to do in free roam. Burnout Paradise had leaderboards for things like drifts, jump distance, air time and stuff and it was fun having impromptu competitions with people even if you were nowhere near each other because you'd get a message saying "xX_genericName_Xx beat your drift score", so why not let us compete on PR stunts and skill score? I'd also like more work put into Forzathon Live, just something like a counter to keep track of how many you've done or a contribution leaderboard, maybe a Horizon Life thing where you can unlock things other than Forza points just to get people to engage with it more, although obviously it'd also be good if Forzathon Live goals were reworked too.

And on a more general note, something to work towards once you've got all the cars would be good. Right now I play every Thursday for the 20-60 minutes needed to unlock the new car, last week I played a bit longer to do the five playground games team adventures to qualify to finally unlock my second Capri FE, if I had something to do that had some impact on basically anything I'd probably play it a lot more because I really like the game, I just don't have anything to do in it so I always just feel like I'm wasting time when I play it.

Also: some tighter paved roads for class D-A cars would be great. Driving a slow car around FH4 is so dull, like doing a lap of the Nürburgring in a Beetle, which has resulted in me building the cars I like out to S1/S2/X and there's basically no point in building a car for handling instead of speed.

There is at least a good deal more narrow paved roads in 4 compared to 3 or 1 (haven't played 2) but yeah, I agree. I have a 4ish mile custom route that is pretty fun for C-A class, but almost nothing is really fun for D class.

 

[AOS-]

Like many have said, there may be too much freedom. I liked the idea in principle as that made the game very accommodating for all types of car enthusiasts. We can go straight to playing the things we enjoy playing, and with the cars we like the most.

But at the same time, I also feel that having access to the fast cars right away also spoils the full experience as you've basically jumped to the end-game of cars. You don't give yourself that opportunity to work your way up from the small cars, because to most people, why would you want to drive any D or C class cars when you already have access to the Mosler and whatever low-priced powerful cars.

Perhaps the fix to this that creates significantly more room for content and extend the sense of progression is to show or notify the player that although you can play any event with just about any car class and division, there could be some sort of checklist to show all (if not a handful) of the possible class/division combinations you can enter with, and your progress. I didn't notice this when I first played, but having an event marked as completed because I finished it with a Class A Hot Hatch should also somehow say "hey you didn't complete this in a Class D Vintage Racer". I'm thinking maybe either allow all class/division combos to maintain that freedom of choice, or arbitrarily limit it to a handful of specific divisions while leaving the class range open.

Playing last night, I was able to really figure out how badly the frontal-impact-of-destructible-objects is implemented. You should be able to use the stone walls in a similar vein to a snow bank in rallying. If I am running the left side of the car through the wall, it should be pulling me left. Instead, it just slows the car down, as if the collision detection just detects "impact:front" and thinks "Good enough for me." So Horizon 5 needs to fix that.

I think it's not as noticeable at higher speeds, but I could recall moments where the cobblestone did in fact pull the car in a different direction. I think I was trying to beat the mission that challenges you to rack up skill score and still reach a destination on time, and I was trying to score as many Sideswipes by sliding into cobblestone using the rear quarter of the car. Maybe it was at a low enough speed while not having enough traction that did it?

please do not feature autoscrolling text on tuning menus next go around, yeah? Thanks. Maybe let the right thumbstick do the scrolling, manually.

1000% agreed. I'm guessing the UI designer head favoured simplifying the UI as much as possible. Hate having to re-hover over the item to read a specific bit.

The next game needs a lot of work put into almost everything short of the graphics and physics, but I think for me the biggest one is stuff to do in free roam. Burnout Paradise had leaderboards for things like drifts, jump distance, air time and stuff and it was fun having impromptu competitions with people even if you were nowhere near each other because you'd get a message saying "xX_genericName_Xx beat your drift score", so why not let us compete on PR stunts and skill score? I'd also like more work put into Forzathon Live, just something like a counter to keep track of how many you've done or a contribution leaderboard, maybe a Horizon Life thing where you can unlock things other than Forza points just to get people to engage with it more, although obviously it'd also be good if Forzathon Live goals were reworked too.

From what I've seen on PC, the leaderboards for rival events are where the real competition is at. I haven't tried it myself, but it seems the BMW Isetta is the god car at drift zone. Some other things on leaderboards, really can't recall at the time of this posting, seems like people have found an exploit or modded the game to land such absurd records.

I've only played the game for a couple of months, and already I've seen repeat Forzathon events. I think the freedom of driving whatever you like is what limits the type of events you can run. In a game world where you can express your love in cars to be able to drive whatever you want, they'd have to make events that any car can contribute to. For example, danger signs are only about racking up flight distance, and not meeting a minimum distance.

Imagine an event that said to jump a minimum distance, or even better, jump a very specific distance range (to limit you from using your fully-beefed up V12-swapped build). Imagine an event that read "Everyone: Head over to the west coast, circle around this specific tree that's about 8km away and come back to this starting spot. You pass when everyone comes back". Something like this that doesn't only utilize the existing stunt points of interest can create more possible events without having to program completely new things into the game.

 

[Eunos_Cosmo]

Wherever FH5 is set I really hope it includes ray-traced reflections on at least the PC / XSX versions of the game. I don't remember the car body cube maps being that distracting in FH3, but they are borderline awful on FH4 - at least on base/S XBO. I feel like this is critically important on an open world game, especially one with dynamic time of day. I'm not sure if it's the heavier load of foliage or accounting for 4 seasons or what, but the transitions from one cube map to the next in FH4 are very obvious, they seem to morph instead of move, and the internal resolution of the reflections themselves are really low. Ever since I noticed it, it's hard for me to drive in 3rd person without getting un-immersed from the world. The hood view that combines SSR and cube maps is also pretty weird and downright ugly on some cars, depending on the geometry of the hood.

 

[sirjim73]

💡 A sombrero...

 

[GBalao888]

If it's gonna be set in Mexico we need plenty of rally cars, from Group B to trophy trucks, to rally raid, Baja buggies, to 90s-early-to-mid 2000s WRC.

 

[Eunos_Cosmo]

If it's gonna be set in Mexico we need plenty of rally cars, from Group B to trophy trucks, to rally raid, Baja buggies, to 90s-early-to-mid 2000s WRC.

Safari conversion everything.

 

[UKMikey]

The soundtrack should be interesting...

 

[Silver_Wolf]

Will there be a change to the livery publication system in Forza Horizon 5?

One of the reasons I am purely racing in the current game FH4 is I find it 'frustrating' that we cannot upload our own decals to the game library like GT Sport and if we do use another person's creation we are subsequently 'locked' and cannot share that design with the community.

The regulars over in Gran Turismo boards will know that I published 'many' liveries' during my time in Sport (still have the gallery on here)

https://www.gtplanet.net/forum/thre...nd-racing-miku-liveries.379151/#post-13326331

I understand 'copyright theft' of a person's design and time and effort but the system we have in GT Sport seems so much simpler and I think I would contribute a lot more to Forza if I had the option to work with other players content but I am not expecting this to change but that is my hope and wish for the upcoming game.

 

[UKMikey]

I'm not sure about "needs" but it sure would be nice to have a bunch of fixed replay cameras dotted around the race routes for more cinematic-looking replays. Not holding out much hope, though as I imagine the demand is somewhat non-existent.

 

[Nacho Libre]

On the subject of radio stations, I would love an "oldies" station with 80's/90's Spanish pop-rock and another with Latin tunes (Ranchero, Tex-Mex, Cumbia, Mariachi, etc.). Don Thompson can sit this one out.

 

[sesselpupser]

Edit: I've just seen I posted here ages ago and it's on this page, so in the interests of not contradicting myself...

Pets. FH5 should have customisable pets that you can put on the passenger seat and let them just hang out in the car. Make mine a tortoise.

 

[raven214]

Pets. FH5 should have customisable pets that you can put on the passenger seat and let them just hang out in the car. Make mine a tortoise.

With his ears blowing in the wind? ...if a tortoise has ears...

 

[UKMikey]

On the subject of radio stations, I would love an "oldies" station with 80's/90's Spanish pop-rock and another with Latin tunes (Ranchero, Tex-Mex, Cumbia, Mariachi, etc.). Don Thompson can sit this one out.

I'm definitely up for some cumbia but leave my Don Thompson out of this. His fish-out-of-water comments are one of the best things about the soundtrack. Scott or Amy can take the hit this time around.

 

[Nacho Libre]

Granted, a clueless, disoriented and/or drunk with tequila Don Thompson would be hilarious!

 

[UKMikey]

With his ears blowing in the wind? ...if a tortoise has ears...

That reminds me of a terrible old joke I heard once.

The hare and the tortoise are getting ready for their race, when the hare looks over and says, "Hey, you've got no hair."

The tortoise replies, "I'm a tortoise, I'm not supposed to have any hair."
"On your marks", says the starter.

"Look at you, you weird bugger," says the hare, "you've got no ears either."

"I'm a tortoise, I'm not supposed to have ears."

"Get set." says the starter.

"Oh my God," says the hare, "you are an ugly freak... your skin is all wrinkly."

"Look, I'm a tortoise. I'm supposed to have wrinkly skin."

Just before the starter fires the gun, the hare stands back and says, "I'm not racing you; you're Niki Lauda!"

 

[RodSk8Dude]

Another thing I disliked about Forza when playing Horizon 4, was the units. Here in Brazil we use metric units, but then I go in-game, say I want metric units, and the game goes:

"OK...

This car has 300 KILOWATTS of power"

Thanks, game.

I wish we could customize specific measures, like in GT4, or Beam.NG Drive. Like, I want Horsepower, I want KM/H, BUT I like LB/FT for torque, because it tends to align a bit with HP, i.e. more LB/FT than HP means it is a torquey car; about the same amount, it's sort of average for the power; sporty lightweight cars tend to have a bit less LB/FT than HP.

[...]When you hover over an event/course icon on the map, often the course details info box will partially or completely obscure the actual route of the course, if it's small. If it's instead a big route, then it goes off the visible extents of the map, and you cannot zoom out enough to see it! What's the point in displaying the route if you cannot see it?
[...]
Level of care item: Cars are very clearly placed procedurally into decade based categories. Most often, this works fine. But does the Ferrari 512TR really belong in the 90s? Does the Acura Integra Type R belong in the 00s only and not the 90s at all? (it's borderline absurd that the Acura Integra, in LHD no less, is featured when the game is set in England, I digress) If there was a genuine level of care on display, the decade lists would be more carefully curated so that cars that straddle decades slot into the one(s) that make the most sense. Of course, if we could create our own car lists, and save/name them, I wouldn't care how the out-of-the-box categories are organized.
[...]
Here's another detail gripe: Why doesn't the game list the engine configuration of standard cars anywhere? As far as I can tell, it only lists the cars engine displacement. The only mention of engine type I've seen is within the engine swap menu. It feels conspicuously absent in a game like this[...]

#1 - I hate that too. Reminds me of a problem I have with the first TDU on PC. If you map everything to a controller, when seeing the map, the previews of the races are bugged, and you can't see them. You will only know the name. You have to leave the map controls on keyboard+mouse only for it to work.

#2 - That also. It's part of the problem with this game only caring about the absolute fastest/newest version of cars possible. Like the C2 Corvette. In real-life, the split-window was disliked at the time, but now due to rarity, it is the most desirable version. On Forza, only a later model was ever featured. Funnily enough, on the PS1 Gran Turismos, the exact same model year as Forza's was featured, but from GT4 onwards, they went with the '63 split-window instead. But concluding, many cars end up feeling off in the decade placement because of that.

#3 - That's something GT does which I really like. It lets people learn about cars. Together with the Forzavista feature, being able to SEE the engine too, it could really help people to know about cars.

Wherever FH5 is set I really hope it includes ray-traced reflections on at least the PC / XSX versions of the game. I don't remember the car body cube maps being that distracting in FH3, but they are borderline awful on FH4 - at least on base/S XBO. I feel like this is critically important on an open world game, especially one with dynamic time of day. I'm not sure if it's the heavier load of foliage or accounting for 4 seasons or what, but the transitions from one cube map to the next in FH4 are very obvious, they seem to morph instead of move, and the internal resolution of the reflections themselves are really low. Ever since I noticed it, it's hard for me to drive in 3rd person without getting un-immersed from the world. The hood view that combines SSR and cube maps is also pretty weird and downright ugly on some cars, depending on the geometry of the hood.

The reflections, on PC, even on ultra, still do that low frame-rate thing on the hood view. And on the interior cameras, ONLY on ultra does it NOT do that. It's really annoying. The car's mirrors also have low frame-rates on lower configurations, I think you have to put it on high for it to be decent. The reflection frame-rate should be a separate option. I remember that being a separate option in older games, like PS2-era NFS games. I also hate that the SSR of the hood passes over the car's paint type, so even on matte paint, it still has reflections.