It's an
arcade racer, people need to stop looking at this game from a sim-enthusiast perspective. If the next expansion is Lego, than it will seem a bit odd, but I wouldn't call it out of place in a game where you can win an off-road race in a Koenigsegg than use the same car to jump 800 feet off a cliff without doing any serious damage.
Than there is these...
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Now, I won't lie, the prospect of a Lego themed expansion doesn't exactly fill me with the desire to start playing regularly again, but the game also isn't called "Forza Northstar Edition".
TDU was an arcade racer as well.
DriveClub was an arcade racer as well.
Heck, even NFS isn't this goofy!
There are a few problems with this situation.
Sure FM7 is old now but Microsoft is clearly unleashing all they got on FH4 and leaving the "serious" game aside. A car like the Apollo IE is useless in Forza Horizon. It's just too slow for S2 despite having great handling. Yet they put it in FH4 despite leaking it in an FM7 menu box which shows they considered it for FM7. And they put it behind an annoying online event.
I understand Forza Horizon is arcade, but it's still underpinned by ForzaTech so it's king in physics in this genre. There are many types of arcade racing games and it's no secret that, at least up to the release of Hot Wheels for FH3, Forza Horizon was a pretty conventional one, not least because it features real cars in real-world environments and, as said, it uses a physics and graphics engine from a simulator (Forza and GT are simulators, sorry to hurt the feelings of some). In FH4 however they added a lot of random crap that turned it into something I can't even make out what it is. Is it an RPG? Is it a racing game? Is it a vehicular combat game? Is it a story-driven game? Forza Horizon tries to be TDU, Burnout and NFS all at the same time. It fares poorly at being any of them, even though it has plenty of advantages over each when it does its own thing, which in turn is borrowed from its sibling Forza Motorsport: the driving.
Forza in general needs LOTS of "quality of life" improvements, down to the tiniest bits such as file browsing in the game. Turn 10 has been doing plenty of under the hood improvements to FM7 after abandoning the goofy things FH4 has now embraced. Playground on the other hand hasn't been doing anything worthwhile with the under the hood workings of FH4. They added online penalties to a game that doesn't need them (you said it yourself: it's not a serious racer). They added the Playlist to restrict players and boost "engagement". They added daily Forzathons which are now tied to the Playlist and feel like an attempt at preparing FH4 for the new mobile xCloud service Microsoft will introduce later this year. They added dances. They pushed FH3's trends further by locking cars and Playlist completion behind Playground Games.
All this alongside creating a worse menu, new rim paint options which broke old designs (and they'll never fix it), porting the Auction House unchanged from FH3 despite numerous complaints from people, terrible reputation system for painters which rewarded very bad designs, bad engine sounds overall (with many cars a copy of each other), track width feature which was clearly untested in cars such as the 1966 Impala, car bugs which remain since release (Lambo Countach misses its brakelight covers), unfair AI with rubberbanding, houses which serve little purpose other than unlocking perks which were more convenient to use in FH3, impossibility of turning off the game music completely without turning on streamer mode (which disables itself when you restart the game), story in the expansion (Drift Club 2.0) that felt like an ad for the Formula Drift pack rather than worthwhile content, DLC content placed to compensate for locked cars (NSX-R GT), DLC filled with cars ported over from earlier Forzas...
And more. They even dared launch a route creator tool without the ability to look at the map! (thankfully they fixed that) This month they added "Star Cards" which don't even register completion correctly. And don't get me started on the plethora of bugs in the cars added post-release...
Despite all this, everyone keeps patting Playground in the back. Which means there will be no change. With Forza Horizon further cannibalizing Forza Motorsport, the trend will continue until either a competitor appears or people simply get bored of Forza Horizon. Funnily enough, despite Turn 10 having done much to change the bad impression people got from FM7, the reaction of everyone is the opposite ("too little, too late", "bring back FM4", etc.). They're the only studio Microsoft currently has that's universally praised despite doing blunders as great as if not greater than what the other ones like 343i, The Coalition or Turn 10 do. And it's difficult to understand why.
Simply put: I'm not happy with the game. First game in years that I actually pre-ordered. And it fell short of my expectations. The good things about it are the core physics, the map and that's it. Every time I have to do something other than driving in this game, I feel disappointed. I saw quite a few content creators leaving or simply slowing down their production because they felt Playground screwed them over, whether they stated it openly or not.
Just don't take me for a Techlet. I really don't understand why people are so defensi
