I think the "story" also changed a lot. In the first game, you were a newbie trying to work up and be the best guy at the festival. You got different colored wristbands which showed your progress as you went up the ranks. It really felt like something a car enthusiast would love to join in real life. Now you're just a dude that does random stunts and drives into sandstorms for the hell of it
My headcanon around this is that I’ve been the same person the whole time. The reason I’m not festival CEO still after horizon 3 is a street racing scandal.
Everything in this video was SPOT ON. The one I felt the most was the "Everyone Becomes No-one." I've played every single Forza game, and I have spent thousands of hours in the Horizon series. The most satisfying moment in all of my thousands of Horizon hours was in Horizon 4 when I finally got my "H-Star" badge. It required that you understood almost every system in the game, and mastered it. You had to perform well in Playground Games, you had to make Tunes and Liveries that people would actually want to download in order to get that. I feel like I had finished everything in Horizon 5 in just a couple of weeks. I come back to Horizon 5 for a few hours every couple of weeks, and every time I do there is nothing there that I can feel accomplished about.
Because you aren't a racer, you're a gamer You want to get badges and stuff that's superficial, instead of striving to be the best at car control and racecraft you can possibly be
@@christiantaylor1495 Yes he's a gamer, as is 95% of the playerbase. When you play a game you want to feel accomplishment from mastering car control, not just do it for the sake of it, because a game is not a simulator, it's made so that you can feel satisfaction from game progression, not the progression of your driving skills. People forget that Forza games are just that, games.
@@wr0ng569 real life racing is also a game. Taking your real life car to track to improve your driving skill is more satisfying than any game progression, but it's satisfying in video games too. Some people forget that people actually enjoy racing and driving cars competitively in real life. Leveling up is a toxic game feature that was only invented to give idiots a sense of progression despite plateauing quickly. Level up your brain and body instead of a silly set of pixels representing a number. Actually develop a skill to reach flow state instead of collecting colourful badges and meaningless titles
@@christiantaylor1495 1. I completely agree, nothing can compare to a real car. 2. While it is satisfying to learn to drive masterfully, most people would rather have a goal and while working towards said goal improve their driving, there are of course competitive players and their existence really isn't bad but most people aren't "tryhards" (that word has such a negative connotation but I don't know a better one). 3. Leveling up really isn't toxic if implemented correctly as a means of showing skill, although I can see what you mean. 2. Point also applies to your last and second-to-last paragraphs. Thanks for discussing this! A lot of people are scumbags on the internet, thank you for not being one of them.
@@christiantaylor1495 you aren’t a racer either, you’re a driver. The racing in Forza is horrible unless you’re versing the clock or other players. The difficulty balancing is awful because it has no consistency. Because of the above, getting well balanced, exciting races is quite rare. The game has a great simcade handling model and physics that makes driving fun. Terrible A.I. and event balancing though that makes racing regularly alternate between feeling dull and unfair.
It will. He's just biased. For the people who played five as their first Forza Horizon, it's the best by far, and to me too, because I'm not biased by nostalgia. Each game is better than the last.
@@christiantaylor1495 "Each game is better than the last." such a bullshit statement. You are way to biased towards your opinion too. I will forever remember the first 2 Horizons, but the one staying mostly at my heart is actually 4. because they did there everything right. You had everything you needed in this game! FH5 is still bugged when it comes to a lot of stuff, and a big let down for me. Its a stretched pizza with the same amount of salamis, yet again some salamis have shrunken compared to 4 haha
@@GregorioStyreco 5 has loads of new features not in 4 but you're all ignoring them. It's like we're playing different games. The first one doesn't have have wheel support, and the second one has tons of restricted areas you can't go and bad ffb on wheel. The only better thing in that is car meets. 5 has everything two has and more and as a better version. I don't know what planet you're on. Forza Horizon 2 was the first open world car game I ever played, but it sucks compared to 5.
YES... YES.. FINALLY someone who makes a proper video about the problems i've had with this game for ages. Big fan of the Forza series over all. I grew up with it. The changes this game has gone through.. or the lack of changes .. has made me very tired of even mentioning the games name out loud.. I really sincerely hope for Playground games and Turn10 to change this series for the better in the future.
Honestly after finishin almost every race in first place and clockin only around 50 hours i unistalled cause I got bored and the beauty of the graphics couldn't let me play anymore , it's unfortunate since the previous title felt so much alive and just driving around and discovering was fun while here, in 5, I felt the need to play almost every race since I got bored if not and now after finishing them I don't feel compeled to do anythin else
This video genuinely summarizes my experience with the game. So nice to see I’m not the only one who felt like this series is standing still instead of moving forward.
I find it's actually moving backwards. But that's my opinion because I haven't actually played the game even though I love the Horizon series. As soon as I saw the pronouns I uninstalled, stupid shit like that does not belong in a racing game.
"Shit games are made tolerable, and good games are made great by their soul. Horizon 5 is a great game made good by it's lack of one" not only does this speak great to me, it is also one of the greatest burns a game could receive.
I got a week ban for creating a livery that said "Initial Deez Nutz" on a car. The person I made it for is allowed to continue using the livery. You are absolutely right that the sanitization harms the game immensely. It doesn't feel lived in or authentic anymore.
@@buckfast2k226 Understandable that flag is banned, but punishing players that used a car that comes with it stock is just incompetence on their part. I'm convinced the devs at playground studios are all amateur mobile game developers that have never driven a car before, and are the type of people the spend all day on twitter getting offended by nonsensical things.
As an open world driving game, it needs more built up urban areas for it to feel immersive. Having acres of grass, sand, and jungle make it so boring and lifeless.
100% agreed, I feel like this is the main reason that even with the big maps and impressive physics of fh4 and fh5, I still come back to games like need for speed world (yes, a bit of an old one, I know). The cityscape of NFS W feels so vivid even when there aren't many players online if any. Even with the much smaller map, i feel like NFS W makes exploring much more exciting due to the fact that every bit of the map has so much detail instead of just being lifeless and seemingly endless fields of grass, and we're talking about NFS W, a game that came out 12 years ago. I think it's about time Playground Games start filling those empty spaces in the map, as they make huge maps feel so much smaller than they actually are.
@@lucascerbasi4518 imo, even Burnout Paradise's Paradise City is more "alive" than FH5's Mexico, and it was way more smaller and less "open". Heck even NFs Payback's map (idk what it was called) feels more alive despite having less diverse environment than Mexico. Maybe because in both maps the city and settlement have more "realistic" vibe by having billboards and adverts, the city layout is a bit realistic like the downtown area is surrounded by either residential area or industrial area, or the streets is more packed with traffic, idk how can I convey it but to me, Paradise City downtown and Fortune Valley (I guess that's the city name) feels more like real city than that city in FH5 and even Edinburgh in FH4.
@@lucascerbasi4518 Ufff, I liked World, had to grind a bit, and even then, all I got was Lotus Elise. But how much I cherished then that Lotus... That was the game that actually brought me to FH. You had an open world, people just doing their stuff, you were a part of some community. Where in FH5, there is minimal chance you have 3+ guys in 1 place, because the map is so big and barren.
It’s my comfort game. I tend to just turn it on and buy a new car, immediately fix it up and paint it, then test out my creation in the open world. The actual races are my least favorite part. Still enjoy it, but I agree with almost all of what you said, especially about the difficulty scaling.
I still remember my excitement with the first 2 Horizon games... the immersion of the first Horizon festival... the variation of the second Horizon festival.. those games were incredible... Horizon 5 is beautiful and soulless
I've just decided to stop playing forza completely now, I've been jumping on for the playlist exclusivecars since fh4 and had every dlc for every forza horizon title but I'm just so bored of jumping on weekly just to get cars and then ignore it till the next week.
At the start of the story… your excited, can’t wait to explore the world and go as fast as you possibly can. By the end… you are just completing the story in the hope something better is around the corner.
The main problem with horizon is that progression requires no skill. You can be the best driver, the best at rally or cross country, but you'll still earn less points than just driving in a jungle and hoping you don't crash into a tree. That's why I'm waiting for Motorsport 8. I hope that it'll be good.
not to mention, with the wheelspin system, finishing first with an in-game equivalent of a 24 hour of le mans event doesn't guarantee you any substantial rewards that are any better than just playing the exact same short circuit race several times to farm wheelspins. The fact that character cosmetics, money, emotes, horns, and cars are all bundled in the same fuckery of a system makes it even worse.
Thank you for being able to correctly articulate the issues that a baboon like me just shouts WHERE PROGRESSION 😂 there's so much frustration with these 'small' things, it gets a pass every single game... why? PS please can we burn Jamin
I feel like it's due to a lot of the community just wanting to get in a nice car and cruise or drift around the map. I do feel like this aspect of the community is important, but having little to no progression just disregards the rest of the community.
@@fluffy6488 It doesn't have much progression because the devs explicitly don't want it to. They aren't targeting a dedicated community, they are targeting casual players who can't bother about progression and just wants to drive the best car as quickly as possible. For people who want progression and more hardcore competition, there is already another game made by them for it, Forza Motorsport. You have a misunderstanding of what the average Horizon player wants.
This explains so much. When I play fh5 I usually just mess around, drive fast on the highways, tune and modify cars or drift but I don't do much missions. And the part about races is veryyy true, all I did was crashing into others and rewind every 3 seconds and I thought I was just bad, it turns out the game works in a weird way.
FH5 got prettiest graphics, biggest map to date, lots of customization options, and tons of things to do, yet somehow it’s not fun to play with. Why this is happening? It is because the map layout is uninspiring, most of the areas in the center mass are forgettable. As for progression, everything essential is easily handed to the player within the early hours of the game through easily earned wheel-spin. Once you got great cars through wheel-spins or purchases. there are little to no incentives to earn other exclusive cars which have inferior performances. And since the game’s map is so boring, driving a new car on it doesn’t really help much.
I'm not too familiar with the Forza games, but is there really no other game reviewers that have brought up these issues? Some of these problems are pretty huge.
@@Largentina. Its not super common both in terms of reviewers and players alike. I think there are a lot of different reasons like it being popular, people being new to the series, not many good racing games around these days, fanboys and girls, afraid of backlash and this franchise being designed with casual people in mind those same casual people might not even notice or care to notice issues.
This is considered a 10/10 for most outlets but for someone that has put more than 200 hrs into the game it is clear it has many flaws. Gone are the days where arcade racers and street racers were thrilling. Remember PGR? Remember Burnout? I miss them
Personally I like all of the forza horizon games over burnout and PGR. I played PGR on for maybe 6 hours before I gave it up and burnout I put 20-30 hours into. But I have easily 1000+ in the horizon series
Its soooo funny you said this cause I found myself thinking about PGR often when playing fh5, i would jump between fh5 and motorsport 7 and just want something in between like pgr was to a degree, i miss the connection as in emotional attachment the player can get to a certain car due to having to work to get it and then race with it for quite some time before being able to get the next goal car
Another problem with FH5 is that all the roads are way too wide, i can drive 200 mph and still feel like i have all the room in the world to correct a mistake.
This was a spectacular review. Wonderfully written, and able to capture in perfect detail all of my disappointments with this game. This is the critical review horizon needs to get better, and the community is better for you having written it. Well done. You just earned yourself a sub. :)
I used to think the critiques of FH5 often felt like petty complaining, but it took someone wording them better like this for me to get the point. I enjoy FH5 but almost exclusively as a sandbox to joyride and customize in. Everything else you explained is woefully apparent when I think about how little I interact with actual racing and progression. 90% of my time with the game is spent customizing cars and just messing around in free roam, rarely doing events. It's great fun, but it's barely a game.
^ this 100% . I hate the racing in the game so much I leave the difficulty at Novice so I can just 1st place all of the playlist crap as fast as possible, because why would I put any effort into making it harder for me to get rewards? Also, why would I subject myself to rammers and griefers when I can literally ignore them entirely? So that basically makes the game "driving f*ck off simulator", lol.
As a mostly Forza Horizon gamer and someone who is obsessed with this game for GOD KNOWS WHY at this point. You just made the most insanely accurate and perfectly described review I have ever heard ever. Anyone who plays this game like I do plays it a VERY certain way, otherwise this game is honestly a big joke these days. I’ve made multiple rants about it. Absolutely PERFECT review and understanding of the the REAL problems with this game 🙏🙏💯💯👏👏👏
i got bored of the game after a few months without even finishing the campaign. i really like the car collecting and such and honestly the season and series cars are the only things that keep me coming back. the only demographic that continues playing the game is car enthusiasts
I still play the game quite a lot but I am a modder so it works out. It honestly sucks that the only way i can truly enjoy the game anymore is either modding and messing around WITH FRIENDS or cruising/cops v robbers or just anything that is WITH FRIENDS or hell even random people to enjoy the game anymore b/c racing just isn't fun anymore.
It was so incredibly frustrating to work tirelessly on learning breaking, gearing and race lines only to fail at them and see that crashing the corner into your opponents whilst sliding along the wall to victory was so much more effective.
This really sums it up for me. I recently started playing this game and I really struggled to enjoy it. I love the cars and the environment but hate literally all the events and story. The most fun I have is literally just driving around and exploring the map in different cars. Honestly I wish I could get a nfs 2005 set in this game. Show the map off by sequentially unlocking it for the next part of the story. The story doesn't need to be great either. The whole blacklist scheme works well enough. This isn't a movie, the fun comes from driving and playing.
@@christiantaylor1495 Literally changes nothing about how lackluster this entry is. The very platform it's built on is faulty. Adding a wheel does nothing for an overly arcade experience. Anyone who would buy a wheel to play this is foolish. This isn't FM, GT, or countless other PC SIMs. It's forza horizon, the CoD of racing games.
05:10 The "false-red-zone" is a huge issue in Gran Turismo as well. Modulating the AI-difficulty should not be accomplished with mid-turn brake-checks IMO. It is frustrating that even today those seemingly basic racing mechanics are still an issue across entire franchises.
people like my roommate bobby are the reason why these games still suck. this dude thinks every AAA game he plays is a 10/10 masterpiece no matter what. dude thinks call of duty search and destroy is a better competitive shooter than csgo. the vast majority of the population doesnt care they will eat up every dlc and in game purchase and never complain about the quality.
Your first line about the first place being harder to get than to maintain it, is totally right. I tried playing on many difficulty levels and once I got up front, it was very easy to maintain it
I've been feeling that something's off when I first played FH5. I enjoyed FH4 and love a lot of things about it (except the snow season, but it grows on you). You managed to address most of the issues I've been having with the game.
yep i started forza with 4 got 5 and was... underwhelmed it just not as good but its like you cant go back cause everyone is on 5 like its fun but I felt everything in 4 more the races were more intense the story was there and the map was more fun. idk its just not the same
I just hope the next FH will feel like an actual event again, an event you look forward to being a part of. The introduction races of FH1 and FH4 made me cry cause they felt so fkn amazing. FH5 crashed on me the first two times I did the intro race and once I did finish it I was left disappointed cause the excitement just isn't there this time around. Also Mexico sucks as a map. In other FH games I had places I always enjoyed coming back to, I made my own paths around the maps and memorized them. In FH5 I couldn't be bothered to even 100% the entire map cause it's so forgettable to me :/
My greatest pet peeve with this game is the fact that AI drive on rails. A lot of cars I like are FR and I love to build them for top speed, and it always ends up with me fighting for every ounce of grip while the AI take the corners like it's nothing. Which we are supposed to have similar cars and following the same race line so it makes no sense to me.
@@apinkofficial3936 well, there is no fun. But there also isn't much fun in games where everything is impossible to beat. A balance of difficulty has to be striked, it has to be difficult enough to be challenging and rewarding to beat, but not too difficult to the point of feeling impossible to beat. Lots of other racing games strike this difficulty balance really well.
It kinda is perfect for me. It came at a perfect time for me, dug me out of depression a little bit and I just get lost cruising through highways, admiring the horizon (no pun intended) I’ve had zero dull moments with it. Though it’s my first Forza game ever, so my opinion might not be well informed. But yet, it’s a perfect game to me.
my biggest gripe with horizon 5 was how easy it was to get all of the fastest cars. It might just be because I was young, but in older forza games it felt really cool to get a new car, and you admired it more. In FH5 it feels like they throw all of the fastest supercars and hypercars at you, to the point where they don't even feel special. I have around 300 hours in the game and I have every single car available from the autoshow + a bunch of season exclusives. I probably only purchased about 5 of these 500+ cars, the rest were just given to me in one way or another. The only way I think they could make up for this is maybe having some more ultra rare Horizon edition cars, but I already have almost all of them anyways.
I'm so happy that you made this video, I myself wanted to cover this in a larger video on Horizon 5 as the initial honeymoon phase wore off, but was so disapointed and depressed with the end product that I couldnt bring myself to get to it. I really hope that this hits all of the heads up at playground. One thing I would have added to this is the embarassing amount of recycled and cut content from Horizons past that has been added back in in new "content updates" making long term players who log in every week to get new cars feel like we have been spit on. With todays world of such wonderful and insane cars that release, we dont get any of them, just cars that we've been playing with for years now. Thank you so much for getting this to a much larger audience, it means the world to us whos voices most often cannot be heard.
I was just about to comment how I was glad there werent any standard arguments we have heard a million times against the game in his review (like recycled content), and also still appreciates FH5 for what it is and doesnt make it seem like its a peice of junk and a disgrace for the Horizon series, like I know some creators do.
Please, please do one for the anniversary of the fh5. This video was good, but it left out so many of the shortcomings of this game. I dont think the biggest problems would be the ai or the lack of progression. Yes they are frustrating but the lack of innovation from the developers are much more annoying (look no further than the forza rear aero, and forza splitter, or the roster of cars in the eliminator that have been unchanged for almost 1 year)
@@pukei Forza Horizon is waaay different. The physics are definitely arcadey, but they are 100x better than almost every other arcade open world racer.
I just wish he did some more comments on the multiplayer aspect. Multiplayer is absolutely trash in FH5, can't even choose what class you want to race, or even road vs cross country. I think they know that 99% of people will do road races and cross country would be dead for the 1% of disabled people who enjoy them.
One of the best reviews of any game I've seen. Having put so many hours into Forza Horizon games, this detailed analysis is spot on. It should be required viewing for everyone involved with developing this game.
Trackmania has this golden rule of track design, that if you make a jump you either have the player see where they land or put a visible sign telling them the direction.
Fh5 does have seasons, but its greatest weakness is that the seasons in Mexico are really the same. Minor temperature variances, and little weather anomalies. It's a tropic area, so it only really has two seasons: Hot, and less Hot.
19:00 i get this because in previous games they even had the radio presenters hyping it up before you'd unlocked it which made me feel more immersed and imagining what it might be like, in actuality i grinded the whole progression thing in the first 2 days, honestly i'd forgotten about it 24:14 wait what i thought keira was australian 26:12 i hate jaimin 26:50 DUDE I LITERALLY THOUGHT THAT WHEN HE CRASHED 28:00 yes. even in 4, jaimin atleast tried to give some secrecy before the scene expanded, sure its the same outcome but it felt a lot more natural 29:00 my number 1 complaint in all the forza games is this 30:16 yeah i did learn some stuff but it did get boring, it's just like "uhuh haley, i know there's these things, i'm driving on them" because 5 borrowed *so* much stuff from 4, like the menus, it just feels like a holiday to me and i don't feel too different based on how i felt driving around in 4, it's a bit sad though how i can say 4's map was a lot cooler, considering how much effort they put into this one (that is, the majority of it, if you actually zoom in some of the textures and modelling is terrible) i very much agree with you calling it lifeless, as i think the main thing that drove people to drive or atleast fast travel to different parts of the map in FH4 was the forzathon lives, now they've been turned into specific modes which most people just avoid, reducing the spread i actually picked up the crew for 50p recently and it was an absolute blast, some of the issues that are in the horizon franchise as a whole weren't even a thought in my head while playing it, it just nailed it so much better great video i agreed with lots of it
It doesn't even look that good. I play on high/ultra for most settings and the car looks amazing but the environment looks terrible, especially the plant textures. Textures look extremely bad when further away and then when you get close enough they switch very obviously to better (but still not great) textures. Maybe this goes away if you play on extreme settings but 99% of players can't.
I find that the announcer of Radio Eterna is to me the most humanly relatable character in FH5. She likes classical music and by the tone of voice she uses to explain about "double skill scores", it's apparent that she too thinks everyone else involved with the festival is mentally 4 years old.
Which, by the way, is literally a clone of the radio announcer from FH4's classical music radio. I haven't even played 5 once, but what you said is the same so i don't need to lol
I think it's kinda sad that Horizon 1 is so overlooked today. I feel like Horizon was at its best back then and shoulve sticked more to it's progression and the "feel" (story) part of the festival. It may just be nostalgia but the fist game is a lot more enjopyable all the way through. I've recently replayed it on PC/Steam Deck with the Xenia Emulator (Highly Recommended for anyone tech savy btw) in a sort of duel with a friend playing on XBox One all the way to 100% and it was an absolute BLAST!
I've always maintained that Forza is a repository of excellent 3D models to port into better games. FH5 is beautiful, boring, frustrating and grindy. I bought it to play with friends who became bored of the game even before I did. The points made in this video are so accurate, especially about crashing opponents to win. Most game modes have no incentive not to and when I get frustrated with seemingly superhuman AI (I managed to PIT maneuver and spin a Drivatar finally and felt so proud) I end up doing the same thing. Weekly challenges are something I do until I get the cars I want and then I turn the game off. They're like grinding in GTA. It's a gorgeous game with many, many variations of the same things to do over and over until you get tired of it.
It's really just a matter of the AI difficulty not being consistent. I play on the hardest difficult and to be honest a lot of the time the 1st place racer seems like it is the same difficulty across the upper half of difficulties
Even then, Forza models are not as high quality as Gran Turismo models. Forza models are always weird; since Forza Motorsport 4, certain cars like the SW20 or the R22 just look... wrong. The proportions. They look off in a number of cars.
@@Freezorgium The 1970 Challenger has had a weird droopy and over-wide nose since it was introduced as DLC. WAY BACK! I bought a PS5 for GT7, I miss my Pantera. My playtime in Horizon 5 is basically, log on, collect my storefront payout, see how many people downloaded my stuff, leave. I haven't even ported over most of my design work from FH4 because I can't even be bothered to port them.
My dude you are a monster at these videos. Gaming is so much more than gaming and you put into words the things I didn't know I wanted to say about some of my favorite franchises. Thank you from a stone cold gamer who is constantly looking for the next inspired piece of greatness..and the Whitelight critique to shortly follow it.
I just realised something, Forza Horizon is the antithesis of say burnout, burnout has rubber banding where the people behind you are always breathing down your neck but never too far ahead of you to warrant giving up. Horizon the first place can get so far away it warrants easy giving up and as soon as you take him over he loses his tenacity, it has anti rubber banding.
One of the best vids on UA-cam. I was hypnotized for the whole duration of it. Accepting and telling the ugly the truth when still loving the game is hard to achieve. Good job man. I actually remember when I shed a tear of joy when FH3 trailer came out and I saw that car jump through the desert. Game had a soul. The feeling never came back for the following games.
Absolutely spot on. Covers basically every gripe. Here’s hoping Playground pay attention but sadly, I highly doubt that since they only care about numbers & player data now.
I love racing games, but for some reason horizon could never pull me in more than few hours, and I could never explain why. Now you explained it very well!
After playing FH5 for a while, I went back and played FH3, there’s just something about FH3 that made the map feel more alive and I feel like car handling is better somewhat. And I really agreed with the points you made in the videos including AI, Showcases, and so on
This was a fantastic deep dive into some of the points preventing Forza Horizon to absolutely take off and shine. Since the start I've felt like Horizon 5 was missing something, but I felt it was not worth my time trying to figure out what, so I just accepted that I didn't like it as much and that playing it felt stale, but you have hit the nail on the head with such precision. Every step of the way I thought to myself "He's exactly right this is exactly what it feels or seems like." I hope at least someone at Playground watched this, someone who can actually get through to the leads, because your opinions and feedback are extremely concise, clear and well thought out, there is not a shred of doubt to be found in them, not a single "Oh well he says this but maybe between the lines he means this and we should do this instead." It is just flat out very fair feedback that should be taken seriously that I believe a lot of players think but aren't able to put into words as clear as this.
FH1 was the best one, every car felt earnt and as such was rewarding. The whole festival vibe actually felt like a festival and you actually were working your way up the ladder. I struggle with the new games as for example, in FH4 I barely played, yet had 15m in the bank and every car I could ever want. It’s far too easy nowadays and as such it’s boring
I 100% agree. The whole feeling of a believable festival where you race cars and work your way up from no one to someone is what sold this whole series. If 5 had come out first we wouldn’t have horizons anymore, because there’s nothing to accomplish so you’d get bored in half a hour and never come back
I remember playing FH1 on the 360 in 2016 when it was free with Live Gold, it just felt so interesting, then when I had 2 weeks of Game Pass in November, the same feeling wasn't there.
As much as the sequels have all improved the physics, detail, and open world. None of them have recaptured the magic of Forza Horizon 1, actually feeling like a competitive street racer.
another annoying thing about big jumps during races is that even if you have a really good jump, the landing will slow almost to the stop while the opponents will land normally and just drive past you. I had way too many races ruined because the last jump just meters before the finish line, slowed me down enough that the opponent that was seconds behind me won
Just a little note about rewinds, I used to crutch on them a lot, but when you get into multiplayer races you can’t rewind without setting yourself in an unwinnable position, so due to that, I have learned to not use it. To take my turns more carefully, watch my speed, etc… it’s a much better game if you pretend rewind isn’t there, but like you said. Necessary evil
you can disable rewind in settings. i usually just restart the event if i fuck up too bad, otherwise it's still fun to me to at least get a clean race and testing tunes
@@asneakychicken322 that was why in xcom 2 at release they added a timer between turns, they limited the moves you had and removed the "overwatch" feature that in the first game let you make moves and not suffer the consequences because it would rewind and make it like nothing happened. There was an uproar and the devs had to add back the overwatch feature, thus ruining the whole point of the game. But if you wanted the challenge and you wanted to experience the game like the devs intented there was a difficulty that allowed you to do that.
Dude this video is so amazing and well done. It's like you dove into my subconscious and pulled out every single thing I dislike about FH5 (despite still loving it). I desperately hope this video serves as a comprehensive checklist of improvements for the next Horizon game. The potential is immense.
I felt bad for hating the map. I told myself that its even better than fh3's map, my favourite. You solved my problem. I spend 90% of my time in that central plateau, which is disgustingly dull. The rainforest also isn't fun because the trees are so short and its like a crazed lumberjacker hacked off giant chunks. The map had potential but it failed to really spark my interest. Also, with playground games, it frustrates me how few arenas there are. So many times do I come across a place I would love an arena in. But no. Instead we get the baja circuit which is prosaic. Then, the lack of a vibrant modern city doesn't make the game feel cutting age and instead feels cheap and second rate. And while it probably represents Mexico well, the shacks that are houses look so out of place with the multitude of expensive cars. In a game where the sky is the limit, the wrong elements are grounded. If cars are given out like bottles, how come the roads are so worn and the infrastructure feels second rate. FH5 needs to stick to a direction. I would treasure a game where it really feels like a developing nation with common cars that you can eventually build from. The mix makes the game feel more worthless, because it really feels alien to what is real.
Central plateau is constructed this way for a reason - every obstacle is shuffled to the corners to make room for Eliminator arena. At least this is how I feel.
Played around 1000 hours of Forza Horizon 4 with my buddies and loved every single moment of it for the most part. It wasn't uncommon for us to go for all nighters of us just playing that game, while on the other hand, the longest session we've had with FH5 was probably, 3 hours TOPS. FH4 just hit different :(
@@pukei I would not got that far. Actually this is insulting. It is like saying Arma 3 and COD are the same. Or Outrun games are the same as the spiritual successors made by fans who forget crashing rules where the party who crashes into the rear of a car needs to be pushed back. Or all coffee is the same which is not the case. Over-roasting is done to hide bad quality vs good quality coffee offers diverse flavours.
Having so many good cars be free with the wheelspin made me have no attachment to my library of vehicles. I upgraded a few here and there but just auto upgrading them is easy, cheap, and money is in those wheelspins too.
As a very casual player who bounced off Horizon in under 20 hours, i did not expect literally every issue i had with the game to be summarised so perfectly and concisely. I thought i was the odd one out, an exception to the rule; that i just had an outlier opinion on a game that was otherwise well-received. Nice to know i wasn't the only one :^)
SIR... YOU ARE DOING THE LORD'S GOOD WORK. I felt SO MANY of these points in the deepest of my soul and you articulated each point beyond the level I have energy to but still feel deep inside. Thank you.
Wow! You are right about everything. I thought I was the only one racing poorly. It's a shame that a game that is so pretty can not address these fundamental flaws; especially 1 year after release.
I completely agree with most of it. I played for about 2-3 months. It was 'wow' at first, but I soon came to realize the difficulty problems. Not being a very good driver myself, I did definitely improve, but the seemingly random difficulty and in some cases nearly impossible task of getting to 1st place, makes it annoying. I love the rewind button, because indeed it would be impossible to ever even get close to winning without it. And I agree that this should not be the case. My goal was to obtain every single car. I didn't, I quit when I had about 90%. By now that would be more, because of the continuous new releases of cars. There is too much to do weekly with the online events schedule and I feel like there is little time to play as you want. I started finding the best ways to make money and spins, so that I could get as many cars as possible, limiting the fun experience of driving the cars and the racing and limiting variety and instead making it grindy to a fault. It is the problem with my desire to get them all, sure, but also in the execution of the game itself. I had a blast playing for a while, but it fell off significantly shortly after. The seasons became as much of an obsession as gacha games and MMO could become because of FOMO; I needed these rewards or there would be no completion of the collection. I had to stop, for my own sanity and I could stop, barely, because the rest of the game had lost its shine by then. I feel like there are more issues than you talked about, but you nailed most of it. It would have been much better if the racing and AI and difficulty were more consistent and if races were the actual main focus for obtaining rewards, not spins and skillpoints. And... I really could do with my mostly single player experience games having no FOMO aspects. They sneak that into way too many modern games now. Because they want you to keep playing their game. No one has the time to play 500 games daily or weekly just to keep up, but they psychologically manipulate people like me to try, anyway. Much better would be if they just made those cars available after introduction, just not as easy to get, or only available for purchase after getting all the base game cars. Something like that. I sometimes wonder which cars I have missed by now, probably a lot. I do catch myself wanting to play again from time to time, but then I remember that its one part frustration at the inconsistency, one part FOMO and only one part of fun and I opt not to. Don't want to sink back into the pool of FOMO for a bunch of cars, anyway. Also, I laughed at the "uwu-mobiles". guilty as charged. xD
I think you hit the nail on the head. So many races felt mindless and meaningless, like when you're just gunning down police for the sake of it. I think they should definitely take a note from Dirt and Grid, where you have a limited number of rewinds per base and each one costs you some credits at the end of the race. Just having that subconsciously in the back of your mind would add a lot of weight to decision-making in races
You know you could just turn the rewind feature off which gives you more credits so this idea is kind of pointless but could make things bit interesting as well
At this point the only thing that keeps me playing horizon games is the sense of progress they create. Unlock a new car each week, earn more points or accolades or whatever it is in a given game. It works but only for a while. After a couple months of playing fh5 I found myself just logging on with the goal the complete the weekly challanges and get the new cars but after driving around in freeroam for a few minutes I just got bored and quit. And this breaks my heart even more when I remember just how excited I was when this game came out...
I think you hit the head on the nail regarding both the games catering to a broader audience and its quite frankly toxic positivity. There can be too much of a good thing, because it leads to desensitization. If you try to appeal to everyone all the time, you will ultimately alienate more people than you entice. And if everything is always 100% super positive hype all the time, then those emotions lose all meaning.
FINALLY someone puts his finger on all of the issues that have been creeping up on us over the last horizon editions. Great work, I recognized every single problem immediately! 😅
Ended up turning off all UI & putting on the crash test dummy suit to get rid of dialogue, the dance of the rest is alright but this is a FAR cry from how good a $70 AAA title from Xbox should be.
Wow, you have summed up everything I've noticed about the game but never dedicated the thought to figuring it out. The most obvious things to me were the scripted Showcase events, the rubber banding in races, and the "1st place or nothing". And it's really that last one that made me do exactly what you said. Restart races as soon as I'm not perfect, give up on some races because I can't get to first place on the difficulty I want and there is no second or third place so I'm not happy with that. This is why I stopped playing, but I never "knew" it. Great content!
NO WAY!! I've been watching all your racing game videos lately , such a joy to watch. I was wondering if you ever would cover FH5, and BOOM, there it is!! Out of nowhere. Can't wait to watch this as soon as I have time. Cheers!!
The first Horizon is still the best. From 2 on the game became almost “too” open world. Being able to drive every car off-road effortlessly makes it too arcadey
@@anonony9081 it really does man like they really should've have made non offroad cars lose lots of traction when their offroad. Like how the modern nfs games does it.
1 and 2 were the best. Cause you had to work hard to get what you want. I was able to get nearly 100 cars, including an m600 and a la ferrari. And i especially loved the challenges. And the sounds were incredible. 2 and the first were the peak of the series. 4 and 5 was the downfall.
The only thing i really disliked about FH1 was the forzed dubbing. I wanted it in english, but instead i was forced to listen to dreadful norwegian voice acting, with the characters not sounding like any real person i've ever heard talking
@@anonony9081 Did we play the same game? Yeah you can shoot yourself at 200mph through the desert with a Veyron, but good luck handling it without proper offroad mods. Offroad cars (especially rally cars) are still the best at offroading bone stock, although you can mod some supercars to become competitive offroad.
Couldn't agree more. I had just played Most Wanted and Carbon before trying Horizon 5. I got bored INSTANTLY. For all the reasons you stated. No soul, no progression, no stakes. A good sandbox with no vision and greater appeal as priority number 1
@@michaelwesten4624 eh barely. I have both of these games and the crew 2 nails FH5 and 4 in a few ways. It just scratches a different itch than Forza without quite the same polish. Honestly I think they're in the same boat when it comes to the limitations of dev creativity.
@@michaelwesten4624 Tbh I don't try to find shortcomings games by comparing them to other games. But I compare them to their previous entry. To me, Crew 2 is a good alternative but is not actually helpful to compare with FH. People play them for different reasons
You just summarized all my problems with Horizon in a single video. I needed something like this to realize how much they actually affected my experience with the game. I hope the next installments go down a different route
The next installments WON'T go down a different route. FORZA HORIZON 5 is arguably the most mid entry in the series, and it was considered a "masterpiece". I never rolled my eyes so hard.
You have an amazing ability to question every game mechanic and understand what is missing. This video puts so many words on stuff i felt playing the game. Great work ! I think this games ironically needs more limits : less cars, less open areas, more dense environments, less content (cosmetics, danses, filler for lottery...)
First video I've watched of yours, and what a damn good first impression. Your style of writing in combination with the simple video editing is really engaging to watch. I don't even play Forza, but I appreciate the quality here so much. Nice job, man.
I've played a lot of Horizon 3, 4, and 5 each... for about 1-2 months on release because I played them all on gamepass. It's weird, I really like them but I just always have that feeling I could be liking them more. Whitelight always hits perfectly.
I really hope playground finds and watches this video. The ending section on soul especially really got me. So sad to see not just horizon, but many other games fall into this problem... It's probably the reason so many of us stick with older games, where breaking the rules wasn't "bad" like it is in most modern titles.
Yea I just stopped playing it and put on this video that I was avoiding until I played it myself. Even a lot of the songs just have this corporate feel to them and I feel like the game is constantly saying "YOU'RE EXCITED" rather than just providing fun. It feels shallow. I've been playing a couple indie games alongside Horizon, and i'm so much more excited by Neon White and Signalis than I am by this 10/10 Game of the Year best arcade racer of all time.
I had that "unlock a new part of the festival" menu pop up while I was cruising or drag racing other people and it always slows you down to a complete stop and traps you in the menu for multiple seconds. That was honestly the most annoying thing for me and I was so happy after I unlocked all stuff so I never have to see that awful menu again xD
I have no idea why theh didn't keep the vibe of the first game. It was full of life. I feel like the newer games leave those vibes just at the main hub
@@christianherrera8359 That never worked imo. You can't please everyone at the same time, not to mention that by doing that the originality kinda fades away
The point about some cars just being better than others is so true, me and my friends used to do races where we could only use cars within a certain rating, but no mater how low the rating restriction, there was always one car that somehow managed to absolutely steam roll the rest of us
I play most of this game and it's good, but all these claims in this video are appositely true and covered everything I had a problem with this game. You're probably the first person to shine a light on this and I'm very glad you made a video about this. Keep it up.
My only guess that why Playground Games is sticking to this formula for Horizon is because it makes all types of players welcome, whether you are buying a racing game for your 3 year old kid, or you are new to the racing genre, or a person with accessibility issues playing video games, the game welcomes everyone. But that accessibility hampers the game's quality. There's so much depth that this game is lacking because they are held back by trying to welcome everyone into the game, instead of focusing on what their current players want for the game. The only reason I'm even sticking around for Forza is their handling model and car roster. If any other racing games had those 2 checkboxes met, let's say NFS or The Crew, I would probably not be playing Forza, or even buy the game at all.
Horizon is really a dream for late night cruisers and people that like to mod cars, but if you're a race enthusiast youre a fish out of water. Such a beautiful game only for their to be very little incentive to do the one thing you'd think it would be good at.
The problems i think the current horizon games have: •The "story" •The way you start already as a legend •The lack of UI change that is just a a clean and modern looking UI •The soundtracks that is somehow got worse than FH4 •Generic map and flat map unlike the first and second game that had a diverse geography and many known spots •The radio Dj's getting bland and more "family friendly •Rubberbanding •Lack of inovation •Generic races with the flag check points that were added arround Fh2 and Fh3 •No restrictions on the cars you can drive which was one of the best things on Forza Horizon 1 since it forced you to try new and diferent cars •Anna •Boring events •Lack of car body customization •No tents arround the map that would give you the races instead of a image floating on the road •The immersion of the festivak that was lost since Fh3 (you can also tell by that by the trailers, just search for Fh1 and Fh2 trailers and compare it to all the other games) •The overpowerd starring cars Thats all, thank you for reading my comment
I think the "story" also changed a lot. In the first game, you were a newbie trying to work up and be the best guy at the festival. You got different colored wristbands which showed your progress as you went up the ranks. It really felt like something a car enthusiast would love to join in real life. Now you're just a dude that does random stunts and drives into sandstorms for the hell of it
We basically went from average street racer to Dan Bilzerian. It sucks.
@Bruno Utech [Kaheeros] corniest shit ever for real
@Bruno Utech [Kaheeros] tbfwe have already won fh4's festival (if it is the same character as some believe)
Less flashiness, more immersion.
My headcanon around this is that I’ve been the same person the whole time. The reason I’m not festival CEO still after horizon 3 is a street racing scandal.
I think the whole trying to appeal to everyone while actually appealing to no one is the best way to describe this game.
This
@@pardolagames8994 This is FORZA HORIZON 5!
@damarfadlan9251 you need to play more games
@damarfadlan9251try Hot pursuit, FH1-3, any burnout, some dirt, and that’s it for me
@damarfadlan9251 20 year old Underground 1 shits all over this game
Everything in this video was SPOT ON. The one I felt the most was the "Everyone Becomes No-one." I've played every single Forza game, and I have spent thousands of hours in the Horizon series. The most satisfying moment in all of my thousands of Horizon hours was in Horizon 4 when I finally got my "H-Star" badge. It required that you understood almost every system in the game, and mastered it. You had to perform well in Playground Games, you had to make Tunes and Liveries that people would actually want to download in order to get that. I feel like I had finished everything in Horizon 5 in just a couple of weeks. I come back to Horizon 5 for a few hours every couple of weeks, and every time I do there is nothing there that I can feel accomplished about.
Because you aren't a racer, you're a gamer
You want to get badges and stuff that's superficial, instead of striving to be the best at car control and racecraft you can possibly be
@@christiantaylor1495 Yes he's a gamer, as is 95% of the playerbase. When you play a game you want to feel accomplishment from mastering car control, not just do it for the sake of it, because a game is not a simulator, it's made so that you can feel satisfaction from game progression, not the progression of your driving skills. People forget that Forza games are just that, games.
@@wr0ng569 real life racing is also a game. Taking your real life car to track to improve your driving skill is more satisfying than any game progression, but it's satisfying in video games too.
Some people forget that people actually enjoy racing and driving cars competitively in real life.
Leveling up is a toxic game feature that was only invented to give idiots a sense of progression despite plateauing quickly.
Level up your brain and body instead of a silly set of pixels representing a number.
Actually develop a skill to reach flow state instead of collecting colourful badges and meaningless titles
@@christiantaylor1495 1. I completely agree, nothing can compare to a real car.
2. While it is satisfying to learn to drive masterfully, most people would rather have a goal and while working towards said goal improve their driving, there are of course competitive players and their existence really isn't bad but most people aren't "tryhards" (that word has such a negative connotation but I don't know a better one).
3. Leveling up really isn't toxic if implemented correctly as a means of showing skill, although I can see what you mean.
2. Point also applies to your last and second-to-last paragraphs.
Thanks for discussing this! A lot of people are scumbags on the internet, thank you for not being one of them.
@@christiantaylor1495 you aren’t a racer either, you’re a driver. The racing in Forza is horrible unless you’re versing the clock or other players. The difficulty balancing is awful because it has no consistency.
Because of the above, getting well balanced, exciting races is quite rare. The game has a great simcade handling model and physics that makes driving fun. Terrible A.I. and event balancing though that makes racing regularly alternate between feeling dull and unfair.
"Too lifeless to even qualify as cringe" is a quote, that I'm absolutely stealing from you. Yet another piece of Whitelight goodness.
@@pukei bait
@@pukei Need for Speed: Cap
The most disturbing aspect for me is that I felt these issues but never NOTICED them, I just stopped playing and moved on
@@pukei bait
@cat Bad opinion! Stupid guy 0/10 comment
atleast playing NFS games make you feel like racing
Yep, gorgeous tech and graphics, awful videogame/player experience. Just a tragic waste of man hours.
@@maruf7956 nfs heat feels just bad, the drifting isnt even drifting. The customization and map is the only good thing about it
You make some of the most special videos and writing on youtube, truly something fresh and love your humor.
Keep up the good work!
"In ten years Forza Horizon 5 will still be good, but it will not be remembered" What a great way to put it.
EXACTLY
It will. He's just biased. For the people who played five as their first Forza Horizon, it's the best by far, and to me too, because I'm not biased by nostalgia. Each game is better than the last.
@@christiantaylor1495 "Each game is better than the last." such a bullshit statement. You are way to biased towards your opinion too. I will forever remember the first 2 Horizons, but the one staying mostly at my heart is actually 4. because they did there everything right. You had everything you needed in this game! FH5 is still bugged when it comes to a lot of stuff, and a big let down for me. Its a stretched pizza with the same amount of salamis, yet again some salamis have shrunken compared to 4 haha
@@GregorioStyreco 5 has loads of new features not in 4 but you're all ignoring them. It's like we're playing different games. The first one doesn't have have wheel support, and the second one has tons of restricted areas you can't go and bad ffb on wheel. The only better thing in that is car meets. 5 has everything two has and more and as a better version. I don't know what planet you're on. Forza Horizon 2 was the first open world car game I ever played, but it sucks compared to 5.
@@christiantaylor1495 "features". Yeah have fun with your Faked Reality!
My favourite part about FH4 was everyone lining up at one end of the highway to do a race. I barely see anyone in FH5
@@pukei bait
@@pukei All shooter games are the same with minimal changes
Ahhh the memories
@@pukei thats bullshit. Driving physics are very different. Compare Assetto Corsa with FH5 for example
@@pukei so cringe
I completely agree with the 1st place buff. It’s impossible sometimes to take first after passing everyone else. I thought it was just me.
Same I thought I was just dog water but I guess not
@@MitchellDouglas4933”dog water” this is exactly the type of vocabulary I expect a forza player to use 😂😭
@@Lxk3ez what does it mean
@@christiantaylor1495 pretty sure it just means “bad” :D
@@Lxk3ez yep.
YES... YES.. FINALLY someone who makes a proper video about the problems i've had with this game for ages. Big fan of the Forza series over all. I grew up with it. The changes this game has gone through.. or the lack of changes .. has made me very tired of even mentioning the games name out loud..
I really sincerely hope for Playground games and Turn10 to change this series for the better in the future.
For me it's the total lack of bugfixing / issues they refuse to fix.. Heres new content and a new forza every year though
They won't.
@@JZStudiosonline Exactly, better high more to the studio with neon colored hair though
@@henrik1743 inclusivity is the only thing they added, because I really need everyone to know I'm a triple amputee tranny.
Honestly after finishin almost every race in first place and clockin only around 50 hours i unistalled cause I got bored and the beauty of the graphics couldn't let me play anymore , it's unfortunate since the previous title felt so much alive and just driving around and discovering was fun while here, in 5, I felt the need to play almost every race since I got bored if not and now after finishing them I don't feel compeled to do anythin else
This video genuinely summarizes my experience with the game.
So nice to see I’m not the only one who felt like this series is standing still instead of moving forward.
Especially the AI is god awful
summarizes your experience of your experience of the game??? 🤨lol
That's alot of experiences.
It summarizes my experience of experiencing the experience of the Forza Horizon 5 experience.
I find it's actually moving backwards. But that's my opinion because I haven't actually played the game even though I love the Horizon series. As soon as I saw the pronouns I uninstalled, stupid shit like that does not belong in a racing game.
"Shit games are made tolerable, and good games are made great by their soul. Horizon 5 is a great game made good by it's lack of one" not only does this speak great to me, it is also one of the greatest burns a game could receive.
Yep. Seems like Metacritic being too kind of Forza Horizon 5. Should've been 52. Not 92.
@@purwantiallan5089Nah, like Whitelight said, it's still a really good game, just not great.
I got a week ban for creating a livery that said "Initial Deez Nutz" on a car. The person I made it for is allowed to continue using the livery. You are absolutely right that the sanitization harms the game immensely. It doesn't feel lived in or authentic anymore.
Yeah, exactly felt like a corporate cashcow
My license plate has been bhallzdp since the third game 😂
there absolute clowns when it comes to banning people i got a month ban after they made the confederate flag bannable on my general lee charger
@@buckfast2k226 Understandable that flag is banned, but punishing players that used a car that comes with it stock is just incompetence on their part.
I'm convinced the devs at playground studios are all amateur mobile game developers that have never driven a car before, and are the type of people the spend all day on twitter getting offended by nonsensical things.
Meanwhile I found a bunch of fully nazi themed liveries
As an open world driving game, it needs more built up urban areas for it to feel immersive. Having acres of grass, sand, and jungle make it so boring and lifeless.
100% agreed, I feel like this is the main reason that even with the big maps and impressive physics of fh4 and fh5, I still come back to games like need for speed world (yes, a bit of an old one, I know). The cityscape of NFS W feels so vivid even when there aren't many players online if any. Even with the much smaller map, i feel like NFS W makes exploring much more exciting due to the fact that every bit of the map has so much detail instead of just being lifeless and seemingly endless fields of grass, and we're talking about NFS W, a game that came out 12 years ago. I think it's about time Playground Games start filling those empty spaces in the map, as they make huge maps feel so much smaller than they actually are.
@@lucascerbasi4518 imo, even Burnout Paradise's Paradise City is more "alive" than FH5's Mexico, and it was way more smaller and less "open". Heck even NFs Payback's map (idk what it was called) feels more alive despite having less diverse environment than Mexico.
Maybe because in both maps the city and settlement have more "realistic" vibe by having billboards and adverts, the city layout is a bit realistic like the downtown area is surrounded by either residential area or industrial area, or the streets is more packed with traffic, idk how can I convey it but to me, Paradise City downtown and Fortune Valley (I guess that's the city name) feels more like real city than that city in FH5 and even Edinburgh in FH4.
@@lucascerbasi4518 Ufff, I liked World, had to grind a bit, and even then, all I got was Lotus Elise. But how much I cherished then that Lotus... That was the game that actually brought me to FH. You had an open world, people just doing their stuff, you were a part of some community. Where in FH5, there is minimal chance you have 3+ guys in 1 place, because the map is so big and barren.
It’s my comfort game. I tend to just turn it on and buy a new car, immediately fix it up and paint it, then test out my creation in the open world. The actual races are my least favorite part. Still enjoy it, but I agree with almost all of what you said, especially about the difficulty scaling.
I still remember my excitement with the first 2 Horizon games... the immersion of the first Horizon festival... the variation of the second Horizon festival.. those games were incredible... Horizon 5 is beautiful and soulless
For me it is the opposite. I played 3 and 4 first and loved them (4 a little less). But then I played 1 and 2 and felt them to be lifeless.
@janis swars 4 is really good.
I've just decided to stop playing forza completely now, I've been jumping on for the playlist exclusivecars since fh4 and had every dlc for every forza horizon title but I'm just so bored of jumping on weekly just to get cars and then ignore it till the next week.
Beautiful and soulless. That sounds exactly like my ex-wife.
@@darksu6947 So, she is a ginger then?
At the start of the story… your excited, can’t wait to explore the world and go as fast as you possibly can. By the end… you are just completing the story in the hope something better is around the corner.
@@pukei bait
@@inspektor12 the "bait" has a good point mate
@@CallumsArmy assetto corsa is nothing like forza
@@joshhawkins8394 and Blur is nothing like Assetto Corsa OR Forza.
@@CordovanSplotchVT tf is blur
The main problem with horizon is that progression requires no skill. You can be the best driver, the best at rally or cross country, but you'll still earn less points than just driving in a jungle and hoping you don't crash into a tree. That's why I'm waiting for Motorsport 8. I hope that it'll be good.
not to mention, with the wheelspin system, finishing first with an in-game equivalent of a 24 hour of le mans event doesn't guarantee you any substantial rewards that are any better than just playing the exact same short circuit race several times to farm wheelspins. The fact that character cosmetics, money, emotes, horns, and cars are all bundled in the same fuckery of a system makes it even worse.
Oh. FM8?
Yeah they fucked up that game even more. Sadly.
@@galaxen04That crap was the reason I bought a 360 to play FM4
@joshuaquinones9760 oh gosh, FM4 is the best Motorsport ever, I wish that I could run it on pc and modify it...
Sadly my Xbox 360 died
When you started talking about Horizon 5's writing and characters all I could think was "this franchise is the MCU of the racing genre".
Lmao truuuuuu
"Uhh that was something"
it makes me sad to know this studio is making the new Fable..its gonna be so watered down and milk toast
bruhhhhhhhh you're so on point.
thats genius, ill steal that comparison
Thank you for being able to correctly articulate the issues that a baboon like me just shouts WHERE PROGRESSION 😂 there's so much frustration with these 'small' things, it gets a pass every single game... why?
PS please can we burn Jamin
I feel like it's due to a lot of the community just wanting to get in a nice car and cruise or drift around the map. I do feel like this aspect of the community is important, but having little to no progression just disregards the rest of the community.
Burn all the characters we need new ones
@@C12sR No, burn all the characters and just don't replace them.
@@fluffy6488 It doesn't have much progression because the devs explicitly don't want it to. They aren't targeting a dedicated community, they are targeting casual players who can't bother about progression and just wants to drive the best car as quickly as possible. For people who want progression and more hardcore competition, there is already another game made by them for it, Forza Motorsport. You have a misunderstanding of what the average Horizon player wants.
wanka
This explains so much. When I play fh5 I usually just mess around, drive fast on the highways, tune and modify cars or drift but I don't do much missions.
And the part about races is veryyy true, all I did was crashing into others and rewind every 3 seconds and I thought I was just bad, it turns out the game works in a weird way.
The cars are probably the only good part of that game.
@@maverick7342 yeah, hundreds of good branded car models is great
FH5 got prettiest graphics, biggest map to date, lots of customization options, and tons of things to do, yet somehow it’s not fun to play with. Why this is happening?
It is because the map layout is uninspiring, most of the areas in the center mass are forgettable. As for progression, everything essential is easily handed to the player within the early hours of the game through easily earned wheel-spin.
Once you got great cars through wheel-spins or purchases. there are little to no incentives to earn other exclusive cars which have inferior performances. And since the game’s map is so boring, driving a new car on it doesn’t really help much.
This review is 100% what we needed, I really hope the devs hear this and adjust the next horizon with a lot of that in mind, good job!
I'm not too familiar with the Forza games, but is there really no other game reviewers that have brought up these issues? Some of these problems are pretty huge.
@@Largentina. Its not super common both in terms of reviewers and players alike. I think there are a lot of different reasons like it being popular, people being new to the series, not many good racing games around these days, fanboys and girls, afraid of backlash and this franchise being designed with casual people in mind those same casual people might not even notice or care to notice issues.
@@sirjarko8762 All great points.
@@Largentina. Nope, the subreddit has been voicing these complaints since release, the devs just don't want to hear it.
@Gaia Mason it's pretty obvious who the target audience is for this game and who the devs actually care about.
This is considered a 10/10 for most outlets but for someone that has put more than 200 hrs into the game it is clear it has many flaws. Gone are the days where arcade racers and street racers were thrilling.
Remember PGR? Remember Burnout? I miss them
Personally I like all of the forza horizon games over burnout and PGR. I played PGR on for maybe 6 hours before I gave it up and burnout I put 20-30 hours into. But I have easily 1000+ in the horizon series
Its soooo funny you said this cause I found myself thinking about PGR often when playing fh5, i would jump between fh5 and motorsport 7 and just want something in between like pgr was to a degree, i miss the connection as in emotional attachment the player can get to a certain car due to having to work to get it and then race with it for quite some time before being able to get the next goal car
Another problem with FH5 is that all the roads are way too wide, i can drive 200 mph and still feel like i have all the room in the world to correct a mistake.
@@pukei bait
Why not play burnout?
This was a spectacular review. Wonderfully written, and able to capture in perfect detail all of my disappointments with this game. This is the critical review horizon needs to get better, and the community is better for you having written it. Well done. You just earned yourself a sub. :)
I used to think the critiques of FH5 often felt like petty complaining, but it took someone wording them better like this for me to get the point. I enjoy FH5 but almost exclusively as a sandbox to joyride and customize in. Everything else you explained is woefully apparent when I think about how little I interact with actual racing and progression. 90% of my time with the game is spent customizing cars and just messing around in free roam, rarely doing events. It's great fun, but it's barely a game.
it's basicly a physics engine lol
^ this 100% . I hate the racing in the game so much I leave the difficulty at Novice so I can just 1st place all of the playlist crap as fast as possible, because why would I put any effort into making it harder for me to get rewards? Also, why would I subject myself to rammers and griefers when I can literally ignore them entirely? So that basically makes the game "driving f*ck off simulator", lol.
@@DJMarcO138 forza series have better ai consistency than forza horizon series. maybe free world racing is too hard to balance the ai
@@qupeter1224
The racing isn't open-world.
except theres barely any customization
As a mostly Forza Horizon gamer and someone who is obsessed with this game for GOD KNOWS WHY at this point. You just made the most insanely accurate and perfectly described review I have ever heard ever. Anyone who plays this game like I do plays it a VERY certain way, otherwise this game is honestly a big joke these days. I’ve made multiple rants about it. Absolutely PERFECT review and understanding of the the REAL problems with this game 🙏🙏💯💯👏👏👏
The market for this game is small children. They won't change becasue adults and young adults are not the playerbase.
i got bored of the game after a few months without even finishing the campaign. i really like the car collecting and such and honestly the season and series cars are the only things that keep me coming back. the only demographic that continues playing the game is car enthusiasts
@@pukei bait
I still play the game quite a lot but I am a modder so it works out. It honestly sucks that the only way i can truly enjoy the game anymore is either modding and messing around WITH FRIENDS or cruising/cops v robbers or just anything that is WITH FRIENDS or hell even random people to enjoy the game anymore b/c racing just isn't fun anymore.
@@pukei it's almost like they're all car games
It was so incredibly frustrating to work tirelessly on learning breaking, gearing and race lines only to fail at them and see that crashing the corner into your opponents whilst sliding along the wall to victory was so much more effective.
This really sums it up for me. I recently started playing this game and I really struggled to enjoy it. I love the cars and the environment but hate literally all the events and story. The most fun I have is literally just driving around and exploring the map in different cars. Honestly I wish I could get a nfs 2005 set in this game. Show the map off by sequentially unlocking it for the next part of the story. The story doesn't need to be great either. The whole blacklist scheme works well enough. This isn't a movie, the fun comes from driving and playing.
Just get a racing wheel
@@christiantaylor1495 lol just buy a house
@@christiantaylor1495
Literally changes nothing about how lackluster this entry is. The very platform it's built on is faulty. Adding a wheel does nothing for an overly arcade experience. Anyone who would buy a wheel to play this is foolish. This isn't FM, GT, or countless other PC SIMs. It's forza horizon, the CoD of racing games.
This is an unbiased knowing experienced review of this game ...a breath of fresh air in the "if its not hyper positive its negative" monotony
Forza Horizon 5 is half under, half overrated.
05:10 The "false-red-zone" is a huge issue in Gran Turismo as well. Modulating the AI-difficulty should not be accomplished with mid-turn brake-checks IMO. It is frustrating that even today those seemingly basic racing mechanics are still an issue across entire franchises.
Gran Turismo 7 is the main example of a false red zone.
people like my roommate bobby are the reason why these games still suck. this dude thinks every AAA game he plays is a 10/10 masterpiece no matter what.
dude thinks call of duty search and destroy is a better competitive shooter than csgo. the vast majority of the population doesnt care they will eat up every dlc and in game purchase and never complain about the quality.
@@realyopikechannel You should put a stop to him.
@@realyopikechannelisnt cs:go technichally a AAA game?
Before I turned it off, I had to brake 3 bars after to not get overtook. It's trash
Your first line about the first place being harder to get than to maintain it, is totally right. I tried playing on many difficulty levels and once I got up front, it was very easy to maintain it
@@pukei bait
I've been feeling that something's off when I first played FH5. I enjoyed FH4 and love a lot of things about it (except the snow season, but it grows on you). You managed to address most of the issues I've been having with the game.
Yeah the map on FH5 is probably one of the worst ones so far. Mexico sucks lol
yep i started forza with 4 got 5 and was... underwhelmed it just not as good but its like you cant go back cause everyone is on 5 like its fun but I felt everything in 4 more the races were more intense the story was there and the map was more fun. idk its just not the same
@@Fishybpp I’m probably going to go back
@yungmetroshotya 96 I might aswell I just like it more ngl
@@Fishybpp I believe everyone has gone back to 4, checking the player charts forza 5 has half of the players as forza 4
I just hope the next FH will feel like an actual event again, an event you look forward to being a part of.
The introduction races of FH1 and FH4 made me cry cause they felt so fkn amazing.
FH5 crashed on me the first two times I did the intro race and once I did finish it I was left disappointed cause the excitement just isn't there this time around.
Also Mexico sucks as a map. In other FH games I had places I always enjoyed coming back to, I made my own paths around the maps and memorized them.
In FH5 I couldn't be bothered to even 100% the entire map cause it's so forgettable to me :/
My greatest pet peeve with this game is the fact that AI drive on rails. A lot of cars I like are FR and I love to build them for top speed, and it always ends up with me fighting for every ounce of grip while the AI take the corners like it's nothing. Which we are supposed to have similar cars and following the same race line so it makes no sense to me.
GTA 5 has the same problem. AI has insane amounts of grip.
wheres the fun in game if everything is easy?
@@pukei bait
@@apinkofficial3936 well, there is no fun. But there also isn't much fun in games where everything is impossible to beat. A balance of difficulty has to be striked, it has to be difficult enough to be challenging and rewarding to beat, but not too difficult to the point of feeling impossible to beat. Lots of other racing games strike this difficulty balance really well.
@@pukei bait
Not only is it a new Whitelight video, but it's one that supports my opinion when anyone I've spoken to thinks this game is perfect. So so happy!
Its always exciting when he uploads
Yeah, the game is awful. You can smell the misogyny it reeks
@@konradcurze8176 Misogyny? Where? Are we even playing the same game?
It kinda is perfect for me. It came at a perfect time for me, dug me out of depression a little bit and I just get lost cruising through highways, admiring the horizon (no pun intended)
I’ve had zero dull moments with it.
Though it’s my first Forza game ever, so my opinion might not be well informed. But yet, it’s a perfect game to me.
@@flyingplantwhale545 I get it man. 4 was similar for me. Sometimes sentimental value surplants all.
my biggest gripe with horizon 5 was how easy it was to get all of the fastest cars. It might just be because I was young, but in older forza games it felt really cool to get a new car, and you admired it more. In FH5 it feels like they throw all of the fastest supercars and hypercars at you, to the point where they don't even feel special. I have around 300 hours in the game and I have every single car available from the autoshow + a bunch of season exclusives. I probably only purchased about 5 of these 500+ cars, the rest were just given to me in one way or another. The only way I think they could make up for this is maybe having some more ultra rare Horizon edition cars, but I already have almost all of them anyways.
I'm so happy that you made this video, I myself wanted to cover this in a larger video on Horizon 5 as the initial honeymoon phase wore off, but was so disapointed and depressed with the end product that I couldnt bring myself to get to it. I really hope that this hits all of the heads up at playground. One thing I would have added to this is the embarassing amount of recycled and cut content from Horizons past that has been added back in in new "content updates" making long term players who log in every week to get new cars feel like we have been spit on. With todays world of such wonderful and insane cars that release, we dont get any of them, just cars that we've been playing with for years now. Thank you so much for getting this to a much larger audience, it means the world to us whos voices most often cannot be heard.
Heyy glad to see you here Moses!!! 💪💪💪
I was just about to comment how I was glad there werent any standard arguments we have heard a million times against the game in his review (like recycled content), and also still appreciates FH5 for what it is and doesnt make it seem like its a peice of junk and a disgrace for the Horizon series, like I know some creators do.
Haven't played 5 since January. That old Mustang as a 200 points prize was insulting, especially when it was an Autoshow car in 4.
@@nightdriver7216 What about it, I would rather have it in the game at a later point than not at all, and if you dont want to grind, go drive it in 4.
Please, please do one for the anniversary of the fh5. This video was good, but it left out so many of the shortcomings of this game. I dont think the biggest problems would be the ai or the lack of progression. Yes they are frustrating but the lack of innovation from the developers are much more annoying (look no further than the forza rear aero, and forza splitter, or the roster of cars in the eliminator that have been unchanged for almost 1 year)
Man, as someone who has around 400 hours on FH5, this is a perfect review of the game. Perfectly put, as usual, Whitelight.
Too many commas, u sound like an idiot
@@pukei Forza Horizon is waaay different. The physics are definitely arcadey, but they are 100x better than almost every other arcade open world racer.
I just wish he did some more comments on the multiplayer aspect.
Multiplayer is absolutely trash in FH5, can't even choose what class you want to race, or even road vs cross country.
I think they know that 99% of people will do road races and cross country would be dead for the 1% of disabled people who enjoy them.
@@pukei bait
One of the best reviews of any game I've seen. Having put so many hours into Forza Horizon games, this detailed analysis is spot on. It should be required viewing for everyone involved with developing this game.
Trackmania has this golden rule of track design, that if you make a jump you either have the player see where they land or put a visible sign telling them the direction.
That's because trackmania uses tracks. Horizon is an open world, you could choose any route you want between 2 checkpoints
@@DriverDGaming Yes, just like Horizon has tracks that you race on Jesus
Very poorly designed tracks
@@pukei bait
@@pukei just like all the times i did your mom
Fh5 does have seasons, but its greatest weakness is that the seasons in Mexico are really the same. Minor temperature variances, and little weather anomalies. It's a tropic area, so it only really has two seasons: Hot, and less Hot.
Dry hot and wet hot, with wet hot fucking up half of the PR Stunts for a week
19:00 i get this because in previous games they even had the radio presenters hyping it up before you'd unlocked it which made me feel more immersed and imagining what it might be like, in actuality i grinded the whole progression thing in the first 2 days, honestly i'd forgotten about it
24:14 wait what i thought keira was australian
26:12 i hate jaimin
26:50 DUDE I LITERALLY THOUGHT THAT WHEN HE CRASHED
28:00 yes. even in 4, jaimin atleast tried to give some secrecy before the scene expanded, sure its the same outcome but it felt a lot more natural
29:00 my number 1 complaint in all the forza games is this
30:16 yeah i did learn some stuff but it did get boring, it's just like "uhuh haley, i know there's these things, i'm driving on them"
because 5 borrowed *so* much stuff from 4, like the menus, it just feels like a holiday to me and i don't feel too different based on how i felt driving around in 4, it's a bit sad though how i can say 4's map was a lot cooler, considering how much effort they put into this one (that is, the majority of it, if you actually zoom in some of the textures and modelling is terrible)
i very much agree with you calling it lifeless, as i think the main thing that drove people to drive or atleast fast travel to different parts of the map in FH4 was the forzathon lives, now they've been turned into specific modes which most people just avoid, reducing the spread
i actually picked up the crew for 50p recently and it was an absolute blast, some of the issues that are in the horizon franchise as a whole weren't even a thought in my head while playing it, it just nailed it so much better
great video i agreed with lots of it
The game really is more focused on how gorgeous it can look than anything else really.
@@pukei bait
It doesn't even look that good. I play on high/ultra for most settings and the car looks amazing but the environment looks terrible, especially the plant textures. Textures look extremely bad when further away and then when you get close enough they switch very obviously to better (but still not great) textures. Maybe this goes away if you play on extreme settings but 99% of players can't.
graphics actually suck for the most part but everyone is so overhyped they hallucinate.
@@sumbodee3 People are deceived by mediocre graphics and good lighting look at gta
@@Matt-pq4tq this game, gran turismo, and assetto corsa and ac competizion all look like absolute garbage
I find that the announcer of Radio Eterna is to me the most humanly relatable character in FH5. She likes classical music and by the tone of voice she uses to explain about "double skill scores", it's apparent that she too thinks everyone else involved with the festival is mentally 4 years old.
Which, by the way, is literally a clone of the radio announcer from FH4's classical music radio. I haven't even played 5 once, but what you said is the same so i don't need to lol
This is such a Reddit fedora tipped comment
@@matthewanthony4606they ain’t wrong tho
I think it's kinda sad that Horizon 1 is so overlooked today. I feel like Horizon was at its best back then and shoulve sticked more to it's progression and the "feel" (story) part of the festival. It may just be nostalgia but the fist game is a lot more enjopyable all the way through. I've recently replayed it on PC/Steam Deck with the Xenia Emulator (Highly Recommended for anyone tech savy btw) in a sort of duel with a friend playing on XBox One all the way to 100% and it was an absolute BLAST!
I've always maintained that Forza is a repository of excellent 3D models to port into better games. FH5 is beautiful, boring, frustrating and grindy. I bought it to play with friends who became bored of the game even before I did. The points made in this video are so accurate, especially about crashing opponents to win. Most game modes have no incentive not to and when I get frustrated with seemingly superhuman AI (I managed to PIT maneuver and spin a Drivatar finally and felt so proud) I end up doing the same thing. Weekly challenges are something I do until I get the cars I want and then I turn the game off. They're like grinding in GTA. It's a gorgeous game with many, many variations of the same things to do over and over until you get tired of it.
It's really just a matter of the AI difficulty not being consistent. I play on the hardest difficult and to be honest a lot of the time the 1st place racer seems like it is the same difficulty across the upper half of difficulties
@@pukei bait
Even then, Forza models are not as high quality as Gran Turismo models. Forza models are always weird; since Forza Motorsport 4, certain cars like the SW20 or the R22 just look... wrong. The proportions. They look off in a number of cars.
I agree on everything except grindy. The game is as far from grindy as it can possibly get imo, and I almost never play it 😅
@@Freezorgium The 1970 Challenger has had a weird droopy and over-wide nose since it was introduced as DLC. WAY BACK! I bought a PS5 for GT7, I miss my Pantera. My playtime in Horizon 5 is basically, log on, collect my storefront payout, see how many people downloaded my stuff, leave. I haven't even ported over most of my design work from FH4 because I can't even be bothered to port them.
My dude you are a monster at these videos. Gaming is so much more than gaming and you put into words the things I didn't know I wanted to say about some of my favorite franchises. Thank you from a stone cold gamer who is constantly looking for the next inspired piece of greatness..and the Whitelight critique to shortly follow it.
I just realised something, Forza Horizon is the antithesis of say burnout, burnout has rubber banding where the people behind you are always breathing down your neck but never too far ahead of you to warrant giving up. Horizon the first place can get so far away it warrants easy giving up and as soon as you take him over he loses his tenacity, it has anti rubber banding.
One of the best vids on UA-cam. I was hypnotized for the whole duration of it. Accepting and telling the ugly the truth when still loving the game is hard to achieve. Good job man.
I actually remember when I shed a tear of joy when FH3 trailer came out and I saw that car jump through the desert. Game had a soul. The feeling never came back for the following games.
4 was definitely not soulless
@@mohawk4759 HAH
@@mohawk4759 Agreed. 4 was the best in the series for me
@James_Smith_ definitely 3
Absolutely spot on. Covers basically every gripe. Here’s hoping Playground pay attention but sadly, I highly doubt that since they only care about numbers & player data now.
I love racing games, but for some reason horizon could never pull me in more than few hours, and I could never explain why. Now you explained it very well!
After playing FH5 for a while, I went back and played FH3, there’s just something about FH3 that made the map feel more alive and I feel like car handling is better somewhat. And I really agreed with the points you made in the videos including AI, Showcases, and so on
Horizon 2 had a Top Gear-esque charm to it. It's been a long fall.
I too have noticed that handling is worse than the older games. Lots of cars in fh5 feel like you're driving on ice.
@@wigletron2846 Ikr
@@wigletron2846 well the cars have always handled way too good in Forza games.
@@zachb1706 this game the handling feels intentionally nerfed and it's awkward.
This captures exactly how I feel, the shortcomings of this game needed to be addressed and you addressed them.
@@pukei bait
This was a fantastic deep dive into some of the points preventing Forza Horizon to absolutely take off and shine. Since the start I've felt like Horizon 5 was missing something, but I felt it was not worth my time trying to figure out what, so I just accepted that I didn't like it as much and that playing it felt stale, but you have hit the nail on the head with such precision. Every step of the way I thought to myself "He's exactly right this is exactly what it feels or seems like."
I hope at least someone at Playground watched this, someone who can actually get through to the leads, because your opinions and feedback are extremely concise, clear and well thought out, there is not a shred of doubt to be found in them, not a single "Oh well he says this but maybe between the lines he means this and we should do this instead." It is just flat out very fair feedback that should be taken seriously that I believe a lot of players think but aren't able to put into words as clear as this.
FH1 was the best one, every car felt earnt and as such was rewarding. The whole festival vibe actually felt like a festival and you actually were working your way up the ladder. I struggle with the new games as for example, in FH4 I barely played, yet had 15m in the bank and every car I could ever want. It’s far too easy nowadays and as such it’s boring
Totally agree! Many different mechanics trivialize progression. Personally, I'm sick of starting as the "Festival Boss".
Yeah horizon 1 is definitely the better game imo
Forza motorsoport 4 and horizon 1 / 2 were the fkn peak. 4 wasn't that bad either to be honest
I 100% agree. The whole feeling of a believable festival where you race cars and work your way up from no one to someone is what sold this whole series. If 5 had come out first we wouldn’t have horizons anymore, because there’s nothing to accomplish so you’d get bored in half a hour and never come back
I think it's almost impossible to disagree with this statement. 1 is easily the best one. I don't think it's even close.
I remember playing FH1 on the 360 in 2016 when it was free with Live Gold, it just felt so interesting, then when I had 2 weeks of Game Pass in November, the same feeling wasn't there.
As much as the sequels have all improved the physics, detail, and open world. None of them have recaptured the magic of Forza Horizon 1, actually feeling like a competitive street racer.
another annoying thing about big jumps during races is that even if you have a really good jump, the landing will slow almost to the stop while the opponents will land normally and just drive past you. I had way too many races ruined because the last jump just meters before the finish line, slowed me down enough that the opponent that was seconds behind me won
Apparently possible imo.
Just a little note about rewinds, I used to crutch on them a lot, but when you get into multiplayer races you can’t rewind without setting yourself in an unwinnable position, so due to that, I have learned to not use it. To take my turns more carefully, watch my speed, etc… it’s a much better game if you pretend rewind isn’t there, but like you said. Necessary evil
you can disable rewind in settings. i usually just restart the event if i fuck up too bad, otherwise it's still fun to me to at least get a clean race and testing tunes
What the devs dont seems to understand is that if a player can cheat they probably will
@@rexyrox8645 the old "given the chance players will optimise the fun out of a game"
@@asneakychicken322 that was why in xcom 2 at release they added a timer between turns, they limited the moves you had and removed the "overwatch" feature that in the first game let you make moves and not suffer the consequences because it would rewind and make it like nothing happened. There was an uproar and the devs had to add back the overwatch feature, thus ruining the whole point of the game. But if you wanted the challenge and you wanted to experience the game like the devs intented there was a difficulty that allowed you to do that.
@@asneakychicken322 speedrun ban any% by downloading a mod that completely enhances the vinyl manager and nothing else.
Dude this video is so amazing and well done. It's like you dove into my subconscious and pulled out every single thing I dislike about FH5 (despite still loving it). I desperately hope this video serves as a comprehensive checklist of improvements for the next Horizon game. The potential is immense.
I felt bad for hating the map. I told myself that its even better than fh3's map, my favourite. You solved my problem. I spend 90% of my time in that central plateau, which is disgustingly dull. The rainforest also isn't fun because the trees are so short and its like a crazed lumberjacker hacked off giant chunks. The map had potential but it failed to really spark my interest.
Also, with playground games, it frustrates me how few arenas there are. So many times do I come across a place I would love an arena in. But no. Instead we get the baja circuit which is prosaic.
Then, the lack of a vibrant modern city doesn't make the game feel cutting age and instead feels cheap and second rate. And while it probably represents Mexico well, the shacks that are houses look so out of place with the multitude of expensive cars. In a game where the sky is the limit, the wrong elements are grounded. If cars are given out like bottles, how come the roads are so worn and the infrastructure feels second rate. FH5 needs to stick to a direction. I would treasure a game where it really feels like a developing nation with common cars that you can eventually build from. The mix makes the game feel more worthless, because it really feels alien to what is real.
Central plateau is constructed this way for a reason - every obstacle is shuffled to the corners to make room for Eliminator arena. At least this is how I feel.
3's map is absolute dog crap!
Japan should be the next setting
Agreed
@@ScorpionF1RE_USA what.. that’s my favorite though….
Played around 1000 hours of Forza Horizon 4 with my buddies and loved every single moment of it for the most part. It wasn't uncommon for us to go for all nighters of us just playing that game, while on the other hand, the longest session we've had with FH5 was probably, 3 hours TOPS. FH4 just hit different :(
@@pukei bait
@@pukei I would not got that far. Actually this is insulting. It is like saying Arma 3 and COD are the same. Or Outrun games are the same as the spiritual successors made by fans who forget crashing rules where the party who crashes into the rear of a car needs to be pushed back. Or all coffee is the same which is not the case. Over-roasting is done to hide bad quality vs good quality coffee offers diverse flavours.
I Felt the exact same playing endloss rounds of mini games, eliminator and races in FH4 and now cannot motivate to continue with FH5
Having so many good cars be free with the wheelspin made me have no attachment to my library of vehicles. I upgraded a few here and there but just auto upgrading them is easy, cheap, and money is in those wheelspins too.
You spoke directly from my heart. I felt everything you said from the very depths of my soul.
Me to every new racing game: you're cool, but you'll never be mid 00s Need for Speed
NFS Hot Pursuit anyone?
As a very casual player who bounced off Horizon in under 20 hours, i did not expect literally every issue i had with the game to be summarised so perfectly and concisely. I thought i was the odd one out, an exception to the rule; that i just had an outlier opinion on a game that was otherwise well-received. Nice to know i wasn't the only one :^)
You nailed it with your description of the skill score system. It rewards driving like a lunatic more than actual skillful driving and maneuvering.
I think my dad was trying to get skill score in real life when he was driving while drinking Heineken
@@Poopfartofficialwreckage-wreckage-great air-crash landing
How can one man be so brave and so correct
@@pukei bait
@@pukei So Assetto Corsa and Mario Kart are the same because they’re both in the racing genre?
@@pukei You realize that Assetto Corsa is a racing sim and Mario Kart is an arcade racer
SIR... YOU ARE DOING THE LORD'S GOOD WORK. I felt SO MANY of these points in the deepest of my soul and you articulated each point beyond the level I have energy to but still feel deep inside.
Thank you.
This video is so accurate it almost hurts. This sums up all the things that playground games could improve and change on.
@@pukei bait
Wow! You are right about everything. I thought I was the only one racing poorly. It's a shame that a game that is so pretty can not address these fundamental flaws; especially 1 year after release.
@@pukei bait
I completely agree with most of it. I played for about 2-3 months. It was 'wow' at first, but I soon came to realize the difficulty problems. Not being a very good driver myself, I did definitely improve, but the seemingly random difficulty and in some cases nearly impossible task of getting to 1st place, makes it annoying. I love the rewind button, because indeed it would be impossible to ever even get close to winning without it. And I agree that this should not be the case.
My goal was to obtain every single car. I didn't, I quit when I had about 90%. By now that would be more, because of the continuous new releases of cars. There is too much to do weekly with the online events schedule and I feel like there is little time to play as you want. I started finding the best ways to make money and spins, so that I could get as many cars as possible, limiting the fun experience of driving the cars and the racing and limiting variety and instead making it grindy to a fault.
It is the problem with my desire to get them all, sure, but also in the execution of the game itself. I had a blast playing for a while, but it fell off significantly shortly after. The seasons became as much of an obsession as gacha games and MMO could become because of FOMO; I needed these rewards or there would be no completion of the collection. I had to stop, for my own sanity and I could stop, barely, because the rest of the game had lost its shine by then.
I feel like there are more issues than you talked about, but you nailed most of it. It would have been much better if the racing and AI and difficulty were more consistent and if races were the actual main focus for obtaining rewards, not spins and skillpoints. And... I really could do with my mostly single player experience games having no FOMO aspects. They sneak that into way too many modern games now. Because they want you to keep playing their game. No one has the time to play 500 games daily or weekly just to keep up, but they psychologically manipulate people like me to try, anyway.
Much better would be if they just made those cars available after introduction, just not as easy to get, or only available for purchase after getting all the base game cars. Something like that.
I sometimes wonder which cars I have missed by now, probably a lot. I do catch myself wanting to play again from time to time, but then I remember that its one part frustration at the inconsistency, one part FOMO and only one part of fun and I opt not to. Don't want to sink back into the pool of FOMO for a bunch of cars, anyway.
Also, I laughed at the "uwu-mobiles". guilty as charged. xD
I think you hit the nail on the head. So many races felt mindless and meaningless, like when you're just gunning down police for the sake of it. I think they should definitely take a note from Dirt and Grid, where you have a limited number of rewinds per base and each one costs you some credits at the end of the race. Just having that subconsciously in the back of your mind would add a lot of weight to decision-making in races
Well... you can turn it off and earn more credits or use it and lose credits so it already is a feature?
You know you could just turn the rewind feature off which gives you more credits so this idea is kind of pointless but could make things bit interesting as well
Yeah, cause i'd rather get a supercar rather then grind to get the car i want. :/
@@AlexxxxxSaysHi Except that you can't ? You don't get any additional credits for turning off rewinds in FH5
@@evandaymon8303 No it doesn't, they changed it in FH5
"Horizon 5 is a great game made good, by the lack of its' soul", is probably my new go to description of this game, beautifully said.
At this point the only thing that keeps me playing horizon games is the sense of progress they create. Unlock a new car each week, earn more points or accolades or whatever it is in a given game. It works but only for a while. After a couple months of playing fh5 I found myself just logging on with the goal the complete the weekly challanges and get the new cars but after driving around in freeroam for a few minutes I just got bored and quit. And this breaks my heart even more when I remember just how excited I was when this game came out...
I think you hit the head on the nail regarding both the games catering to a broader audience and its quite frankly toxic positivity. There can be too much of a good thing, because it leads to desensitization. If you try to appeal to everyone all the time, you will ultimately alienate more people than you entice. And if everything is always 100% super positive hype all the time, then those emotions lose all meaning.
FINALLY someone puts his finger on all of the issues that have been creeping up on us over the last horizon editions. Great work, I recognized every single problem immediately! 😅
I remember that racing line breaking zone thing being a part of every Forza game i've played
Can we just appreciate that this man thought to use the Motorsport 6 soundtrack in this video? It’s actually incredible.
Driveclub as well
@@pukei bait
No it's not.
“Forza Horizon 5 will still be good, but it will not be remembered”
Sums up the game perfectly
@@pukei bait
Ended up turning off all UI & putting on the crash test dummy suit to get rid of dialogue, the dance of the rest is alright but this is a FAR cry from how good a $70 AAA title from Xbox should be.
Internet Historian and yourself are probably the best writers on UA-cam for level of content you make.
And Ahoy is a good writer.
Summoning Salt
I don't get the comparison. It's hard to say one is better than the other when they have completely different goals.
*cough* LEMMiNO *cough*
Noah Caldwell Gervais
I am absolutely floored at how well you managed to capture my thoughts about this game. Incredible!
Wow, you have summed up everything I've noticed about the game but never dedicated the thought to figuring it out. The most obvious things to me were the scripted Showcase events, the rubber banding in races, and the "1st place or nothing". And it's really that last one that made me do exactly what you said. Restart races as soon as I'm not perfect, give up on some races because I can't get to first place on the difficulty I want and there is no second or third place so I'm not happy with that. This is why I stopped playing, but I never "knew" it. Great content!
NO WAY!! I've been watching all your racing game videos lately , such a joy to watch. I was wondering if you ever would cover FH5, and BOOM, there it is!! Out of nowhere. Can't wait to watch this as soon as I have time. Cheers!!
The first Horizon is still the best. From 2 on the game became almost “too” open world. Being able to drive every car off-road effortlessly makes it too arcadey
I agree, driving a Veyron across desert at over 200mph is just stupid. It makes the off road cars feel totally pointless
@@anonony9081 it really does man like they really should've have made non offroad cars lose lots of traction when their offroad. Like how the modern nfs games does it.
1 and 2 were the best. Cause you had to work hard to get what you want. I was able to get nearly 100 cars, including an m600 and a la ferrari. And i especially loved the challenges. And the sounds were incredible. 2 and the first were the peak of the series. 4 and 5 was the downfall.
The only thing i really disliked about FH1 was the forzed dubbing. I wanted it in english, but instead i was forced to listen to dreadful norwegian voice acting, with the characters not sounding like any real person i've ever heard talking
@@anonony9081 Did we play the same game? Yeah you can shoot yourself at 200mph through the desert with a Veyron, but good luck handling it without proper offroad mods. Offroad cars (especially rally cars) are still the best at offroading bone stock, although you can mod some supercars to become competitive offroad.
Couldn't agree more. I had just played Most Wanted and Carbon before trying Horizon 5. I got bored INSTANTLY. For all the reasons you stated. No soul, no progression, no stakes. A good sandbox with no vision and greater appeal as priority number 1
Finally. Someone who is making points of shortcomings of this.
yeah but it's still better than some tosh like crew 2
@@michaelwesten4624 eh barely. I have both of these games and the crew 2 nails FH5 and 4 in a few ways. It just scratches a different itch than Forza without quite the same polish. Honestly I think they're in the same boat when it comes to the limitations of dev creativity.
@@michaelwesten4624 Tbh I don't try to find shortcomings games by comparing them to other games.
But I compare them to their previous entry.
To me, Crew 2 is a good alternative but is not actually helpful to compare with FH. People play them for different reasons
You just summarized all my problems with Horizon in a single video. I needed something like this to realize how much they actually affected my experience with the game. I hope the next installments go down a different route
The next installments WON'T go down a different route. FORZA HORIZON 5 is arguably the most mid entry in the series, and it was considered a "masterpiece". I never rolled my eyes so hard.
Not being able to interact with people with an in game voice chat makes this game so freaking boring.
@@pukei bait
You have an amazing ability to question every game mechanic and understand what is missing.
This video puts so many words on stuff i felt playing the game. Great work !
I think this games ironically needs more limits : less cars, less open areas, more dense environments, less content (cosmetics, danses, filler for lottery...)
First video I've watched of yours, and what a damn good first impression. Your style of writing in combination with the simple video editing is really engaging to watch. I don't even play Forza, but I appreciate the quality here so much. Nice job, man.
Same, never even played this game yet found great satisfaction just watching the video.
I've played a lot of Horizon 3, 4, and 5 each... for about 1-2 months on release because I played them all on gamepass. It's weird, I really like them but I just always have that feeling I could be liking them more. Whitelight always hits perfectly.
I really hope playground finds and watches this video. The ending section on soul especially really got me. So sad to see not just horizon, but many other games fall into this problem... It's probably the reason so many of us stick with older games, where breaking the rules wasn't "bad" like it is in most modern titles.
Yea I just stopped playing it and put on this video that I was avoiding until I played it myself. Even a lot of the songs just have this corporate feel to them and I feel like the game is constantly saying "YOU'RE EXCITED" rather than just providing fun. It feels shallow. I've been playing a couple indie games alongside Horizon, and i'm so much more excited by Neon White and Signalis than I am by this 10/10 Game of the Year best arcade racer of all time.
@@OneAndZer0 you seemingly love FM4 MORE THAN FH5.
I had that "unlock a new part of the festival" menu pop up while I was cruising or drag racing other people and it always slows you down to a complete stop and traps you in the menu for multiple seconds. That was honestly the most annoying thing for me and I was so happy after I unlocked all stuff so I never have to see that awful menu again xD
@@pukei bait
I have no idea why theh didn't keep the vibe of the first game. It was full of life. I feel like the newer games leave those vibes just at the main hub
1 and 2 were when turn 10 was with us, before they left to do the sounds in GT
They're trying to please a wider audience
@@christianherrera8359 That never worked imo. You can't please everyone at the same time, not to mention that by doing that the originality kinda fades away
@@ralcolfwolfcoon8207 1 and 2 was made when playground was not under microsoft then 3 , 4 where ok .
This!
The point about some cars just being better than others is so true, me and my friends used to do races where we could only use cars within a certain rating, but no mater how low the rating restriction, there was always one car that somehow managed to absolutely steam roll the rest of us
I play most of this game and it's good, but all these claims in this video are appositely true and covered everything I had a problem with this game. You're probably the first person to shine a light on this and I'm very glad you made a video about this. Keep it up.
My only guess that why Playground Games is sticking to this formula for Horizon is because it makes all types of players welcome, whether you are buying a racing game for your 3 year old kid, or you are new to the racing genre, or a person with accessibility issues playing video games, the game welcomes everyone.
But that accessibility hampers the game's quality. There's so much depth that this game is lacking because they are held back by trying to welcome everyone into the game, instead of focusing on what their current players want for the game.
The only reason I'm even sticking around for Forza is their handling model and car roster. If any other racing games had those 2 checkboxes met, let's say NFS or The Crew, I would probably not be playing Forza, or even buy the game at all.
Horizon is really a dream for late night cruisers and people that like to mod cars, but if you're a race enthusiast youre a fish out of water. Such a beautiful game only for their to be very little incentive to do the one thing you'd think it would be good at.
The problems i think the current horizon games have:
•The "story"
•The way you start already as a legend
•The lack of UI change that is just a a clean and modern looking UI
•The soundtracks that is somehow got worse than FH4
•Generic map and flat map unlike the first and second game that had a diverse geography and many known spots
•The radio Dj's getting bland and more "family friendly
•Rubberbanding
•Lack of inovation
•Generic races with the flag check points that were added arround Fh2 and Fh3
•No restrictions on the cars you can drive which was one of the best things on Forza Horizon 1 since it forced you to try new and diferent cars
•Anna
•Boring events
•Lack of car body customization
•No tents arround the map that would give you the races instead of a image floating on the road
•The immersion of the festivak that was lost since Fh3 (you can also tell by that by the trailers, just search for Fh1 and Fh2 trailers and compare it to all the other games)
•The overpowerd starring cars
Thats all, thank you for reading my comment
so what youre saying is that the game is the games biggest problem.. agreed