The Fall of Forza Horizon

thank you know when I'm playing through my favorite games I find that I usually don't touch a lot of my catalog like I find my habits generally fall into what I've heard called the 80 20 principle where 20 of my games get eighty percent of my play time and vice versa in those games you have stuff like Minecraft the classic need for speeds and a couple Sim Racers but one that's taken up a lot of my time is the Forza Horizon series I started playing Forza just over eight years ago and now I've been playing them regularly for the past six and I'm gonna be honest they don't really do it for me anymore and for the longest time I wasn't exactly sure why maybe I had moved on from that kind of game or maybe I just wasn't as invested in it as I was when I was younger but I think I know the real reason to figure that out let's go back to the start of Forza Horizon all the way back in 2012. actually let's go a little bit further but now it's official we are in a recession the research it's 2009 the world is just starting to recover from the 2008 housing crisis Obama's inaugurated is America's first black president and Bron GP wins the F1 Constructors title in their first season but among all that we got this foreign Motorsport 3 was released on October 22nd 2009 to widespread critical Acclaim Forza Forza Sports started as Microsoft's attempt at making a direct competitor to Sony's immensely successful Gran Turismo franchise with both games being semi-realistic simcade Racers with the focus being on track racing however there were some key differences in how Forza Motorsport and Gran Turismo approached this idea and these differences would carry over into both the Motorsport and Horizon games namely the customization the AI and a different kind of approach to physics let's break each of these down the customization as much as people now like the harp on Forza for not being super Innovative in their approach was a main focus in the early games mainly because the people who developed the games were Car Guys themselves so they thoroughly enjoyed the feeling of owning and building a car up to make it entirely their own at this time that really hadn't been done in a game like Forza the only options you got in most games was stuff like the color and maybe a body kit and its main competitor in Gran Turismo well their newest release up to that point only let you change the color rims and add a wing while Forza Motorsport allowed for wings Splitters bumpers side skirts a vast of wheel and rim options and a very in-depth and malleable Livery editor that allowed for players to make practically anything they wanted although that would later become more restrictive also in Motorsport 3 and onwards the ability to swap both engines and drive trains was added allowing the player to drastically change the handling characteristics and really most of the characteristics of practically any car foreign was built from the ground up with a new approach to making a virtual eraser now normally movement AI is built like any other piece of code with restrictive and rigid lines determining how it should behave if this then that kind of statements but the forza development team had a new kind of interesting idea the drivatar basically what the AI would do is it would take the inputs of the player whether it be braking turning accelerating sliding or anything else and use it as training data along with the ai's spatial awareness of the track to begin training the AI to be more like the player and in turn be more realistic and more human there's a great interview that Forza creative director Dan greenewald gave about how they made the original Forza Ai and how it changed over time which I'd highly recommend checking out if you have more interest in that the physics and Forza Motorsport were meant to be a fairly realistic simulation but with arcade accessibility or a Sim cage for sure although his green oil and my attempts at racing show many players found the original physics to be too challenging to handle and made it far too difficult for casual players so the devs implemented the toggleable assist to both counteract the difficult physics and to give highly skilled players an incentive to turning off all the assists in being awarded with extra credits after each race [Music] those were just a couple of the elements that made the original Forza Motorsports stand out from the Gran turismos of the time and this along with the general quality of the titles meant that they did very well both commercially and critically with most claiming that there were two very particular high points in Motorsport 3 and 4. 4 especially was an amazing title for its day it had a great physics engine amazing graphics for a game from 2011. the best customization the series had up to that point solid progression car soccer and Clarkson and that's not something you can say about many of their efforts from the last few years I've gone again in the plums this game really had just about everything and it is widely regarded as one of the best Forza Motorsport heck forza games in the series really seeing the level of success they got from their track racers playground games decided to end the 360 console generation with a new project [Music] thank you [Music] Forza Horizon was a big departure from what the Motorsports had established up to that point instead of it being another track Focus razor it was instead an open world street racing game centered around the concept of a music and racing Festival it had a similar vibe to Coachella or Lollapalooza but with the racing aspect drawing from games like Need for Speed or Midnight Club minus the cops I personally really like this idea as a basis for a racing game and it appeals to me specifically even more as I'm a musician and I've heard some of my favorite songs now originally from playing this game like the power by DJ Fresh Are You Mine by the Arctic Monkeys or blue Monday by New Order side note yes I know Blue Monday is an EDM I just got confused after watching this video on its influence on the club electronic scene and just kind of thought it might have worked um the horizons also introduced a story Into the game which while not super engaging or extremely necessary it did make the World the game was trying to build come alive a bit more and gave the player a bit more reason to keep playing the game the game was actually pretty good at keeping the player engaged throughout the events and it's relatively short length rarely made the game feel like a grind but after finishing up the story you'd probably want to check out the multiplayer which is really something the four of the titles have both excelled at and at some points I'll talk about later made the main focus of their games the multiplayer in Forza Horizon is no different from that although they did it in a very different way to every other Forza where you could either join randomly made race or playground games playlists made by the game or very easily join public lobbies that people set up for drag racing infected street racing drifting or what have you the community was really a great part of the original Forza Horizon especially thinking back to what people use to organize events in Forza he didn't have Discord or the others to do that kind of stuff you literally had to make a dedicated Forum to it or just message people on the Xbox 360. now as much as I like the original Horizon I'd probably say it's actually my favorite of the series it's certainly not without its problems first of all the physics can seem a bit off especially coming from the Motorsports where the cars were much snappier and more difficult to drive in comparison Horizon 1 feels like the same cars have semi-slick tires on and floatier suspension the game also featured some paid DLC which I'm not that opposed to especially when they were adding a decent number of cars to a game with a quite small roster wouldn't be compared to Motorsport 4. it also wasn't without its own bugs or odd design decisions like they were funny ones like the bunker Carson and Redrock matte glitches that were really funny to do in infected matches but there was also stuff like the rewinds being allowed in Rivals the glowing paint visual bug and the occasional titanium tree but outside of that this is still a super fun game to play today and I definitely recommend it to someone who hasn't tried it yet look up the Xenia emulator if you're looking to get it on PC you should be able to find it there seeing the success of their first attempt playground games decided to give us another installment which we get in late 2014 [Music] Forza Horizon 2 was the second game in the series to be on the Xbox One except for the disappointment that was Forza Motorsport 5. it was also ported to the 360 but that version was basically just a demo of the game with Horizon one's physics put onto a smaller version of two's map and given a smaller car list that was also the version that I played for a couple years because I couldn't afford an Xbox one until late 2018. but when I did get the actual game I had a great time in my opinion it almost takes everything Horizon one did right and just does it a bit better the physics feel better to play than Horizon one the graphics were way better the car list is much larger and they even added new features like the addition of tuning to the Horizon games which Horizon one didn't come with as well as drivetrain swaps which he also didn't get back in one only engine and aspiration swaps and they also introduced the new style of multiplayer lobbies which in one form or another would basically be the standard for multiplayer on the horizons going forward the only reason it ranks lower than Horizon 1 to me are a couple relatively small things like the music being a bit less interesting in my opinion like there are definitely some great stuff still in there like nitrous by Nick Mulvey [Music] love Sublime by 10 snake and the legendary Nile Rogers [Music] in NRG by Duck Sauce images [Music] although to me the average song in Horizon 2 is just a little bit worse and the changing of the old online system to me made the online one a bit more impersonal and two a bit worse as you couldn't just kick out someone for ramming or being about on the road you had to deal with them like you would someone in NASCAR except instead of a bump and run it's more of a smash and dash and the single player did start to take a back seat to the multiplayer this would become a somewhat concerning Trend going forward but besides that Forza Horizon 2 is genuinely a great game and it's one that I see rated very highly by players that have been in the community for some time I'd say that they gave Horizon one a proper sequel but can they do it again [Music] foreign [Music] foreign is the game that at least from the people I've talked to is seen as the best one in the series at least from what I've gathered it's essentially the culmination of everything good about the previous two games put together but with even more stuff it had a massive map with extremely varied and detailed areas and is also the only Horizon so far to be in the Southern Hemisphere or more specifically Australia shout out your boy friendly Jody's it had a massive car list with tons of regional cars like Holdens and Ford Utes and it added a bunch of new features like the customizable events as well as the introduction of custom characters yay it also had what I'd say is the second strongest soundtrack of any Horizon game it had the 1975. [Music] De La Soul [Music] DMX [Music] and justice foreign T that features Justice immediately goes up in my book Horizon 3 in my opinion is probably the next closest Contender for being the best Horizon second only to Horizon 1 in my opinion and most of you seem to agree that Horizon 3 is the best one however it isn't without issues Horizon 3 did have a few I guess you'd say odd design decisions like how they diminished the single player campaign even further making the main form of regression just leveling hubs to unlock new stuff or like how an online race is your ability to win a playlist wasn't determined by how many races you would win but rather how much drifting around every corner you could do to gain XP this was also a thing back in Horizon 2 but you still had to win in order to actually get enough points to take the win for the whole series now it didn't really matter speaking of online races Horizon 3 was also what I would call the inflection point for the metas in Horizon games going from unbalanced to ludicrous with the lobby starting to be filled with tons of cars that were either all built the same or all literally just the same car which usually consisted of a lightweight or low drag car a swap to make the car all-wheel drive and as much power as you could fit under the hood this was mainly because of the pi or performance index system which made practically all handling upgrades cost a fortune in pi which would instead be used to all-wheel drive or Turbo LS swap your car this meant that if you wanted to stay competitive online you basically had to build at least a few cars this way this basically started here because back in one and two even if your opponent brought a much better car you still had a reasonable chance of beating them purely by outracing them that wasn't exactly the case in Horizon 3 at least not as much as one and two but outside of that and maybe the really funny incident where the dev build of the game got leaked Horizon 3 was still a great game and probably the one I'd most recommend to someone who started with the later games because in my experience it's all downhill from here [Music] thank you [Music] Forza Horizon 4 . okay I'll start with what Horizon 4 did well what what they did right the game had the biggest car list of any Horizon finishing off with over 750 cars it implemented some great new mechanics like the custom route Creator and the new seasons and some notable ones like Super 7 and The Eliminator it also had the biggest map of any Horizon up to then and had the greatest elevation changes making the map feel much bigger to play on it also looked nearly immaculate foreign those are all the positive things I found in my 190 days of play time you'd really expect more but there's just not that many now let's get to the bad [Music] let's start with the small stuff at launch the game was in an absolutely abysmal State like I mentioned in the decline video you had issues of graphics on cars poor Collision physics with the map and the infamous Goliath infinite money glitch then you had stuff that was implemented as genuine features that were just plainly terrible like how there wasn't any class-based Rivals for the first three months you weren't allowed to gift or sell any cars yourself and would have to use the auction house and this really cool one horizon 4 was the first and so far only Forza to implement A ranked online Lobby system sounds like a good idea and it would have been if not for this bug I guess that if anyone on either team yours or the opponents left or disconnected which happened very often neither team would get any points towards their rank making it almost impossible to rank up they later fix this by making it to where no one gets any points so then it's literally impossible to rank up thank you playground games very cool speaking of disconnects this game had absolutely terrible online connections like this footage of sitting in a loading screen is from a month after release this is from a year after this is from two years after and this is from a couple weeks ago the game has literally never worked and that wouldn't be as big a deal if there was something to do in the single player shame there isn't the best the game gives you are these little Horizon story missions which can all be beaten in just a couple hours and add relatively little to the game you have the expansions that were okay but they were basically dead Community wise within just a couple months of release you had the in-game music which had some bangers in it like you had some from Kendrick [Music] Greta Van Fleet [Music] and A Tribe Called Quest [Music] but they didn't really get much out of the group that they had paid for like for those that listen to him I'm guessing when you think of Anderson pack you think of hip-hop inspired beats Jazzy instrumentation and Soulful vocals like come down come home or fly as me prayer with you instead we got this [Music] you also have the awful physics that when paired with the busted Pi system meant every car either felt like or was upgraded to ensure maximum understeer and then it was the tuner's job to try and absolutely screw the car just to get it to turn into Corners properly and the meadow which hit its peak at Horizon 4 going so far as to have some of the best cars even locked behind DLC effectively making it pay to win like the Shelby Monaco or the peel Trident as well as the 4GT and ev110 that dominated S1 Robbies the launcher o37 and Lola race car dominate on dirt of course until they were beat out by the hoonigan RS200 on circuits in the Toyota Baja welcome Pack Edition on sprints and later in the game you have the absolute Scourge that was the rear-wheel drive power build a type of car purely designed to both annoy the driver and the drivers around as much as possible and to be the fastest car on the vast majority of road tracks and you want to know the funniest part that's not even the worst part of horizon 4. but to get to that we have to talk about five because it might be even worse there thank you [Music] thank you [Music] Horizon 5 is well I'd argue it's better than four but in the same way Nvidia says the 4070 TI is better than a 3090 as in not really the improvements and differences I've seen between four and five are relatively few especially when compared to the other games in the series now granted much of five's development time was during the covet lockdowns so having it not be much better or different was sort of expected if it didn't also take an extra year to develop but when Horizon 5 finally did come out how was it yeah would I say it was better than four maybe I mean the online Works more of the time and since that's the focus of the games now I guess that makes it a bit better but not by much like I'll give Horizon 5 the fact that it implemented the fully customizable track Creator allowing people to make basically anything they could want and the fact that they had a better launch than for but outside of that there really wasn't much to write home about for me the map was just okay the seasons went from four very distinct environments to the rainy one and the other three and the playlist started getting filled with recycled content oh did I mention the playlists they were implemented back in Horizon 4 as a monthly update that would also include a new car basically every week one they were a good way to add new content in especially that we didn't have to pay for but two it was the only reason a lot of people were still playing for in 2020 and 21 which to many including myself became very boring and monotonous very quickly this meant that when I got to Horizon 5 and within a year they were already starting to recycle cars that were in four but not five at launch as new cars for the festival playlist it left me with a bit of a sour taste and told me that even if I stayed with this game for a while I'm probably not going to see much new and why should I stay because then I'd have to deal with one of the worst parts of any Forza Horizon game especially the last two the Forza Horizon community [Music] please now when I say the Forza Horizon Community is the worst part of the modern forza games I am being slightly hyperbolic really The Horizon Community is the biggest strength and weakness of a lot of the Horizon games mainly because of how multiplayer focused they've gotten over time although in my experience the Forza Horizon community in particular has been one of the more obnoxious and toxic communities and this is coming from the racing game Community as a whole which if you watch the video by Moses B and why he's actively trying to distance himself from the community you'll see why the community as a whole throughout all of racing games hasn't been in the best state recently I'd say the main reason for the Horizon series getting this kind of community is because of the game's continued push towards a more child and kid audience with different things such as lower difficulty easier access to plenty of exotic and crazy cars and just trying to make the game seem more fun and accessible rather than unique or gritty in any way that's also why you see a lot of the average Forza player jokes followed by someone smashing their car into a wall at Mach 2. but it's not just the young casuals that are spawning this kind of toxic behavior for any of you that saw the video by sp4 on the competitive racing Community which yes is a thing in the forza Horizons that's not just a motorsport thing you know that in the competitive scene there are a lot of people who aren't exactly the easiest to work with especially when it comes to organizing events and joining up into groups in a game that already doesn't have the best online connectivity which just makes the whole process even more frustrating one thing I will say for anyone that's just starting to get into Forza but you do want to get into the more competitive or race oriented sign I'll leave a link in the description to a Discord server to a group known as The Horizon Racing Academy run by cast haste and his team and they're a great group of dudes who will help you in progressing and becoming a better racer if that's what you're looking for [Music] Za Horizon really isn't in a good state right now literally as I'm editing this video it seems like I'm getting more and more proof of that as many of the lead developers of the game recently left the team and as of two weeks before the video goes out they manage to somehow break a bunch of the leaderboards and just delete tons of times while still leaving up all the ones that were hacked or done via altering the game so I don't know how they screwed that one up but yeah but they also announced the rally DLC which I guess I'm excited for I mean I'm not gonna buy it but it it'll look nice seeing other people try it out especially since we've already had a rally DLC back in Horizon one since at least for the time being I'm probably not buying another Forza Horizon game I guess my last bit of Hope in the forza series as a whole goes in the new Motorsport game that's coming out let's see what they can do with five and a half years of development time and hope they can bring something good out of it foreign

Channel: Fastminer07

Views: 929,949

Keywords: memes, forza horizon 5, forza horizon 4, forza horizon 3, forza horizon 2, forza horizon, Fortza, fh5, fh4, fh5 vs fh4, forza motorsport, history of forza, forza games, forza games evolution, horizon 4, horizon 5, horizon 5 gameplay

Id: RRALZ9n9Mis

Length: 30min 36sec (1836 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 27 2023