Forza Horizon 5: General Discussion

[Famine]

So you're sayin' the existing brands under Stellantis can't have new licensing agreements anymore?

Nope, just that Stellantis doesn't appear to have been doing so for whatever reason.

I don't have a horse in this race, so to speak...but has Stellantis offered a reason why they aren't making new agreements?

No, and you can be pretty certain they don't even think it's significant. In my experience the very senior PRs at car brands tend to know nothing about games at all, unless they have a kid who's told them something about a game they like; that's not exclusively the case of course, I hear it a lot from the younger PRs who do know about games and try to extol the virtues of getting the brand out into the games to the senior ones but get nowhere.

This was more-or-less the case with Porsche, which had no idea that it was bad to have an exclusivity agreement with EA until about year eight when the internet was pretty much hitting them over the head with it every day - but could do nothing about it. Some guys gave them a lot of money to something something cars, and they didn't have to do anything to get the money so contract agreed; I think there was even a comment from Porsche about not realising the limitations of it at one point.

That also answers your final question which is that games tend to pay brands for their inclusion. It's not always the case but it's almost always the case.

 

[Eunos_Cosmo]

That also answers your final question which is that games tend to pay brands for their inclusion. It's not always the case but it's almost always the case.

Does make me wonder about how cars get selected for inclusion.

Did PG really pay Nissan for licensing to include the Sentra Nismo in FH4/5? I would find it far more likely that Nissan would be wanting to put that one out in front of the exact people it would target selling those things to in real life and either offer it for free or actually pay PG to include it. Makes me wonder if as games take larger roles in people's lives whether we see a shift from developer-pushed licensed content to manufacturer-pushed licensed content. I'm not sure advertising gets much better than having a car featured in a mega-hit video game. (I don't know this for sure, I'm assuming)

Back when GT1 first shipped 1997 video games were still kind of novelty diversions. They are now unequivocally cash cow attention powerhouses and the implications for licensing between those two extremes are quite different.

 

[Famine]

Did PG really pay Nissan for licensing to include the Sentra Nismo in FH4/5?

It's unlikely to be quite so piecemeal, more sort of "x cars, and we'd really like y"; I can certainly see Nissan saying "okay, but one of them needs to be z".

Brands do commonly want the new stuff in, because that's about as far as they can see. We're marketing «this» right now, so we want it in the game. In nine months' time. A lot don't grasp the value of cool old stuff engaging the young players with the brand so that they buy new cars from the brand in a decade when they're old enough.

It's maddening.

 

[SU_Tempest]

I’m just so burned out on the constant slog that is FH5. The playlist is always basically a bunch of chores in cars I don’t want to drive on miserable tracks. I literally just spent $100 or so making my H-shifter work right with FH1 again so I could go back to it.

Modern FH games are basically mobile gatcha / free-to-play games at this point.

Are we playing the same game? Can we please not have these ridiculous, hyperbolic statements? You can earn the 40 points it takes for both cars on the weekly playlist in 2-3 hours. Far less if you just want the exclusive car of the week, which is almost always the first of these cars. Say what you will about making content timed exclusives - it's a valid criticism - but when the content is available to unlock, one thing it absolutely isn't... is difficult to obtain.

I've played actual gacha games rather regularly for several years, and these respect my time and money far less than Forza ever did. Forza got $100 out of me and I am nearing 900 hours played, most of which I enjoyed. The actual gacha games got about $40 out of me and I realized rather late I was being addicted to the engagement they provided, not having any actual fun playing. I quit cold turkey before it got any worse, but I know many people who won't or can't for various reasons, even though they also don't have any fun with it.

By and large, FH5 is not "basically like a gacha game." I could make stronger arguments as to why a certain other racing game whose name ends in "7" has more gacha traits than FH5 does, and it would still be unfair to that game.

I sincerely think you're just bored of FH5, and it's no real fault of the game. It's OK to feel that way, but let's cut the uninformed, hyperbolic takes, please?

 

[Nacho Libre]

Me this week: Ok FH5, what do you got?
FH5: Kinda Christmas dinner leftovers...
Me: Ok... You, Grid Legends, what do you got?
Grid Legends: I got nothing...
Me: I see... Well, The Crew 2, what do you got?
The Crew 2: Rabbids and a gangsta EB110!
Me: Sold! Be right back with you in a moment.

 

[UKMikey]

I played it for maybe an hour before I decided I didn't like the map very much. If you can see it you can drive to it...and once you drive to it there's nothing to do except drive around it...there is no compelling reason to explore or even for the game to be open world...same as the previous 4 games.

LOL, they're not likely to have changed this in the fifth game just for people who, like you, want everyone to drive the long way round, especially as most serious players will have already explored most if not all of the roads in pursuit of the Ride and Seek achievement. All it'd do is add an extra layer of frustration as you travel from race event to race event, most of whom have barriers while racing anyway.

Me: I see... Well, The Crew 2, what do you got?
The Crew 2: Rabbids and a gangsta EB110!
Me: Sold! Be right back with you in a moment.

I must admit your comment had me intrigued so I checked out the scenery graphics in freeroam and... um... well, at least the lighting's nice... What's the handling like compared to FH5?

 

[Stang616]

It's unlikely to be quite so piecemeal, more sort of "x cars, and we'd really like y"; I can certainly see Nissan saying "okay, but one of them needs to be z".

Brands do commonly want the new stuff in, because that's about as far as they can see. We're marketing «this» right now, so we want it in the game. In nine months' time. A lot don't grasp the value of cool old stuff engaging the young players with the brand so that they buy new cars from the brand in a decade when they're old enough.

It's maddening.

To be fair a lot of this comes from the extremely vocal minority that only want the latest and greatest and think anything that isn't a supercar, hypercar or anything older than 2015 to be "old, slow and boring crap" and have no appreciation for the cars that led to their favorites.

So you have the younger marketing team trying their darnedest to tell the older marketing execs that the old cars are uninteresting and no one wants them in video games as opposed to doing actual market research.

 

[Famine]

To be fair a lot of this comes from the extremely vocal minority that only want the latest and greatest and think anything that isn't a supercar, hypercar or anything older than 2015 to be "old, slow and boring crap" and have no appreciation for the cars that led to their favorites.

So you have the younger marketing team trying their darnedest to tell the older marketing execs that the old cars are uninteresting and no one wants them in video games as opposed to doing actual market research.

Not entirely; PR teams always want to push the current models because that's pretty much what they're paid to do. There's no budget to promote a car two, three, five, ten years old - it's this car we're going to be selling next.

There's a... popular sports car at the moment; just come out, lots of praise. The UK press office isn't trying to promote it because the allocation is all sold out, the marketing is done, and although it'll probably be on sale for three years, they're onto the next car coming to their range. There's a car on the press fleet and the smaller/non-national outlets are getting it at the moment, but they're not interested in sending it out beyond that (costs about £1,000 for a brand to send a car to a journo for a week) because they're not promoting it.

It'll either sit in the press garage for eight months or go to Top Gear (or other large multinational outlets where the exposure is worth it) if they do some kind of mad feature on it.

 

[The_Greaser]

'Kay, I got the S16 80pt-reward car. Better late than never, though. Also got a seasonal Renault in the process. Life is good.

 

[Stupornaut]

I know people have been complaining about The Slog™ or whatever, but this week's Trial, despite otherwise being nothing all that special, did spark that old "wait, I somehow haven't even really driven this car -- and it's a fun car to drive" feeling this game makes me chase. I already knew that the Sierra RS500 was a classic of touring car racing and one of the best hot hatches of the '80s -- now I just got a fun reminder why.

 

[Nacho Libre]

What's the handling like compared to FH5?

The handling is pure arcade, but enjoyable, responsive, and not devoid of nuances. And the cars are specialized: You can't just take a sports car/hypercar offroad and expect about the same performance as on the road, and you have track cars, cross rally cars, demolition derby cars and so on.

 

[nukleabomb]

I know people have been complaining about The Slog™ or whatever, but this week's Trial, despite otherwise being nothing all that special, did spark that old "wait, I somehow haven't even really driven this car -- and it's a fun car to drive" feeling this game makes me chase. I already knew that the Sierra RS500 was a classic of touring car racing and one of the best hot hatches of the '80s -- now I just got a fun reminder why.

I did use the Sierra for a couple for speed traps and zones in b class with a pretty high turbo. Man is that thing fun

 

[Edax 76]

I'm loving all this talk of how the trade works in promoting vehicles. Very interesting. Thank you.

 

[Eunos_Cosmo]

LOL, they're not likely to have changed this in the fifth game just for people who, like you, want everyone to drive the long way round, especially as most serious players will have already explored most if not all of the roads in pursuit of the Ride and Seek achievement. All it'd do is add an extra layer of frustration as you travel from race event to race event, most of whom have barriers while racing anyway.

I don't think you understand what I meant. I mean that there isn't anything else to do in the game world other than drive around in it. I appreciate that it's a driving game, but it's also an open world game and I happen to feel like that open world is underutilized. There is some incongruity of how open/expansive the world is and how limited you can experience it. That's what I was getting at.

 

[RYAN]

Returnal(PS5 game) Was just listed on Steam for release in Feb. Suddenly the dream of being able to play Forza and GT on the same machine seems a bit closer.

 

[RageRacer]

To be fair a lot of this comes from the extremely vocal minority that only want the latest and greatest and think anything that isn't a supercar, hypercar or anything older than 2015 to be "old, slow and boring crap" and have no appreciation for the cars that led to their favorites.

So you have the younger marketing team trying their darnedest to tell the older marketing execs that the old cars are uninteresting and no one wants them in video games.

Then they are idiots and aren't true car lovers at all.

 

[Stang616]

Then they are idiots and aren't true car lovers at all.

That's always been my response to people like that and they usually just laugh and make themselves look even more ridiculous by trying to rebuke.

 

[UKMikey]

I'm an idiot when it comes to car culture but I sure love the chance to drive unusual vehicles. Even speaking as someone who's more on the gaming side than the car enthusiast side, just driving hypercars would bore me silly. There'd be no point in having such a large car collection if that were to be the case going forward and it seems to go against Dan Greenawalt's stated aims for the Forza franchise.

I've long said that catering to some minorities at the expense of others in a mass market videogame is madness and that applies to the boy racer crowd as much as anyone.

 

[SU_Tempest]

Joining the previous comments, there is, in fact, more to life than just the latest and greatest, or S2-998 hypercars.

It's not to say I dislike or don't appreciate the latest the industry has to offer. But given the choice I'd rather get into a Toyota Sera, a Subaru SVX, a Citroen AX, an Alpine A310, any Daihatsu, or any number of weird, unusual, and overall cool cars that don't get their chance to shine too often... than yet another latest-production car that will be seen and played everywhere else.

Also, you know you want to drop a racing V8 into the engine bay of the vehicular equivalent of a cosmic alien. That's also part of what I play Forza for. The tuning and the engine swapping do keep me coming back. Nothing more fun than building raceable cars out of unusual oddities.

 

[Edax 76]

I've said before on here I would love to see more unusual cars (more artic heads, concept cars etc), family cars (people carriers, standard 5 door hatchback or saloons etc) and vintage cars. I do fully appreciate the licensing side of things but if I had my way I'd have more of the above in the game.

Oh and @SU_Tempest bloody great shout with Citroen AX 👍

 

[-Fred-]

Remember the little city cars in FM4? Yeah, more of those please.

 

[Kitten]

Stumbled upon this video the other day, and honestly its quite accurate....

 

[SU_Tempest]

Stumbled upon this video the other day, and honestly its quite accurate....

I had a huge comment in drafts because this video made me want to say a lot of things, but I realized I had 7 minutes left to watch, and after watching it all to its conclusion... including every criticism of FH4 and FH5 in spite of Fastminer07's hour counts in both games. Then I looked back at my hour counts...

...and yeah, let's just say that point landed extra well, at least to me. This vid nails it. On the whole, they're right.

As they put it, yeah there's a decline, absolutely, both specifically with Forza and in the genre in general. But it's not all bad. There's still plenty of good games, plenty of good to see even in the flawed games, and if nothing else, plenty of upcoming games to look forward to.

 

[UKMikey]

The handling is pure arcade, but enjoyable, responsive, and not devoid of nuances. And the cars are specialized: You can't just take a sports car/hypercar offroad and expect about the same performance as on the road, and you have track cars, cross rally cars, demolition derby cars and so on.

The physics sound cool but I think I'm-a wait until the Orlando/"Motorfest" version to see if the graphics have improved any by then.

As they put it, yeah there's a decline, absolutely, both specifically with Forza and in the genre in general. But it's not all bad. There's still plenty of good games, plenty of good to see even in the flawed games, and if nothing else, plenty of upcoming games to look forward to.

I haven't had time to watch it yet outside of the Modern Forza section but how many of the games that he says were great were still fun to play for hours a year after release? I guess if I were playing on PC his remarks about poor optimisation and server glitches would hit harder for me but I don't think I had as much of a problem with the game as he seems to have. As it was I didn't even recognise the game he was describing most of the time.

 

[PJTierney]

Did PG really pay Nissan for licensing to include the Sentra Nismo in FH4/5?

Turn 10 have said in the past that the car selection philosophy for Forza has historically been put into three buckets:

1. "My first car"
2. "My current car"
3. "My dream car"

Take that and add in other factors such as gameplay balance (ie: having multiple brands' cars in a specific car division), thematic relevance (like all the Australian cars in Forza Horizon 3) and more, and it begins to make sense why a Forza game adds cars that aren't the hottest ones out there.

 

[space_wadet]

Stumbled upon this video the other day, and honestly its quite accurate....

Way too harsh on modern games while not acknowledging the most important factors, ie nostalgia and context. The author of the video paints FH4 & 5 as unplayable buggy shovelware, while the "classic" games are basically faultless. Not sure how this can be construed as accurate or reasonable in any way. The classic games had all the faults he assigns to modern games (those had great online experiences and no bugs? ...really?), but somehow they don't count for those games. Modern games are basically better in every way, but what some people seem to feel is lacking isn't something that can be found within the game itself.

It becomes a bit of a moot discussion when people fail to realize that they were kids when playing those games. Your perspective and expectations will obviously change 15 years later. Of course games nowadays have issues, but people need to stop chasing this nebulous idea of "atmosphere/spirit/soul/personality" in games, which was mostly just experiencing games (and the world at large) as a child/teen.

I think Whitelight's video does a better job at criticising the game, without completely falling into the trap of nostalgia.

The context of racing games in general is important too. A lot of the kids that grew up on these GT, Forza, NFS games have now moved on to sim racing, which is doing better than ever now. But on the other hand, arcade racing seems to be doomed to forever live in the shadow of nostalgia tinged expectations. NFS Heat by all accounts ticks all the boxes for what a good NFS game should be, doesn't seem to be doing nearly as well as older games. The player base just doesn't seem to be there anymore.

That said, Horizon does need a slight shake up in the next iteration. There's nothing wrong with iterating a formula that works but I think it's fair to say that after 5 games it has run its course. Hopefully with the changes at Playground it'll mean the next game will evolve the formula somewhat.

 

[UKMikey]

That said, Horizon does need a slight shake up in the next iteration. There's nothing wrong with iterating a formula that works but I think it's fair to say that after 5 games it has run its course. Hopefully with the changes at Playground it'll mean the next game will evolve the formula somewhat.

Hopefully the as-yet near mythical properties of the ForzaTech 2023 engine may also provide some impetus towards a shakeup.🤞🏽

 

[Stupornaut]

I haven't watched that video (yet), but I'll say this: there's a difference between "racing games aren't as good as they used to be" and "racing games aren't as good as they could be." As much as people retroactively claim that Forza Motorsport 4 was the best the series ever got, one of the things that kept running through my head -- and dozens of threads on the forum -- was how much of a shame it was that the game didn't have weather, day/night, open-wheel cars, or tracks like Spa and Bathurst. Ten years later people think the problem with recent Forza Motorsport titles is that the career feels off, there's no Fujimi Kaido, and they can't tootle around in a Toyota Aygo. The problem isn't that Forza got "worse", it's that it shifted focus, plugging some important gaps but creating new ones in the process.

That said, most devs from indies to AAAs seem to be hilariously risk-averse: oh, Soulsborne games are huge, let's just imitate that. Everyone's doing battle royale? Work that into our multiplayer. The Kids demand Fortnite levels of personalization, we better give it to 'em. And one of the biggest risks, as NFS Unbound proved, is trying to create a sense of style, something beyond just super-photorealistic immersion that looks like a slightly cleaner version of reality. I'm too old to be in Unbound's supposed target demo of 12-year-olds and 20-something influencers who act like 12-year-olds, so I can see some of the transparent Skateboard Buscemi goofiness in its attempts to be trendy and up-to-date with youth culture. But at least they tried, and I'd at least like to see more devs actually try to lean more into a credible effort at capturing the weirdness and excitement and distinctive eclecticism of car culture as effectively as, say, the Tony Hawk games embodied skate culture or NBA Street did basketball.

Then again, this is also becoming an increasingly niche genre for reasons I feel have less to do with the quality of the games than a general pop-culture shift, but that's a whole other complicated narrative that leaves me more pessimistic about the potential future of racing games than anything FH5 or GT7 has done.

 

[Eunos_Cosmo]

Turn 10 have said in the past that the car selection philosophy for Forza has historically been put into three buckets:

1. "My first car"
2. "My current car"
3. "My dream car"

Take that and add in other factors such as gameplay balance (ie: having multiple brands' cars in a specific car division), thematic relevance (like all the Australian cars in Forza Horizon 3) and more, and it begins to make sense why a Forza game adds cars that aren't the hottest ones out there.

I didn't mean to suggest that the Sentra Nismo represents a poor selection because it's cheap or lowly or anything like that, but that it felt like an odd and/or forced choice. I don't think I've ever seen one in real life...it seemed like a product nobody wanted. There are ton of cheap Nissan products that would be fantastic inclusions in a FH title. I would far, far more like to see a B13 Sentra SE-R or even an Xterra in a title like Forza Horizon rather than a souless marketing product like the Nismo. For the record, my favorite car in FH4 is the Peugeot 205 Rallye...stock, and I almost never use anything faster than B class in that game. I'm all for pedestrian vehicles, particularly in a game that is supposed to represent public roads.

 

[sw3g005]

That said, most devs from indies to AAAs seem to be hilariously risk-averse: oh, Soulsborne games are huge, let's just imitate that. Everyone's doing battle royale? Work that into our multiplayer. The Kids demand Fortnite levels of personalization, we better give it to 'em. And one of the biggest risks, as NFS Unbound proved, is trying to create a sense of style, something beyond just super-photorealistic immersion that looks like a slightly cleaner version of reality. I'm too old to be in Unbound's supposed target demo of 12-year-olds and 20-something influencers who act like 12-year-olds, so I can see some of the transparent Skateboard Buscemi goofiness in its attempts to be trendy and up-to-date with youth culture. But at least they tried, and I'd at least like to see more devs actually try to lean more into a credible effort at capturing the weirdness and excitement and distinctive eclecticism of car culture as effectively as, say, the Tony Hawk games embodied skate culture or NBA Street did basketball.

THIS. RIGHT HERE. IS THE PROBLEM.

I can (mostly) buy that AAA is risk averse cuz of ridiculous development costs and late-stage capitalism - it doesn't excuse it, but I can accept it. What I cannot accept and never will is indie devs being risk averse and just hooking on supercar/JDM dorifto trends/online simracing. Like... you've got nothing to lose by doing things differently. It's like most if not all car game developers are not just creatively bankrupt but also have simply just given up trying to do things differently.

Heck, even in AAA world, GTA has gotten alot worse in this regard for seemingly no reason? Like they've had cars in the past that are obviously meant to emulate real cars (T20) but they did atleast try to make them look like their own thing. Now, especially with cars literally called Postlude?