despite being perma-obsessed with driving games, i absolutely cannot subject myself to forza horizon in order to play forza horizon, sorry, nope.
was really thinking about it this time but i saw that tweet and i know what i’d be in for. again
the totality of a games’ affect is extremely important to me and those games epitomize exactly what not to do imo
and yeah the driving is always fun? i guess? i mean, they have the physics stuff down pat. but it isn’t enough, will never be enough. there are too many other games where the driving is fun
this is the totality of my experiences with modern AAA games
the vavoom philosophy
FH5 is the first game whose textures I’ve had to dial down from max to ultra not because I didn’t have the vram but because it didn’t have the CPU overhead to stream them in
It’s sometimes hard to explain to people how much this makes me bail on so many lawnmower sims that I otherwise have been marginally OK with up to that point. the “big map revelation plus here are 500 icons for stuff for you to do now” moment I think is meant to elicit enthusiasm from players, and seems to for a lot of folks, but man can it backfire and make me check out on a thing.
Oh, that is disappointing as well. Like one of the fun thing in @DaleNixon’s GT2 thread is remembering how much fun the model specific races could be for learning how to mess with a car I otherwise might never have touched.
between this texture streaming bottleneck and this game’s ever so slight reluctance to send you careening through the cotswolds destroying legally protected stone walls towards dozens of undifferentiated objective markers in its first hour, as well as what seems like marginally more restraint in its menus etc against its predecessor – which as I and others have said made probably the best tacky AAA first impression it could’ve – I don’t love it quite as much as FH4 so far. I’m almost tempted to think that the gonzo presentation was helpfully ironized by it being impossible to make Britain seem in any way exotic, and this is taking me back to FH3’s borderline gross festival promoter vibes. that said, taken as a massive free expansion pack to the biggest and best driving game since gran turismo 15+ years ago, it’s like an A- at worst.
I was able to upgrade the McLaren it gave me as a loyalty reward to 999 stats within 90 minutes of playing only to find it’s undriveable because unlike FH4 this game literally cannot stream assets in fast enough on my machine at 230kph which is pretty funny
I’m only 43% GPU limited, it’s incredible
I vastly prefer Mexico and getting they’d to the alternatives which in retrospect are why I put down 4
I bought a 2005 Mazdaspeed Miata and went to do donuts on the beach immediately after the introduction. It’s obscene how pretty it is for a game with a driving wrong combo meter
Forza is, imo, the exact kind of game people like us should hate, but it’s actually a great game, so it almost doesn’t matter. it has all the trappings of something abysmal, but once you’re on the road, it feels so good.
yeah it’s a game i want to hate but i keep playing it whoops
It could have zero formal “activities” and be just as good for me. Making my own fun is effortless.
YES
AND I LOVE IT
I mean I kinda hated Forza Horizon 4. The almost pointless feeling races, the deeply unclear progression systems, the mobile phone game like infinite currency dropping, the weird uncanny valley vibe from all humans turning up and feeling like an advertisement for the game you were already playing…
It was a perfect storm for everything that turns me off about AAA games?
“Welcome to Microsoft”
keyword “perfect” – if it’d been only halfway grotesque it wouldn’t have worked for me at all. and I really do feel like the pointlessness was a feature, I have no patience for the average game’s progression loop nowadays, just grease the fucker and let me at it
i harbor dark fantasies about sensational public coup attempts in Washington by powerful geriatric power brokers but they are about Bruce Artwick’s hostile takeover of Playground Games
This has been there since FH1 and it’s so weird. You don’t have to get me hype for this game, y’all. I already spent money on it. Like, it would make more sense if they were advertising the next game, but nope, just gotta get hype about this very microsoft car festival thing. (Not) glad to hear they still do this.
Progression systems seem very at odds with Playground explicitly designing the game to give you the cool cars ASAP and letting you use them in whatever event you want, like what am I meant to be working towards exactly?
The game design objective of FH5 seems to be to do the equivalent for players as when Marvin the Paranoid Android gets his reward system computer chip replaced by a copper wire.
Now he feels maxed-out in each of the 10 different categories of gratification, all at once and nonstop, and his outward behavior goes from morose to like one of those dancing NPCs