Forza Horizon 3
Discussion
westtra said:
Thanks for the link! 
I see they're making quite a few significant changes, in both performance and gameplay. The drift tap exploit is "fixed", new HE cars are available and performance is improved on PCs running 4 and 8 core CPUs, which is likely most people playing FH3 on PC.
I won't hold my breath on the performance front, but I'm definitely looking forward to having some new HE cars to collect.
I've got to my favourite bit of Horizon games (sarcasm 
) , 485/488 roads completed. Can I find the last 3? Can I hell. Theyre probably little gnarly driveways onto random farmhouses around the map, or access roads between 2 others, but no, the grey road lines on the map are now invisible to me 
. I've also found out that the old Abarth 500 with a turbo bike engine is a bit of fun to drive. It doesn't fall over all the time like the Isetta and Reliant. The old Mini will probably be in a DLC at some point.
) , 485/488 roads completed. Can I find the last 3? Can I hell. Theyre probably little gnarly driveways onto random farmhouses around the map, or access roads between 2 others, but no, the grey road lines on the map are now invisible to me . I've also found out that the old Abarth 500 with a turbo bike engine is a bit of fun to drive. It doesn't fall over all the time like the Isetta and Reliant. The old Mini will probably be in a DLC at some point.ajprice said:
The old Mini will probably be in a DLC at some point.
I've got a 1965 Mini Cooper S sitting in my FH3 garage and I only have the standard version of the game, so no paid DLC. That said, I can't remember where I got it from, barn find maybe...?
EDIT: Ignore me, the poster above is correct, the old Mini is from the top of the "Instant Rewards" skills tree.
Thanks, I'll check the skills next time I'm on, but I'm a way off the top row, still filling in row 2 of the grids.
Anyway, today it's been downloading the PC version update (50GB again!), and for me at least, it's playable on PC now. Not quite as shiny as the Xbox, and I still get the low memory warning and the odd low frame rate, especially at surfers paradise, but it didn't freeze or crash tonight.
Anyway, today it's been downloading the PC version update (50GB again!), and for me at least, it's playable on PC now. Not quite as shiny as the Xbox, and I still get the low memory warning and the odd low frame rate, especially at surfers paradise, but it didn't freeze or crash tonight.
I unlocked the achievement for beating 10 community bluprint challenges tonight. Jesus, that was awful. Contrary to the description, you actually have to win to score a credit towards the achievement.
It makes you realise just how much QA and playtesting games get, as the user created challenges are mostly complete s
t. Even the time trial ones are usually just someone pointing their car off road and driving straight towards the target flat out.
Absolute crap. Thank fk I can just look forward to more racing in my Lotus Carlton tomorrow.
It makes you realise just how much QA and playtesting games get, as the user created challenges are mostly complete s
t. Even the time trial ones are usually just someone pointing their car off road and driving straight towards the target flat out. Absolute crap. Thank f
k I can just look forward to more racing in my Lotus Carlton tomorrow.westtra said:
Worked wonders. I can't even get past the splash screen now. Bunch of clowns. I've noticed that despite the patch notes the older Horizon Edition cars are still offered in the wheelspins.
Won the Viper this morning and had the focus appear a couple of times.
Also won the Mini, BAC and 22B already so thinking they have also tweaked how often the wheel spin plays nice.
Won the Viper this morning and had the focus appear a couple of times.
Also won the Mini, BAC and 22B already so thinking they have also tweaked how often the wheel spin plays nice.
I am going to put on my Hat of Negativity for a little while here. Anyone who is happy as larry pootling around Australia in Horizon 3, feel free to skip over this post entirely, there's nothing here for you. However I'm going to have a ramble and get some stuff off my chest that I feel like nobody else is talking about.
I am finding FH3 has me thoroughly whelmed. Not overwhelmed, or underwhelmed, just... whelmed.
Horizon 1 was my first real exposure to Forza, having played some of the Motorsport ones at mates' houses and not really got into it. I'm not much of a circuit racer fan, something about driving on the "open road" means I prefer games that end up being a lot more arcadey - GTA, Burnout series, Outrun, Need for Speed before it went rubbish. But despite liking those arcadey games I always lusted after something with some more depth to the driving experience, something with more realistic physics that wasn't quite so silly. So when the Horizon 1 demo came out I was over the moon, though not totally smitten yet; it took a bit of playing and some recommendations on the settings (turning off the driver aids etc) before I really got attached to it. Then when the full game came out, I enjoyed trundling around for a while admiring the scenery and running races though never quite "getting it" and feeling a bit unmoved by the whole experience, until one particular session I decided to run up that mountain road at the very northernmost edge of the map - it was a single road running up to a mountain top area with some more races at the top, but it was one single stretch of twisties that took a few minutes to drive - and I started messing about, I switched to cockpit view and started driving like I would out on a run in real life - sticking to the correct side of the road except where I could see it was clear, darting out for overtakes, occasionally pausing to take some nice snaps of the car against the view - and in that moment I felt I finally GOT Horizon. Here it was, finally, that enthusiast's open-road driving sim (or close enough anyway). Fell in love. I spent ages exploring everywhere, many happy hours fiddling with paint jobs (I took a geeky joy in putting number plates on the cars with stupid "clever" puns). Enjoyed the Top Gear style showcase races which were often pretty challenging. Difficulty level felt just right. I liked the car class system for races, a simple performance band requirement and then occasionally extra quirks like AWD only, or Japanese cars only, or similar. It meant that even if forced to do an SUV "race", if I didn't fancy slobbing about in a BMW X5 then I could still build up an Impreza to competitive level or even bring a 4WD supercar and still enjoy myself. It was just enough to force you to explore the range of cars a bit, but not so much that you were forced to drive things you didn't want to. I found that I didn't really care much about the races and it was just a grind through to keep "seeing what there was to see", but I'm used to that in games (I like to think of myself as a bit of a video game tourist - I like to see what there is to see in a game, and I want to have to work for it a little bit so it doesn't just feel like it was handed to you on a plate... but I'm playing games to escape the frustrations of real life, not give myself all new ones).
A few nitpicky little bits, it was annoying having the barriers everywhere keeping you to the roads, the map often felt a little generic and sparse without many roads I would actually ENJOY driving (that northern mountain road was a clear favourite), some objects you can smash through but other similar ones you couldn't, the car modification was good but not QUITE as much as I wanted, etc. A great first outing and all looking very promising for a sequel. The rally expansion was also excellent, felt like an extra game in itself and a really different experience compared to the main game.
Then it was Horizon 2! So excited. Again very much enjoyed pootling around the game world at first, but over time, some things crept into my awareness that left me feeling just... not 100% satisfied. The map felt a little better-defined than FH1, with the different cities forming distinct areas that were fun to explore, and I liked the roadtrip mechanic - but with the new removal of barriers so you can drive anywhere you want, it felt to me somewhat sparse in between the main themed areas. And where a race didn't keep you to the road with checkpoints, there was no reason NOT to just spear off into the countryside and straight-line it - proper obstacles were so rare as to be not worth worrying about, just dodge the occasional tree. I found the championship class mechanic irritating - FH1's class system was much better. FH2, nope, after a point if I want to progress the game at all then I have to spend a few hours in a BMW X5 hating life. I also noticed that the showcase races initially APPEARED nail-bitingly close, but that I never had to try any of them more than once... so long as you didn't massively cock up and smash into a tree, then you would always win "by the skin of your teeth" - no challenge or tension at all once I started noticing that EVERY finish was a photo finish, no matter how badly I drove. Compare that to FH1 where the RUF vs Plane race up that mountain road took me the better part of a day to finally beat, and gave a real sense of accomplishment at beating the bd.
Main races I cared about even less than FH1. Most of the cars in the game I've already driven to death in FH1, although enough new ones to enjoy and keep me mostly happy enough. I forged a real connection with the MR2, which I made look just like my real one, and the GT86 that I did a lot of fiddling with, and a few others which I loved driving. I felt pretty inspired by the car selection and just like FH1 whiled away many hours mucking about with paint jobs and taking pretty pictures and so on.
On the downside, pretty much the same visual mods as ever, same selection of wheels, and so on.
Storm Island expansion was pretty pants I thought, uninspiring generic new island with nothing much to see on it, races I REALLY didn't care about even worse than the normal ones.
FH2 I played an awful lot, but while I enjoyed FH1 to a level of let's say 90-95% after that moment of "getting it", I never gelled with FH2 quite as much. Let's call it 80-85%. Don't get me wrong, still a great game, played a lot, enjoyed a lot. Many happy hours whiled away razzing up and down the French coast.
Horizon 3 is announced! I was really pleased at all the new features they said was coming and all the screenshots looked great. Particularly excited about new customisation stuff - wide body kits, new wheels from fashionable manufacturers, brilliant. Demo was good fun, the intro sequences gave me goosebumps, the physics seemed as fun as ever, the game world seemed beautiful. This time I preordered, including the full-fat £80 Ultimate Edition with car pass and everything. But playing it, I'm a little disappointed, I feel like the slight dip from FH1 to FH2 has turned into a downward slide rather than being a little blip. I feel like they've changed the physics somehow - cars don't have that same realistic feeling weight to throw around like they did in the previous games, I don't feel connected to them. I dislike the way the game unfolds, the "run the festival" mechanic. The assistant girl is annoying. The Aussie garage bloke is especially annoying. The showcase events are just as falsely tense as they were in FH2, maybe even worse. It feels like new st is popping up all over my map all the time, and I don't care about any of them or really enjoy very many of them. I've got more money and cars than I know what to do with so there's rarely any challenge in sorting a car for a particular race (admittedly this is my own fault, by buying the Ultimate edition I get double credits on Wheelspins and an absolute shedload of special cars for free). It's not clear to me what I actually have to do, whether I just need to finish a race to mark it as done, or whether I have to win it, or just get a podium place? I still don't actually know. There feels no point to modifying cars since the AI automatically scales to match your performance anyway. I can drive any car in any race at any time using the Blueprint system, which I never want to use because I can't be arsed to set a whole thing up and most of the time I don't KNOW exactly what it is I want to do or what I will enjoy, so I liked the structure of previous games, where I had a general path mapped out with a bit of leeway to make sure I can always find a way to make it fun. It feels just too... freeform. Perhaps that says more about me than the game, maybe I lack imagination, maybe I'm getting old?! To me it feels a bit like if you fire up one of the GTA games but specifically don't do any missions. You can amuse yourself for a while exploring the world and mucking about, but eventually you want something proper to DO. FH3 feels like that but with a much less interesting game world than GTA has and far fewer options for amusing diversions. The world seems to me even more sparse and empty than FH2, with a hundred pointless-seeming roads that don't go anywhere and aren't especially fun to drive. There are a scattering of nice landmarks to see and fun things you'll drive past (*that* water splash from the intro, the cave leading to the beach, etc) but it seems to be a very big world, with a very short list of places I actually want to go. The widebody stuff is great at first, until I discover that it's done to the same degree as all the other Forza mod stuff - ie better than nothing, but not quite as good as I hoped. Even the barn finds... 90% of them I was massively disappointed with, I don't give a toss about some ancient wood-panelled wagon, or yet another 70's ute.
Oh and I'm still mostly driving about in the same cars I was in FH1. It looks to me like even the same exact 3D models they always were.
Bah, humbug, etc. I know I hate it when I read someone just moaning about something that I enjoy, but I wanted to get this off my chest, it all feels so obvious to me but I've not seen anyone talking about it. It's still a fun game - perhaps it's me, perhaps I was expecting too much, or perhaps I'm getting old and this game isn't FOR me anymore?
It just feels like a slight disappointment, I had such a clear impression of what the series was going to be and it just... didn't get there, in fact it feels further away than the previous ones. Is that my fault or the game's? If they're making more money than ever, then it's probably me...
It all feels a little artificial, a very polished facsimile of something that used to be genuine and great but an imitation all the same. The video game version of how new cars are all having overrun exhaust pops engineered in, when they used to be rare and authentic. Saw an M2 the other day popping and banging its way out of a petrol station at less than 10mph and it seemed vulgar as anything.
edit: Little things are winding me up. I decide to start a new championship because I think that will make one of the event icons go grey and be marked as completed. I pick some category I don't like in the hopes the cars are a laugh. They are not. At the end of the race, I'm sat in the middle of nowhere in the rubbish car I used in the championship instead of the car I was in before. In other news, I unlocked a new showcase event which is on the other side of the world. All other events disappear off the map until I go and visit this showcase event, even though I am in the middle of a championship and the next event would have been half a mile away from my current position. And I'll be driving all the way there in the crap car unless I fast travel to a festival site just to swap cars. Just, ugh. Lots of minor irritations keep stacking up.
I am finding FH3 has me thoroughly whelmed. Not overwhelmed, or underwhelmed, just... whelmed.
Horizon 1 was my first real exposure to Forza, having played some of the Motorsport ones at mates' houses and not really got into it. I'm not much of a circuit racer fan, something about driving on the "open road" means I prefer games that end up being a lot more arcadey - GTA, Burnout series, Outrun, Need for Speed before it went rubbish. But despite liking those arcadey games I always lusted after something with some more depth to the driving experience, something with more realistic physics that wasn't quite so silly. So when the Horizon 1 demo came out I was over the moon, though not totally smitten yet; it took a bit of playing and some recommendations on the settings (turning off the driver aids etc) before I really got attached to it. Then when the full game came out, I enjoyed trundling around for a while admiring the scenery and running races though never quite "getting it" and feeling a bit unmoved by the whole experience, until one particular session I decided to run up that mountain road at the very northernmost edge of the map - it was a single road running up to a mountain top area with some more races at the top, but it was one single stretch of twisties that took a few minutes to drive - and I started messing about, I switched to cockpit view and started driving like I would out on a run in real life - sticking to the correct side of the road except where I could see it was clear, darting out for overtakes, occasionally pausing to take some nice snaps of the car against the view - and in that moment I felt I finally GOT Horizon. Here it was, finally, that enthusiast's open-road driving sim (or close enough anyway). Fell in love. I spent ages exploring everywhere, many happy hours fiddling with paint jobs (I took a geeky joy in putting number plates on the cars with stupid "clever" puns). Enjoyed the Top Gear style showcase races which were often pretty challenging. Difficulty level felt just right. I liked the car class system for races, a simple performance band requirement and then occasionally extra quirks like AWD only, or Japanese cars only, or similar. It meant that even if forced to do an SUV "race", if I didn't fancy slobbing about in a BMW X5 then I could still build up an Impreza to competitive level or even bring a 4WD supercar and still enjoy myself. It was just enough to force you to explore the range of cars a bit, but not so much that you were forced to drive things you didn't want to. I found that I didn't really care much about the races and it was just a grind through to keep "seeing what there was to see", but I'm used to that in games (I like to think of myself as a bit of a video game tourist - I like to see what there is to see in a game, and I want to have to work for it a little bit so it doesn't just feel like it was handed to you on a plate... but I'm playing games to escape the frustrations of real life, not give myself all new ones).
A few nitpicky little bits, it was annoying having the barriers everywhere keeping you to the roads, the map often felt a little generic and sparse without many roads I would actually ENJOY driving (that northern mountain road was a clear favourite), some objects you can smash through but other similar ones you couldn't, the car modification was good but not QUITE as much as I wanted, etc. A great first outing and all looking very promising for a sequel. The rally expansion was also excellent, felt like an extra game in itself and a really different experience compared to the main game.
Then it was Horizon 2! So excited. Again very much enjoyed pootling around the game world at first, but over time, some things crept into my awareness that left me feeling just... not 100% satisfied. The map felt a little better-defined than FH1, with the different cities forming distinct areas that were fun to explore, and I liked the roadtrip mechanic - but with the new removal of barriers so you can drive anywhere you want, it felt to me somewhat sparse in between the main themed areas. And where a race didn't keep you to the road with checkpoints, there was no reason NOT to just spear off into the countryside and straight-line it - proper obstacles were so rare as to be not worth worrying about, just dodge the occasional tree. I found the championship class mechanic irritating - FH1's class system was much better. FH2, nope, after a point if I want to progress the game at all then I have to spend a few hours in a BMW X5 hating life. I also noticed that the showcase races initially APPEARED nail-bitingly close, but that I never had to try any of them more than once... so long as you didn't massively cock up and smash into a tree, then you would always win "by the skin of your teeth" - no challenge or tension at all once I started noticing that EVERY finish was a photo finish, no matter how badly I drove. Compare that to FH1 where the RUF vs Plane race up that mountain road took me the better part of a day to finally beat, and gave a real sense of accomplishment at beating the b
d.Main races I cared about even less than FH1. Most of the cars in the game I've already driven to death in FH1, although enough new ones to enjoy and keep me mostly happy enough. I forged a real connection with the MR2, which I made look just like my real one, and the GT86 that I did a lot of fiddling with, and a few others which I loved driving. I felt pretty inspired by the car selection and just like FH1 whiled away many hours mucking about with paint jobs and taking pretty pictures and so on.
On the downside, pretty much the same visual mods as ever, same selection of wheels, and so on.
Storm Island expansion was pretty pants I thought, uninspiring generic new island with nothing much to see on it, races I REALLY didn't care about even worse than the normal ones.
FH2 I played an awful lot, but while I enjoyed FH1 to a level of let's say 90-95% after that moment of "getting it", I never gelled with FH2 quite as much. Let's call it 80-85%. Don't get me wrong, still a great game, played a lot, enjoyed a lot. Many happy hours whiled away razzing up and down the French coast.
Horizon 3 is announced! I was really pleased at all the new features they said was coming and all the screenshots looked great. Particularly excited about new customisation stuff - wide body kits, new wheels from fashionable manufacturers, brilliant. Demo was good fun, the intro sequences gave me goosebumps, the physics seemed as fun as ever, the game world seemed beautiful. This time I preordered, including the full-fat £80 Ultimate Edition with car pass and everything. But playing it, I'm a little disappointed, I feel like the slight dip from FH1 to FH2 has turned into a downward slide rather than being a little blip. I feel like they've changed the physics somehow - cars don't have that same realistic feeling weight to throw around like they did in the previous games, I don't feel connected to them. I dislike the way the game unfolds, the "run the festival" mechanic. The assistant girl is annoying. The Aussie garage bloke is especially annoying. The showcase events are just as falsely tense as they were in FH2, maybe even worse. It feels like new s
t is popping up all over my map all the time, and I don't care about any of them or really enjoy very many of them. I've got more money and cars than I know what to do with so there's rarely any challenge in sorting a car for a particular race (admittedly this is my own fault, by buying the Ultimate edition I get double credits on Wheelspins and an absolute shedload of special cars for free). It's not clear to me what I actually have to do, whether I just need to finish a race to mark it as done, or whether I have to win it, or just get a podium place? I still don't actually know. There feels no point to modifying cars since the AI automatically scales to match your performance anyway. I can drive any car in any race at any time using the Blueprint system, which I never want to use because I can't be arsed to set a whole thing up and most of the time I don't KNOW exactly what it is I want to do or what I will enjoy, so I liked the structure of previous games, where I had a general path mapped out with a bit of leeway to make sure I can always find a way to make it fun. It feels just too... freeform. Perhaps that says more about me than the game, maybe I lack imagination, maybe I'm getting old?! To me it feels a bit like if you fire up one of the GTA games but specifically don't do any missions. You can amuse yourself for a while exploring the world and mucking about, but eventually you want something proper to DO. FH3 feels like that but with a much less interesting game world than GTA has and far fewer options for amusing diversions. The world seems to me even more sparse and empty than FH2, with a hundred pointless-seeming roads that don't go anywhere and aren't especially fun to drive. There are a scattering of nice landmarks to see and fun things you'll drive past (*that* water splash from the intro, the cave leading to the beach, etc) but it seems to be a very big world, with a very short list of places I actually want to go. The widebody stuff is great at first, until I discover that it's done to the same degree as all the other Forza mod stuff - ie better than nothing, but not quite as good as I hoped. Even the barn finds... 90% of them I was massively disappointed with, I don't give a toss about some ancient wood-panelled wagon, or yet another 70's ute.Oh and I'm still mostly driving about in the same cars I was in FH1. It looks to me like even the same exact 3D models they always were.
Bah, humbug, etc. I know I hate it when I read someone just moaning about something that I enjoy, but I wanted to get this off my chest, it all feels so obvious to me but I've not seen anyone talking about it. It's still a fun game - perhaps it's me, perhaps I was expecting too much, or perhaps I'm getting old and this game isn't FOR me anymore?
It just feels like a slight disappointment, I had such a clear impression of what the series was going to be and it just... didn't get there, in fact it feels further away than the previous ones. Is that my fault or the game's? If they're making more money than ever, then it's probably me...
It all feels a little artificial, a very polished facsimile of something that used to be genuine and great but an imitation all the same. The video game version of how new cars are all having overrun exhaust pops engineered in, when they used to be rare and authentic. Saw an M2 the other day popping and banging its way out of a petrol station at less than 10mph and it seemed vulgar as anything.
Edited by OwenK on Sunday 16th October 17:41
edit: Little things are winding me up. I decide to start a new championship because I think that will make one of the event icons go grey and be marked as completed. I pick some category I don't like in the hopes the cars are a laugh. They are not. At the end of the race, I'm sat in the middle of nowhere in the rubbish car I used in the championship instead of the car I was in before. In other news, I unlocked a new showcase event which is on the other side of the world. All other events disappear off the map until I go and visit this showcase event, even though I am in the middle of a championship and the next event would have been half a mile away from my current position. And I'll be driving all the way there in the crap car unless I fast travel to a festival site just to swap cars. Just, ugh. Lots of minor irritations keep stacking up.
Edited by OwenK on Sunday 16th October 17:57
LiamB said:
What's everyones best sounding car in the game for them?
For me it's a toss up between the C63 Black Edition or the E46 M3 with its insane overrun
This time last week I would have said the Jaguar Project 7, but then I won an SLK55 on a wheelspin. For me it's a toss up between the C63 Black Edition or the E46 M3 with its insane overrun
That 5.5 V8 sounds absolutely incredible, it's just a shame that I can't muster up any love for the SLK itself. Even with that V8 soundtrack, it still seems like a car which is more at home being driven around a city centre with a "250 CDI" badge on the back... Oh and I think it has an ugly face, though thankfully I don't have to see much of it in either 1st or 3rd person view.
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