Tag: Forza

Genre: Open World Racing
Platform: PC / Xbox Series X
Also Available On: Xbox One

Forza Horizon always plays that line between fun and realistic at a base game. Their expansions then either lean towards one of those. For Hot Wheels, it’s definitely leaning into the fun.

This feels a bit like deja-vu in that I’ve already done an x.1 ramblings on a Forza Horizon Hot Wheels expansion. However, that’s not a bad thing in this case. The original run of this theme felt like a layer on top of the existing gameplay. It threw some Hot Wheels tracks into the normal environment and called it a day. This is very much a step up. They’ve built an entire new world for this expansion, consisting of three environment archetype islands (desert, snow, and jungle) set in a large interconnected world in the sky. It’s an incredibly well constructed landscape that really pushes the Hot Wheels theming far better than the previous run.

Compared to the previous one, this also just feels much more playable than I remember. That one had some weird things with physics where opponent AI would have problems staying on the track or staying on all four wheels. I didn’t see that at all here. I think some of that has to do with a much increased use of magnetic tracks that keep you really locked down, at least compared to my memory. On the general driving side there feels like a much larger inclusion of randomly fun track elements. There’s things like water slides, corkscrews, a giant half pipe, boost fans all over the place, and more that just make you feel more like you’re in a childhood playroom than in the base Forza.

That’s not to say it’s all great, but what’s weird here isn’t really a surprise. The events aren’t really that different to the base game. The AI is still rubberbandy as all hell. Like the FH3 expansion, the Hot Wheels cars are largely impractical if you use cockpit view and you end up depending on regular cars. It’s very distinctly an expansion to widen what Forza Horizon 5 is, which is the pattern they’ve followed in the past and isn’t really anything of a surprise here.

This is ultimately a case where you know what you’re getting into. If you liked Horizon 5, you’ll like this. If you didn’t the theming isn’t going to be enough to get you on board. It’s a stupid fun bend on the core Horizon gameplay, which is really all I want. It adds some more events to a game that I will routinely come back to every few months for a few hours, and give me some things to do until the next expansion comes out, and again that’s expected and for me is perfectly in line with what I wanted.

2021-11-172021-11-17

Game Ramblings #151 – Forza Horizon 5

More Info from Microsoft

Genre: Open World Racing
Platform: PC / Xbox Series X
Also Available On: Xbox One

Look, this is Forza Horizon. From a meta game perspective, there’s nothing new. You drive around in an open world, find races, find over the top stupid events, crush signs, get a ton of cars. That hasn’t changed. The location has changed. The specifics of the story have changed. None of that is really important though. If you’ve played these games, you know if you like this series by now. If you don’t know if you like it, give it a try. That stuff’s not really what I care to talk about.

What’s nice about 5 is that it’s a lot of the things that they felt like they learned from 4, but amped up and there from the start. Seasons and seasonal play lists are no longer the big new feature, but just part of the game. As a result they feel oddly more integrated to me. There’s more variety in the seasonal play lists. There’s a better push to get you to jump into multiplayer games just to try them out, without the stress of needing to win. There’s just more of a reason to do these things for the hell of it. Being rewarded with cool new cars is just a part of the fun.

The other big thing just there is the Eliminator. For 4, this was the battle royale that was added as a random patch a year after the game’s release. What nobody expected is that it was going to be a hell of a lot of fun. For 5, it’s there from the start and continues to be chaotic. Now that it’s just a part of the game, I’m looking forward to seeing what kind of dumb shouldn’t work but ends up being hilariously find ideas they come up with.

However, the big thing for me is related to screenshots in this one being in different aspect ratios. I was actually able to take advantage of cross platform play this time around, and boy does it work well. For FH3 and 4, my choices were PC or a base Xbox One, and let’s be realistic – that isn’t a choice. I was PC all the way. However, now I have my development PC or a Series X. They’re comparable hardware for me with comparable experiences – I can do 60 FPS in 21:9 1440p or I can do 60fps in performance mode dynamic res 4k. They’re both great experiences and I used them both.

The big thing for me is that the cross platform play just works. A lot of cloud save stuff in the game industry has tended to be sporadic. Nintendo’s cloud saves work well, but require a lot of manual handling that can be kind of a pain in the ass. Sony’s storage needs are so slim relative to the size of modern save files that I stopped taking advantage of it when I left the PS3 generation. On mobile, both Android and iOS have made me want to stab myself in the face when developing on those platform. Steam’s cloud saves work well though because they check when you launch a game for any newer data in the cloud. Microsoft takes this approach, and it works flawlessly. If I was already at my PC, I’d just play there. If I wanted to lay in my beanbag or didn’t want to turn my PC on, I just turned on the Xbox. In both cases I didn’t think about save data or whether I needed to sync things. I just went, it just worked, I just raced.

It should also be noted just how well it runs on any hardware you throw at it, but frankly Digital Foundry covered it better than I will ever be able to.

That was really the important thing for about playing through 5. I already knew I was going to come in and enjoy the game because I’ve literally been doing that now for this subseries for the past decade. What I didn’t expect was how easy it would be to just play where I wanted to play. This series has always been spectacularly fun, and it continues to be so. Now I just know that I can do so where I want, when I want, and I don’t have to worry about the platforms getting in my way.

2017-05-14

Game Ramblings #22.1 – Forza Horizon 3: Hot Wheels

See original post covering Forza Horizon 3

Genre: Open World Racing
Platform: Windows 10 (Microsoft Store – Digital Only)
Also Available On: Xbox One

This screenshot is the best quick peak I can really give to describe this expansion. There’s a loop in the back left, some obligatory fire in the right, and an entire mountain covered in looping track in the center. This is as close as you’ll get to your childhood fantasy of driving a full size Hot Wheels car in a full size Hot Wheels universe, and damn is it a lot of fun.

This is the second expansion released as post-release content for Forza Horizon 3. The first one, Blizzard Mountain, added a bunch of snow-focused rally events that were solid but didn’t stray too far from the core gameplay established in the base game. Horizon Hot Wheels throws the idea of the base game out the window. All of the expectations of a Hot Wheels theme are there. There’s brightly colored blue and orange track (with the all important little side walls) built in impossible angles to drive around on. There’s soaring banks and loops that seem impossible to drive on (and yes, you can fall off if you’re going too slow at the top of a loop). There’s gigantic jumps everywhere, most of the time preceded by a little black boost pad to really get you up to speed. There’s even an occasional T-Rex there just to make sure things stay grounded in reality. Despite it all, this still works as a solid Forza experience.

While Horizon has always leaned distinctly more towards arcade than the core Forza titles, it still had a relatively realistic feel to driving, and that’s maintained here. The best times are still going to be had by paying attention to your breaking lines and properly hitting corners. However, the track designs greatly changed how I approached racing. My preferred setup has always been the cockpit view, and the ability to see where I’m going in a standard car on standard roads was never a problem. What I didn’t take into account is the fact that I may be turning UP, instead of left and right, and that’s the biggest gameplay change that the Hot Wheels expansion brings to the table. Because of the significant inclusion of things like loops or Immelmann loops, I tended to heavily lean on cars that either had significantly large windshields, or cars that were roll cage only, giving me a lot more ability to see where the corners were approaching in a completely foreign direction from what I was used to.

That said, not everything worked out fantastically. The Hot Wheels cars themselves were unsurprisingly bad at being cars. The designs have always been hilariously impractical as actual car designs, but having the cool looking toy and actually trying to drive the cars are two different things. This is especially bad when you can’t actually see where you’re going:

Yep, that’s a big ol engine block in the way. The designs that are there are definitely authentic to the originals, but I tended to stick with normal cars when I could just for playability. The AI also was having some significant problems adjusting to the strange track designs, particularly in high speed banks where turning really wasn’t that important. I can’t recall more than a handful of times where I really saw the AI ever flip over in the base game, but it was pretty routine to see multiple cars in a race go flying off the track to their doom here. The AI also felt like it had some adjustments to its rubberbanding since I last played, because the AI was often pulling off impossible feats in acceleration to pass me. I’ve never driven the Halo Warthog, but I king of suspect it can’t out accelerate a Jaguar F-Type.

However, the things I found wrong were at best minor nitpicks. They’re immediately forgotten the first time you go off a blind jump through a fire hoop, see the car tilting up, and just watch the sky for seconds at a time not really knowing when you’re going to land. It’s those kinds of outlandish moments that make this feel like playing in a giant Hot Wheels set, despite still feeling like Forza.