What does everyone think so far? Better or worse than FH4?

[Ryan Gyattling]

I have the Premium edition played about 1.9 hours. I liked what I played so far. Haven't gone over the 2 hour mark yet in case I wanted to refund, wanted to hear other's thoughts on it who played it for longer.

In comparison to FH4, how would you rate the Map, Physics, Activities, Fun, etc.?

[atmur]

I'm a little over 10 hours in, and I'm more than happy with my purchase. It's another Forza Horizon, with updates and upgrades across the board, like 4 was to 3, and 3 to 2. And the map is beautiful.

I still think FH1 is the best in the series, but it's a very different game at this point.

EDIT: Also wanted to note that I haven't run into that many bugs, just some minor stuff and certainly nothing game-breaking. I appear to be lucky on this front.

[TyresTyco]

It's all top notch and better besides the server issues and memory leak. Which are unacceptable.

[TheHuskyGT]

Played for almost 20 hours now. It is a refined FH4. I didn't expect anything different. Just the same formula improved end expanded.

Yes it's more of the same, but some of us, we wouldn't want it any other way.

The map, I have mixed feelings. Maybe I haven't gotten used to it, but although it's beautiful in design and larger, I wouldn't say it's necessarily better. It's a bit... barren. Maybe I need to explore it more.

Physics feel similar to FH4. I play with a wheel exclusively. As for wheel support, it has improved greatly. It's very smooth and predictable.

Activities... there is just too much to do and at the moment I feel overwhelmed. That's a good thing I guess. The story and the way the game progresses is really nice though. The new Expedition feature gives you a nice rewarding feeling when you complete it and expand the festival.

Fun. All I care for are the cars. Driving them is fun. They look and sound great.

As for technical aspects, I've been the lucky one. No crashes, stutters, wheel issues or any bug or glitch. The game runs butter smooth as FH4 did.

[Moon]

First and probably last time a game I pre-ordered lives up to my hype.. My expectations were demolished by this game and I'm surprised how much better it is than 4

[Tony]

low res textures in RTX gpus, that the answer

[JDumbz]

I just wanted a new racing game in general. So yes, I'm satisfied

[Ascent]

I've already played way too much. Imo it's masterpiece tier 10/10

[Alan J T]

21 Hours and is better than 4 more racing variety better off road exploring than in H4 H4 was mostly mud and Tarmac now sand dunes,

Just a shame I can not import all my Tunes from H4 Had well over 100 and was Classed as 5 star tuner but nope only designs can be imported

[Princess Pilfer]

It's marginally better at everything, but has some bugs, is my TL:DR opinion.

My favorite improvements are how what specific upgrades you get matter a lot more now (particularly for your suspension) so it's much easier (generally speaking) to 'make your own' as it were.

Also the handling is a lot more predicatble. Momentum matters more. For me this is most noticable in cross country races, where in FH4 sometimes the car just...shoots off to one side or the other like there's one of those Fast and Furious Magnent cars next to you for no apparent reason, forcing a restart. Especially when landing jumps. This has been almost completely eliminated in my experience thus far. I've run into *1* time where it jerked like it wanted to do that, but because the momentum matters more for your cornering the car actually physically couldn't launch itself off the track before I could correct it. Which makes cross country (and to a lesser extent dirt) racing a lot more fun and a lot less controller crushingly frustrating.

[kireta]

Map is pretty big, and there's variety of terrain. Plenty of tracks too. Biodomes are decently large, so map doesn't feel like patched garden either.
AIs and random traffic are plain suicidal, and keep crashing into each other if you play SP.
Autoshow feels kind of lacking in variety. Many, many cars supposedly in game are locked behind activities or withheld for events. Lack of Abarth and Lancia is bummer for me, I like my RWD dirt racing.
Driving model feels, dunno, softer? Coming in and out of slide is much smoother, you can actually recover from unplanned loss of traction rather easily compared to FH4.
Progression tracking/ingame cheevos look grindy, like one in Lego expansion for FH4, I guess "gotta catch them all" crowd will like it.
Freeroam doesn't work more often than it does. Hard to say if bad netcode, or beta severs just can't keep up, we'll see on Tuesday when game actually releases.
Online racing works fine though, no disconnects once you're in. Waiting for next race can take few minutes, again hard to say where the issue is.
Music becomes just background noise after a while. It's not just plain bad as in FH4, just nothing to write home about. At this point I simply keep it off.

[joaristo]

About 10 hours in and i must say the game itself is fantastic. The map is a lot better than FH4 and is varied with different biomes and elevation changes (and Guanajuato is absolutely stunning!). Car sounds are overall nicer than FH4 and i love the expeditions and progression system in general. Horizon stories felt more lively (?) than 4 especially The Vocho story. Physics is weird, could be somewhat better than 4 because RWD cars felt more stable but at the same time i could cut the grass and not lose any grip, unlike in 4. On the graphics department they absolutely nailed it. It is simply the best looking racer or maybe even game out there.

However the PC port is, unsatisfying i must say. While i managed to get it up and running now, i had to put it into a specific exclusion setting on my antivirus which i didn't even know existed until i found a comment on another thread. It seems weird that a AAA game can't even run with antivirus. Another issue i ran into is memory leak, or whatever its called. I don't have the best hardware (i5 3470 - GTX 1650) and it can run relatively stable at around 50-60 fps for an hour or so on high settings with some tweaking. It suddenly just starts dropping into the 40 - low 50s and if i play longer than 2 hours it could drop to the 30s.

In conclusion, it is a mixed bag so far. On one hand the game is, dare i say, nearly faultless for a racing game. On the other hand the PC port isn't great. Hoping for Playground Games to fix all of our issues.

[Mexicola9302]

Map and gameplay and all is nice, but the graphic is worse than in FH4, and the optimization too.

[Monky]

Originally posted by Michael Myers:

I have the Premium edition played about 1.9 hours. I liked what I played so far. Haven't gone over the 2 hour mark yet in case I wanted to refund, wanted to hear other's thoughts on it who played it for longer.

In comparison to FH4, how would you rate the Map, Physics, Activities, Fun, etc.?

What the ♥♥♥♥ - if you think about refund than do it instead of bullshitting the discussion - love FH or hate it!

[Monky]

Originally posted by Mexicola9302:

Map and gameplay and all is nice, but the graphic is worse than in FH4, and the optimization too.

Not true - both is better than FH4

[Paradoxica]

Its alright, car physics seems downgraded compared to fh3 and fh4

probably due to the map being so big and the game needing to run on a xbox made in 2012