Forza Horizon - Page 2

Played the demo and Forza has sold out. It's utter crap. You can crash head on with a car and still keep going. Computer catches up like there's something built into the game where they can go faster to do so. Physics are non existent.

TDU came out years ago and is way better than this. Guess they needed some money before the year ended so they released it.

This game stomps all over TDU in almost every imaginable way. In my eyes, the only thing TDU has over this is the size of the island. TDU had horrible catch up and CPU cheating, terrible physics, non-existent wheels support, and was glitchy as hell. This game is infinitely more polished and has much better racing tracks.

Saying you're better than TDU is like saying you're the worlds tallest midget. FH is a good game that could've been great. And that's what a lot of people said about TDU, too.

I've logged about 60 hours into TDU the past 6 weeks and have enjoyed it. Didn't see any server issues before they went down, only experienced one significant glitch that never happened again, and the only real technical issue that annoys me are the poorly synched mouths of the characters in the cutscenes that continue moving after the character's voicework has ended and seeing the bird animation happen in a tunnel once. Mostly my complaints relate to the lack of race variety, graphics being a tad weak in areas like the car models, no rain or nighttime, no pedestrians, no parked cars on the side of streets, no Arizona memorial (and what's up with the dozen or so battleships at anchor in the harbor, guess they don't reaize that beyond 8 museum ships in this country that they're all scrapped or on the bottom of the ocean), and other minor complaints like having to drive to a real estate office after touring a house just to buy it.

It does more right than it does wrong and the setting helps make it be entertaining and overcome its weaknesses (Which largely was the lack of life... it needed a lot more little touches to really make the island come alive). I'll happily put in another 15 hours into it in the next few weeks to wrap it up. I just hope TDU2 stays online for a few more years since I don't want to jump into it so soon. I think a year or two wait is best if I'm going to get the most entertainment out of it.

They sadly took it offline at the end of September. At least it finally spurred me on into playing it after sitting here on the shelf for a half decade or so. Had a lot of fun in multiplayer the last couple of weeks and have been surprised to see single player holding my attention since then.

Even going for 100% highway exploration for an achievement was fun. Underated little game these days I think. Too bad it's offline forever now.

AI cars driving the exotic sports cars in the game take their place and help fill the void a bit. They can be pretty entertaining and help spice things up a tad. I've seen them causing pile ups, driving the wrong way down interstates, racing each other, etc.

It's better than just the mindless AI traffic. Poor substitute for real humans but it was a nice touch just the same for the offline gamer's and for the day the game was taken offline.

has this become the TDU thread?

If you have a question about Forza Horizons or a comment about the game, I don't think we're stopping you. Forza Horizons clearly owes much to the foundation Test Drive Unlimited established so I don't think going off on a tangent with a few post about it and just a couple without anything to do with Forza Horizons was too far off topic. And I think it's unreasonable not to expect it to have come up. It's like expecting Gran Turismo to not factor into Forza discussion at some point and vice versa.

If it's bothering you though, I doubt there's much more to be said about TDU at this point. But I doubt there's going to be a heck of a lot more activity in here about the subject of the thread either. It doesn't seem to be grabbing the interest of many AVS users judging by this thread.

I know you love your TDU dearly. But there's a reason the servers were closed.

Word around the campfire is FH is going to be $15 at Wallyworld come Black Friday. It didn't take long for this title to hit the bargain bin. I feel profoundly ripped off after paying for the LCE. Oh well, live'n learn.

I don't buy many games close to launch, but if it's $15 on Black Friday, I'll venture out and grab a copy.

It's for that reason you refuse to admit ever happens; the game was old, one of the few non EA projects out there that relied on dedicated company ran servers, and they simply wanted to redirect their server resources towards their current projects and customers.

It wasn't due to the lack of popularity from what I saw. Had no trouble having 5 or 6 names viewable in my vicinity in even in the mountains at any time and my recently met player's list on the 360's guide was turning over after about every session or two. Not bad for a half decade old game (Even if the announced server closure likely was helping boost numbers a bit).

black friday pricing is no indication of the popularity or quality of the titles and you know it. Forza Motorsport 4 was $20 on BF, only a few weeks after it was released and it's by far got the most online racers of all of them out there. And Horizon has more online people than the newer NFS: Most Wanted.

TDU died because it's old and because no one played it anymore. Doesn't help to have an open world racing game if no one plays it. It wasn't until the notice went out that the servers were going to be closed that some people went back to TDU. And even then, it took people begging other people to go back online to finish off the achievements.

The only reason you're even saying that is because of a single thread at AtariAge where we both post at. It was a hassle getting two clubs together with two members from each club to knock out the interclub victories achievement and that was it for hassles. And I bet it would've been a hassle five years ago to get four people coordinated and online at the same time.

With the amount of people I saw online, there's no way that anyone would've ever encountered any difficulty finding people to race with at any point. My recently met player's list (Which is what, a good 50 names or so?) was often completely full of people met within just the last 24 hours throughout the few weeks I played. And that was with me largely sticking to rural areas instead of Honolulu (Which went largely ignored by me until I started knocking out the exploration achievement after the servers closed) where many player's would hang out.

There's no way it went from ghost town to a thriving online community just because the end was near. Like I was the first to say, I'm sure it boosted numbers a bit (It's what spurred me into finally playing for instance), but I'm sure it was a very active community even in the months leading up to the server closure announcement. Heck, how would you even know one way or another? Your played games list is publically viewable and clearly shows that you've never even played TDU on your Xbox Live account.
Edited by Leo_Ames - 11/14/12 at 2:59pm

nice that you took the time to look at my games list. if you looked closer, you would see my friends game list and see that a number of them had TDU on their list and they all abandoned TDU a long time ago. AtariAge wasn't the only place with people begging for people to get back online to play. check out cheapassgamer. lots of people trying to get people to boost.

Onlysublime, there are people trying to organize boosting sessions from the minute an achievement list is released for upcoming titles these days.

When you have an achievement that require multiple people to get together to accomplish it, you need to go to a message forum to organize something with like minded individuals. That three out of the four people for this achievement came from AtariAge where modern gaming is just a small speck in the forum I think speaks highly of this older game. You couldn't just drive up to random people to do interclub. You needed to specifically go out of your way to set something up since you needed someone else in your same club and two opponents also together in a club and you all had to be online together at your respective clubs at the same time.

Racing random strangers, of which there was no shortage of, was only useful for earning 30 victories (I think that was the amount) and winning five instant challenges. And one could've did all that just fine without ever organizing a thing and I probably got halfway to 30 (And won over 5 instant challenges) just in the course of enjoying it over the last few weeks. Only boosted to help people and to guarantee that I got enough victories with a server closure looming.

Had I had a couple of more weeks or been a bit faster (I didn't have many fast cars, a Viper was my fastest at that point), I'd of only needed to organize interclub.

Could it be because the entire island is not only recreated in TDU2 but also expanded upon with off road tracks?

Speaking of boosting, I just noticed the group challenge achievement. I need to figure out how to get that. That and the stupid sell something on the store achievement that was glitched for me in Forza 4.

TDU2 sounds like it would be a pain to fully complete the achievements on since some of those online achievements require decent sized groups of individuals and coordination to accomplish. I'll be sticking to just having fun I think when I get it without an eye towards earning achievements. I hope Forza Horizon's offline and online achievements can be accomplished via one's individual actions instead of requiring a group effort.

Anyone know if the Black Friday rumor was accurate? Can't really make out titles on the pictures in Wal-Mart's circular.
Edited by Leo_Ames - 11/16/12 at 7:38pm

Snagged it for $15 last night along with some other games. Thanks for the heads up.

I only have one question. Is it equal or better than Project Gotham?

I am the wrong person to ask. Project Gotham 2-4 are some of my favorite games of all time. A lot of people from Project Gotham worked on this team. If you put it side by side with PGR 4 today, I'd pick this.

Thats exactly why I asked you. You were one of the few people on my Xbox Live Friends lists that played PGR as much or more than I did. I've never fell in love with Forza games, because felt too boring.. just as boring as GT5. PGR's kudos system rewarded game play for things over than absolute fastest laptime. So it made the series alot more fun to play. It seems thats what Forza Horizon is also about, being more fun to play. Its great to hear PGR people worked on this title.

I ordered yesterday, as I couldn't resist only paying $5 bucks for this game ($15 sale price - $10 MS store discount from BLOPS2 purchase).

Let me put it another way: I think this game meets Forza 4 and PGR 4 halfway in terms of fun and playability. It even has a system similar to kudos. I also don't regret spending $70 for it for one minute.

BF pricing may not reflect the quality of a title, but it can be a yardstick to measure the popularity of one. FH hasn't been setting the sales charts on fire. I asked my ex wife to pick this title up for my son when she ventured out to Walmart on Thanksgiving night. She arrived several hours after the doors opened to avoid the mad rush, so I wasn't real confident on her being able to score it. As it turns out she did, and told me it was the only game left among the cheap sale titles. For $15, it's a no brainer, but for what I paid for the LCE, I feel let down by the quality for $80.

I havent played FH yet, so I cant talk about its quality. But I can talk about BF. And why I agree it can properly measure an item's popularity.
BF came to be for several reasons:

1) It gives retailers a reason to get shoppers in stores on what would normally be a restful weekday off from work.
2) It signals the "official" start of the holiday shopping season. There is a psychological effect that tells consumers *this* is the day you begin preparing & shopping for Christmas presents.
3) BF discounts allow stores to clear out older, overstocked or otherwise slow selling products. Which makes room for next year products. Think about all the 2013 announcements that will happen in 6 weeks from CES.
4) By heavily discounting older, overstocked or less-than popular products, retailers attract record breaking amounts of foot/web traffic. Which leads to customers purchasing other items on their Christmas list while already shopping in the B&M or website store.

While the vast majority of my friends list plays shooters, mainly Call of Duty. I have quite a few who are also big into racing games. Several of those guys were playing Forza4 when it released. I didnt see nearly that number playing Forza Horizon. I dont know what the official sales numbers were.. but Horizon does seem to be alot less 'popular' than previous iterations of Forza.