FH5, Horizon Open reconsider’d

I’ve finally got to level 1,000 in Horizon Open and have the gold badge to prove it. (Also, as an aside, I’ve finally reached prestige 7.)

It’s unlikely that outside of the Festival Playlist I’ll ever voluntarily bother with Horizon Open again. This session (which I undertook solely to get the gold badge once and for all) has been no better than the last occasion I played Open racing for a prolonged period. The cheater-exploiters, shovers, rammers, and Chinese e-sports players are all there waiting to ruin the experience, free to bugger up your race one way or another without let or hindrance or fear of any penalties. And then there’s tyre smoke. By all means have some for a touch of realism, but not enough to blind the player and give them enough lung cancer for seven generations.

However, the biggest problem, I think, is the overall lack of adequate constraints. Apart from the race type and PI, the Cult of Anything Goes reigns unchallenged, which creates an utterly uneven playing field. It’s like telling an under-13s rugby team that they’re going to be playing against the Lions or the All Blacks etc., and thinking that there’s nothing unusual about it.

I don’t expect PGG are going to do anything about any of this. I hope they might be considering some modified version of the penalties in Forza Motorsport. I can probably hope in vain that they add driver and safety ratings (after GT7 or iRacing etc.), or matchmaking based on some sort of Elo system because it’s not fun when you’re a good rugby player, but there are others who are well beyond your level.

I have been thinking about other constraints along the lines of Horizon Tour, but to car category and class adding PWR constraints so that races have a balance of power, and the rest is down to tuning. I did investigate PWR on paper, but it’d have to be very, very narrow. A PWR range of, say, 0.30-0.39, and a car weighing 1500kg, results in a range of about 250hp from the least to most powerful engine which you could have in the car, which is way too much in my view. If the PWR range is 0.350-0.359, and the car is 1500kg, the overall power range is 13hp.

It’d also help if you had to change cars between championships (say, ten times before you could reuse a car) so that you wouldn’t have to deal with the cheating scoundrels in the Bone Shakers in race after race. (One cheater today was in a weirdly fast S800, but rubbish round Cathedral Circuit; another cheater was in an impossibly fast, good-handling Unimog who could magically switch between the flatbed and the canvas top during races.) Nor could you switch to another of the same car.

The timer at the end of races needs to be extended. It’s annoying to get DNF’ed because the cheaters are like rockets or because some clown shoved you into some solid object.

I have very low expectations for seeing any improvement in FH6. They ought to make Horizon Open a separate game called, for example, Forza Horizon Competizione, but this aspect of FH5 feels like it’s been bolted onto the main game without any consideration of the consequences because the kiddies expect some sort of multiplayer element.

Overall, Horizon Open is not fun when most races are so completely one-sided, there are inadequate strictures on what can be raced, and there are no consequences for some of the atrocious behaviour that you see online.