FH5, Series 58, Week 3

Treasure hunt. Hot hatch? No, a super hot hatch. All right, fine. 300FPs to add to my 178,000. Penury averted once again.

I did the photo second because the car I drove in the treasure hunt, the R26.R, was the car for this week’s photo. I got socks. Steady, ladies.

The weekly was in the Mitsubishi Eclipse GSX. I’ve never consciously mastered Lucky Escape skills, which I only ever get by chance, which is how I completed this irritating task. A short pointless drag race. 100,000 skill points. And thus I’ve probably driven this rather dull car for the last time in FH5.

I started with the DS for the PR stunts. It was the usual issue of landing somewhere you don’t go thumping into trees, but I eventually PB’ed it and got a one-third good SWS. I managed to one-shot and PB the ST for a rubbish SWS.

I one-shotted the HW PR stunt in a messy, untidy way. One-third very good SWS.

I knew the RA PR stunt would take several attempts to do. I went far enough on the first attempt, but landed on the rail line. I tried not belting up the hill full tilt, which seems to have helped. I can only hope that in FH6 we shan’t have DSs where there’s a jump before the ramp. Got a two-thirds good SWS.

And then there was the Trial. I tried doing this at lunchtime in the 1965 Transit van, but missed a checkpoint in Carretera, which was partly my own fault, and quit. Returned this afternoon in the SVT Lightning, which seems to have been a much stronger choice, although the player in the El Camino who won left me far behind. I was going to use the El Camino, but built it to B700 because I forgot this was a C-class race. I tried the C-class version afterwards in a normal Jungle Descent. Quite fast in a straight line, but a bugger round corners.

And that’s all I’m doing this week. No Eventlab, but four seasonals, none of which have anything enticing.

FH6, art

I was wondering just recently whether we were going to get some more artworks in FH6. I was right. It’s a pity this sort of thing is getting highlighted instead of some actual game play. I expect the fanboys will be unhappy because of the lack of top-heavy waifus (but the American – and yes, I know where PGG is, but it’s under American orders – gaming industry seems terrified of boobs; just look at Serana in Skyrim – front-on, cleavage; side-on, where have they gone?)

As various people noted, “I may not know much about art, but I’d like a great deal more about the actual business of the game.”

FH6, the map

I’ll base my comments partly on the topographical image and what I’ve seen in the videos on YouTube. The map is very portrait, and more so because I looked at the green bit and then noticed there was a lot of snowy, mountainous map north of that. One of my first thoughts was that it was like an expansion (a thought which I now know others have also had).

I picked out the probable route of the Goliath and Legend Island without much bother. I thought the drag strips might be airfields, but the one roughly in the centre of the southern part of the map is the Festival site, and the other one appears to be an actual drag strip (with a third at the space port in the south of the map?) The player estate to the north west is obvious.

A lot of the map also resembles Sierra Nueva with an excess of twisty roads, making it look like everywhere’s a drift zone. Traversing the southern half of the map between the stadium and the corresponding point on the east side of the map while staying on the road (i.e., tarmac) all the way is going to demand significant detours. The one small advantage will be the ability to fast travel once you’ve been somewhere, and I can see a lot of people using that because driving the full distance will quickly become tedious. I wonder whether the non-linear nature of the roads encouraged the devs to drop smashing bonus boards to unlock fast travel. The motorway across the map which was in FH4 and 5 has gone, and yet the longer motorway in FH5 was a response to all the players who wanted something longer where they could drive their cars at full tilt. Possibly the size of the map means that the ring road will be perfectly adequate.

However, I’m a little concerned that too much of this is going to be 2nd gear-3rd gear racing, and anything above A class is going to be ill suited to most of it.

I’m guessing the buildable player base is that broad expanse in the middle of the mountains slightly to the north west.

I can see a couple of smaller towns, but it’s either Tokyo or a village, and nothing in between; but I suppose there’s not the space for middle-sized urban areas.

From the videos on YouTube, the countryside looks amazing, and has a good deal more character than the predominantly beige Mexico.

Another feature which will be welcome is predominantly breakable trees. This may be another concession to the absence of straight lines in the map. I hate the trees in FH5 because a lot of them ought to be breakable, but aren’t. They also have nasty roots as well. One additional thought about this: this is to compensate for a map to which the Eliminator seems ill suited.

And since we’re talking about trees, there don’t appear to be a lot of stray, annoying rocks to impede my grand, great and glorious progress. They’re another nuisance in FH5.

FH6, other things

PI system has been changed. C500 not C600, but that’ll take the new R class into account. I assume that C class is still the same, but with a different number.

The fourth rim category is all rims. Sort of handy because I seldom stray beyond the first set, where my needs are adequately addressed. I’ll be honest and say that the game has far too many rims and a lot of them look identical. My choices are usually the lightest or the heaviest and rarely anything else unless I’m looking too get a car to a particular PI.

AR12 Nick feels that the brakes have changed, and he also mentioned that suspension has apparently been reworked.