Occasional Tales

I knew Horizon 4 wouldn’t last forever, although it seems to have lasted a good long time. There have been reports of content already disappearing from the game and not being available for download. That looks to affect players who bought the Ultimate version in the first place, whereas I bought the base game and then got the Ultimate bundle on special, which may be why I can still drive all the various DLC cars. (Aside: I’ve been a bit slow in writing this while the posts on the forum about the problems with DLC cars continue to have the stylings of a peevish sense of adolescent entitlement which, frankly, annoys me. I assume that the matter will be resolved. Stop banging on about it. ) And now back to our main feature. I may make a more concerted effort to get to prestige 8, but of late, I’ve been neglecting the game somewhat, with my attention focused on FH5. I think because FH4 was my first Horizon game, I have a preference for it just as if I’d started with FH3, I would’ve preferr...

It was convenient to deal with the first daily of the week, the photo and the collectibles at the stadium all in one fell swoop. This week’s weekly was in the Hoonigan F-150, thus continuing the whole drift theme of this series. I’d already practised the Volcán Sprint in less than ideal conditions (i.e., the wet) yesterday, hence I knew it could be done without too much grief. I’m surprised we weren’t made to do Reservorio as well. Eventlab (1). Arcadia . Another artistic Eventlab course from DJS. Not a bad circuit, but it looks to be designed for drifting. Absolute rubbish SWS. Eventlab (2). Hilltop Scramble was another decent circuit. This is more like it. Eventlab (3). Otoribashi . I liked the style, but was not so keen on the course. I one-shotted all three danger signs in the Hyundai Ioniq which merely needed the gear tuned to make the car ridiculously fast in A-class. A couple of the SWSs were one-third all right, and the other was good. I chose the Lynk and Co. 03+ for Fine C...

I tried the car in FH4 to get a feel for it. It was all right in C class, somewhat slow, and occasionally slidey because of the bicycle tyres on it. In B class it was more of the same, but I needed to be subtle with cornering or the back end was prone to step out. A800. Aero time because the car was floaty and slidey through benign corners, dips and rises. Aero helped, and minimum tuning settings seemed to be sufficient. In FH5, the Giulia Sprint wasn’t exactly the same. It took a good deal more fiddling to build a C class car which in the sprint races ( Descansar Dorado , Dunas Blancas and Copper Canyon ) took late leads and struggled to stay ahead of the drivatars. Plaza Circuit was a whole different matter, with my car winning by 15 seconds. I upgraded to semi-slick tyres in B class, but the performance in the sprint races was much the same – a late lead in Descansar Dorado ; not much oomph uphill in Dunas Blancas , but decent cornering; plagued by a Bentley 8 litre in Copper Cany...

A Tale of Two Games. It took me a long time to make something of the Giulia Quadrifoglio in FH4. I wanted to like the car, but it wasn’t until I applied Modern Tuning™ that I had something drivable. With the introduction of Alfa Romeo in Horizon 5, the car was back. I was sort of hoping for the more recent model, but the 2017 one will do. I started with an RWD build of the car, taking it into mid-S1 class. It’s understeery. It’s not excessively understeery, but I’m used to RWD builds having good turn-in. It suffers through sharp turns as well, being one of those cars where I have to slow down a lot, lift off, coast, straighten up, and get back on the power. Meanwhile, the drivatars are ploughing into such corners as if they’re nothing. More usually, the Giulia’s tail starts to wiggle because the drivatars don’t have to worry about coasting or racing in RWD cars on a keyboard, and coasting causes you to lose time. I added aero, but that didn’t help as much as I hoped it would. The car s...

And some observations about Forza aero. In the interests of research, I did some builds of these cars (RWD) in B and A class. The B-class versions are drivable, but in spite of the BRZ and the GT86 being same-actress-different-hair, the former had worse handling through corners, being prone to wheel spin and sliding. The curious thing here is that the weight distribution of the BRZ was 54% to the GT86’s 53%, but that 1% seemed to make all the difference. Overall, the cars are too chunky and too slow in B class to do more than struggle, but I was going for handling builds as I want to be able to tune these things. The GR86 has even less scope for upgrading to the top of B class, but in performance, is much like the GT86 in this class. The A-class build of the BRZ was much like the B-class one, being terrible through corners as it was still prone to wheel spin and sliding. The A-class GT86 continued to have superior handling, which got me curious as to why there was such a difference. I ...

Yes, the Trial in FH4. I did the Trial in FH4 for the very first time ever last week because I wanted the achievement from doing so. As I said in my previous post about the Trial, it’s always sounded so irritating that it just wasn’t worth the stress of doing it. As I had nothing better to do in the UK this afternoon, I thought I’d try the Trial again. This week it’s dirt racing in B700 Mazdas, and the reward is a gold jacket that would be embarrassing in almost any situation that wasn’t a 70s disco. I chose the 2005 Mazda MX-5 (the Mazdaspeed) because it had the best stock PWR of the eligible cars. I must’ve built it for dirt racing at some stage because I’d already purchased most of the relevant components. The starting point was the Moorhead Rally Trail . I waited for it to get to the point where it asked if you wanted to join the event, and got most of the way to Derwent Water and back before the Trial started, but with Lakehurst Copse Scramble . Not sure what was going on there, b...

No, not that one; not yet. After the 1953 Corvette got mentioned a few times in connection with recent events in FH5, I thought I’d turn my attention to this car. From FH4 I know it’s nothing outstanding, but it is a fairly solid performer. Instead, in FH5, it vexed the tits off me. I tried it in D class, the drivatars mocked my efforts. C class, same again. I skipped to A class, and, er… This morning I went through the same process in FH4. In D-B class races, the Corvette was constantly pestered by the drivatars. The one thing I didn’t alter was the drivetrain, keeping it RWD throughout. In A class (sans aero), the same thing happened again. The drivatars made nuisances of themselves, never being more than a second or so behind me. And then I tried A class (avec aero) and I romped off into the distance. I had to do some fiddling with the car, mostly adjustments to the weight, to get it to A800, but it only worked once I’d added all the herbs and spices. This afternoon, it was back to ...

When I got FH4, I looked at the tuning settings and didn’t bother because they were incomprehensible. My first attempt at tuning was stretching out the final drive after seeing the YouTuber, DUBS, do the same. The next major step came from watching a Shmee150 video in which Tim Burton talked about changing the car setting to corsa (or something like that) and the effect it had on the springs. I started doing the same with generic settings for the springs. I did some wild guessing with the settings for the ARBs, but the game is so forgiving that it didn’t seem to mind. Things got a little more serious when I ran into weight-based settings in a YouTube video. I know these get dismissed, but they had two advantages in my tiny, non-technical mind: first, they made sense, and second, they could be calculated exactly. There was no need use generic spring settings any longer, although as I said above, the game is quite forgiving. I also wondered about tyre pressures and adopted my GT3, GT4, r...

That was the pain that was. The treasure hunt – always start with the treasure hunt in case it fails because you left it too late – was three new pathfinders, starting with Tulum. I’m sure I went through the gate to trigger it, and then I followed the path of red balloons only to find nothing was happening. The second time, I drove down the road and bumped into the finish in about 30 se­c­onds flat. When I started the pathfinder from Guanajuato, I couldn’t see any of the balloons or any hint as to which way I should go. Thanks for frustrating and annoying me, game. I got that done after I doubled back to the start, which was when I spotted the red balloons. The weekly in the Series III Land Rover went off without any issues. First pain of the week – a showcase remix. I loathed these things in Horizon 4 and am glad that they’re generally not part of the Festival playlist. This just proved that point. I set the game to the easiest difficulty and still nearly lost the race when the fat Am...

And some other stuff. The details of series 21 are out. Yeah, off-roading. Shrug. Some new pick-up trucks (cue baffling fanboy hysteria about them; Quote from Facebook: “This month is Huge!”). Two repeat exclusives, an Extreme E and the terrible Morris Traveller. There are other, thematically relevant exclusives which could’ve been included as seasonal rewards, but they’re nowhere to be seen. There’s an update to photo mode (don’t care), but what about an update to the painting tools? And looking ahead to series 22, more new rims (which we don’t need), but no sign of tunable stock aero or different, tunable rear wings. Even NFS: Most Wanted (2005) had more wings than the Horizon series even if they were purely cosmetic. I’ve driven the Porsche Mission R. The problem with EVs is a lack of gears. Most of the time I played FH4 it was in automatic, hence I didn’t need to pay any attention to gears. But now that I use manual with clutch, it’s all about the gears. I know what gear I need to ...

Good out of the box. I’m seriously impressed by the Porsche 935. All I did to the car was tune it (not something I’m especially good at, but my approach works for me). As usual, I took it to the HW Goliath. The Huracán STO was a disappointment in that the drivatars were all over it whether it was RWD or AWD, and I was expecting much the same with the 935. Well, I’m sometimes wrong. A normal race round the HW Goliath has me on a best lap that’s about 45 seconds ahead of the drivatars’ best lap, and that’s what I had by the end of the race; hence I’m seriously impressed by the Porsche 935. I’ll admit that this is the sort of car I want to see more of in the game – the sort of lineup you get in ACC rather than the stock cars that your dad, granddad, and rich uncles and aunts drive every day. I’d still prefer the game to have free roam between proper motor racing circuits. The next series of FH5 would appear to focus on off-roading, which I feel is a little too soon after the so-called Ral...

 It’s all about the PWR. Now that we have the Huracán STO in FH5, I thought I’d try building all of them to S1 900 and racing them round the Horizon Festival Circuit over five laps. It did not go well in that the 2014 Huracán had the most scope for modification, while the STO had the least and drove like a pig. It was a good example of why the PI system in Horizon games is so appalling because S1 900 ≠ S1 900. The 2014 Huracán had a power-to-weight ratio (PWR) of 0.498, but the STO could only manage 0.418 to hit the same PI. (Aside: in FH4, the game is all metric, but in FH5, I have power set to hp, but the rest is metric; the PWR figure still provides the same sort of information.) I did a little experiment in FH4 this morning, building the Huracán and the Huracán Performante to nearly the same PWR, the former being 0.478 to the latter’s 0.477, and racing them in the Colossus. Al­though I took some corners a little badly in the Performante, it was only about two seconds slower tha...

The pain, the pain. That I’ve got this far this week is verging on the miraculous. As I said in my previous post, the fans on the Zephyrus died, which had me taking the machine to the local service centre where, I was eventually informed, it would be off for a week. I went through the long, arduous process of reinstalling FH5 on the Nitro 5. The game worked yesterday morning and I started doing the Festival playlist. It then refused to work after lunch, getting as far as the small splash screen, which would sit there in mute defiance before vanishing. I had a sudden thought that the problem was with the D:\ drive. I adjusted the settings and the game ran with some demur. This morning I had the same problem. The game would get to the small splash screen and then die. When I checked Event Viewer, the message seemed to be saying that parts of the system weren’t chatting, but if I went to Component Services, I could fix it, and did – several times without even a sniff of success. Even edit...

 Let’s start with yesterday. There was a patch for FH5 yesterday which I discovered by chance when I checked the MS shop. I in­stalled it and ran the game three times before it stopped crashing. I dealt with the daily and then re­mem­bered that I wanted to see whether the Eliminator was playable because I’d been hearing there were issues. It didn’t disappoint. First challenge, the game froze, and went CTD. That was yesterday. Today it was time to do the new Festival playlist. It was… unremarkable. Even the Hoonigan Bel Air managed to stay on its wheels in spite of being a fally-over clown car, and the Eventlab tiles were actually functioning properly. I should mention the FH4 weekly in a rally monster, aka the Grindathon. 20 ultimate drift skills, 15 points from speed zones. If it was a piece of writing, I’d call it space-filling waffle. Speaking of Grindathons, that would seem to be the second expansion. If my maths is correct, you’ll have to do 33 races to unlock the Goliath. But...

Bored now. By the time the reset in August last year deprived me of seven months of progress in Horizon 5, I was doing little more than the Festival playlist and the daily challenges, and had probably been doing that for some time. After the reset, I was playing the game a lot more because I wanted to recover the levels and money that I’d lost, but that only lasted about six months, and again I’m back to doing as little as possible in the game. Yesterday, I was unable to play FH5 because of some connection issue (the one that claims you’re offline). I tried the game again today, but had no luck until I disconnected the laptop from the router and reconnected it. After that, the game was back to normal, but having done the two outstanding dailies, I sat in my Toyota Celica for a few moments and could think of no compelling reason to continue playing. I may not play Horizon 4 for extended periods these days, but I’ve never gone into the game feeling utterly uninspired. Horizon 5 was good ...