Forza Horizon 5

[Steve]

They have been handing out bans to people who were taking advantage of exploits and glitches to get credits and cars. In some cases, people have received 40 year bans with no warning. I think that's pretty shitty tbh. Give people a short ban as a warning, say, 24 hours, 3 days or whatever, but jumping straight to what is essentially a perma-ban is too much.

[Dan]

It's bollox, the willy jeep thing wasn't cheating it was their fault for making it so easy to get a super wheel spin. Same with the AKF racing for 50 laps, yeah it's a bit shitty but they are not really cheating, it's built into the game. I've seen people get banned for making car designs which is bollox as well when you look at the score boards and there's people with scores of ridiculous distances on the leader boards, what are the going to do about that? Nothing, same as with FH4. I even saw a screen shot on the second day of release where someone had a level of 2999. They need to sort out all the cheaters before worrying about people taking advantage of in game things.

[Dan]

https://old.reddit.com/r/ForzaHorizon/comments/r18mlz/psa_dont_share_anything_banned_from_everything/

This dude has been banned for 8000 years!

[Steve]

Unless he did something far worse than he claims he did, that shit is ridiculous.

[Steve]

I got another win on the Eliminator earlier. I was just trying to get the 2 parts of the festival playlist that relate to it done (finish in the top 30, win 2 head to heads) and ended up winning.

Some tips for anyone reading this that is struggling with it: -

Be aggressive at the beginning, unless you get really lucky and get a drop for a car that's level 8 or above, although that's rare. The quicker you can level up, the better. Obviously, try and challenge people in lower level cars whenever possible.

If you do get super-lucky and get a car drop that's level 8 or above near the beginning of the event, I think it's best to chill and not seek out head to heads, because there's always a risk that you'll hit a tree, roll the car or whatever.

If you come across car drops that are the same level as the car you're in, unless you know from experience that you don't like that particular vehicle, take it, cos it deprives another person of being able to take it.

When the circle gets smaller, remember that if you challenge someone near the edge of the circle, the finishing line will almost always be towards the centre or the opposite of where you're at, so you can catch people slipping by challenging them as they're facing the wrong way, as if you can challenge them while you're already moving in the right direction at decent speed, you have a big advantage.

When you get to the final showdown, check the map. If the circle is at the lower left of the map, for example, the finishing line is likely to be at the upper right - it's almost always the furthest away from where the circle is in terms of regions. So, in that scenario, if you are at the lower left side of the circle, you are much further away from the finishing line than someone that's at the upper right of the circle, so try and position yourself ready to go. Also, bear in mind that you can exit the circle before the countdown ends. There is a timeout meter that counts down when you are outside the circle, but that disappears as soon as the countdown to the final showdown hits zero, so you can get a further head start by exiting the circle a few seconds before the countdown ends.

Knowing the vehicles and map helps a lot too, but obviously that takes a fair bit of experience. There are some walls that you can't smash through. There are also areas of the map where you are basically funnelled through roads and can't take shortcuts. You also want to consider how fast your vehicle is on the road compared to off road, but yeah - it takes a LOT of experience to weight all that shit up. Unless you've really got a deep level of knowledge, just take an "as the crow flies" route and try your best not to hit anything!

 

[Steve]

A large patch for FH5 is available now. It's just over 14GB on Xbox Series X.

Patch notes: -

https://support.forzamotorsport.net/hc/en-us/articles/4411898144659-FH5-Release-Notes-December-3rd-2021

[Steve]

Ugh, so I've had to force quit the game twice in 20 minutes cos it got stuck on loading screens. I checked out the official Forza forums and loads of people are having the same issues.

Do they not test this shit before releasing it?

[Deft]

So it looks like my brother is getting his kids a Series S for Christmas. They're also coming to mine for Christmas, so maybe I'll get a bit of Yuletide Xbox action going.

[Steve]

5 hours ago, Deft said:

So it looks like my brother is getting his kids a Series S for Christmas. They're also coming to mine for Christmas, so maybe I'll get a bit of Yuletide Xbox action going.

Nice! Overall I am very happy with the Xbox experience, in terms of features, services, and games, but I am frustrated with FH5 right now cos of its buggy state.

I tried to play today and the server was down, then after playing solo for 5 minutes, the game hung on a "saving" screen when I changed the livery for one of my cars, then when I restarted it, it crashed mid-race, dumping me back at the home screen without warning, so I just gave up.

Game Pass is amazing value, so let your brother know about the Gold to Game Pass Ultimate thing if he's not already aware of it; stack up up to 3 years of pre-paid Xbox Live Gold (you can get 12 month codes online for about £40), then pay for 1 month of Ultimate and all of the Gold will convert over to Ultimate on a 1:1 basis.

[Steve]

Oh yeah - another rant about this game - in the last patch they changed how the drift zone scoring works.

Drifting was one of my favourite things to do in this game, cos I have 3 or 4 friends that are around my level at drifting and we would constantly try and one-up each other on the leaderboards. Since the last patch, I am getting drift scores around 10% lower than I was getting previously. I was #1 on every drift zone amongst my friends before the patch, but now they have no chance of beating me, and also I have no chance of beating any of my existing scores either.

If they're not going to change how the scoring works again, I think they should just reset the leaderboards, cos I feel little incentive to do drift zones when it's impossible for me to beat the scores I've already posted on them.

[Steve]

All achievements done!

[Dan]

I got really bored of it. Not sure why, maybe it's the setting. I really didn't like the fact that the weekly PR challenges have to be certain types of cars, where's the fun in that?!

[Steve]

I'm not a huge fan of the setting either really. It looked so cool in the previews, but so much of the map is just basically desert with annoying rocks in certain places.

[Steve]

The first of 2 major DLC packs is releasing on July 19th: -

 

[Steve]

A longer look at the Hot Wheels pack: -

It looks really good IMO!

[Steve]

The Hot Wheels DLC is great IMO!

The new map is made up of 3 themed biomes with a central hub area. That's split into 28 separate areas made up of over 125 miles of track, so it's pretty big!

There's a new story mode, as well as the Hot Wheels Academy, where you have to complete a bunch of challenges and races as you progress from class B up to class X. There's a lot of content.

There were already some Hot Wheels cars in the game. This DLC adds 10 new cars, but only 4 of them are Hot Wheels ones. Maybe it's a licensing thing, but I think they could have done with including more actual Hot Wheels cars. Perhaps they will add more over time.

The DLC adds over 80 new track pieces and props to use in Event Lab so you can create your own Hot Wheels races/events.

There's a bunch of new PR stunts, new billboards to discover and smash, and balloons to pop.

Rather than there being various different types of race (dirt, road, street etc.), there's just 2; speed and hazard. Speed races take place entirely on Hot Wheels track, which is suspended in the air above the ground, while the hazard races are on a mix of Hot Wheels track and the underlying terrain.

There's Hot Wheels rivals and open events that you can do.

The graphics are great, at least on the Xbox Series X.

[Steve]

I finished the Hot Wheels DLC. It took maybe 10-12 hours. Obviously there are still weekly playlist challenges to do, as well as Open and Rivals stuff, so I'll never be fully done with the DLC, but I've done all the challenges. I really enjoyed it!

[Steve]

I'm 9,413th in the Hall of Fame on this game, which is not bad considering there are 24,497,784 players!

There's a new Donut Media story being added to the game tomorrow, which will also be the theme of the playlist.

[Steve]

Well, the Donut Media story is an absolute bag of shite. It's made up of 5 short events that are boring to play. You get some clothes and a car out of it, although the car is not new to the game.

[Steve]

The game's economy has been ruined by a glitch, so they have shut down the in-game auction house.

Basically, someone made a Super 7 challenge card where you had to drive up the inside of an angled pipe. When he was testing it, he found that his car kept getting stuck with the wheels spinning, but the car not moving forwards, which caused burnout skills to be triggered. When he eventually completed his own card, the game awarded him a shit ton of credits. Once this was discovered and posted to YouTube, loads of people made their own variants of the glitch, so by wedging the accelerator down for about 20 minutes and having your car do repeated burnout skills, you could earn hundreds of millions of credits.

That led to thousands and thousands of players suddenly having 9 figure bank balances, so they went to the auction house and started buying up cars, which then caused the prices of cars to rise and rarer cars to become unavailable.

What sucks is that it took them over a week to patch the glitch, and they have announced that they will not be issuing any bans over it, nor does it seem like they will be revoking the credits/cars people obtained through it, so it's legit players like me that get shafted.

[Steve]

On 12/6/2021 at 1:59 AM, Steve said:

Oh yeah - another rant about this game - in the last patch they changed how the drift zone scoring works.

Drifting was one of my favourite things to do in this game, cos I have 3 or 4 friends that are around my level at drifting and we would constantly try and one-up each other on the leaderboards. Since the last patch, I am getting drift scores around 10% lower than I was getting previously. I was #1 on every drift zone amongst my friends before the patch, but now they have no chance of beating me, and also I have no chance of beating any of my existing scores either.

If they're not going to change how the scoring works again, I think they should just reset the leaderboards, cos I feel little incentive to do drift zones when it's impossible for me to beat the scores I've already posted on them.

They have finally decided to reset the drift leaderboards to address the issue I mentioned above. Any scores achieved before the patch was released in December 2021 that changed how the scoring works will be wiped from the leaderboards, leaving only scores achieved after that.

It's good that they're finally addressing the issue, but why the fuck did they leave it for over a year?

Also, it doesn't address the issue of all the glitched/cheated scores on other leaderboards, nor does it address the issue of speed-related scores that were achieved legitimately in certain cars that have seen been nerfed, which make beating those scores impossible.

IMO, they need to fix their shit, then do a complete wipe of all leaderboards. You'd think they'd have learned from the cheats/glitches in FH4, but FH5 ended up even worse!

[Steve]

The second and final major expansion for FH5 is being announced today at 5PM UK time, via this stream: -

 

[Steve]

The track creation tools in FH5 keep getting better and better. I bet it took DJS ages to make this: -

 

[Dan]

I haven't played 5 in months, stil much prefer 4. The map on 5 is so boring.

[Steve]

I'm enjoying the new rally expansion more than I thought I would! I like that you can do each race as a staged rally race with co-pilot directions, or as a regular race where all racers start at the same time. The new map area is a decent size and offers a bunch of new content, challenges, and rewards.

If you don't like the game already, it's definitely not going to make you a convert, but if, like me, you liked the game and wanted more of the same, albeit with a slightly different twist added, it's great.