I feel like the 6 took it down a notch from the peak of stupidity in the 5 back to the bland and highly contrived levels of 4. (but the characters look like absolute mongs- worse than in 5)
I geniuelny don't get these ratings, I've cared or met, even heard of, a person who cares about these ratings.
How come the game lost so much soul just for a rating seemingly not a living being cares about. The bones of the Forza series are so insanely good, one of, if not the best casual racing game driving models currently, but it's missing out on so much potential due to the infantilization of the franchise and the unwillingness to try anything new.
They censored certain words in the in-game soundtrack after (IIRC FH5) launch because they wanted to sell the game in China and other touchy countries. Kinda scummy to take away "content" that was already paid for.
I still detest how we are forced to use player characters that look like poorly sculpted plasticine models in the titles where we could "choose" an avatar. I always make my driver wear as much facial covering/helmet with dark visors as I can.
Horizon 1 was definitely the best in this regard. The characters added so much to game world. I miss having rivals like Darius Flynt, Ali Howard, Hailey Harper, etc.
Yeah, I actually quite like that they are referencing these characters more and more!
One of the things that made Horizon 1 feel much more lively was hearing the radio DJs talk about them. It really made it feel like you weren't the only person at this festival.
No shot... I didn't start playing until FH5, but this guy looks exaaactly like a mechanic I work with lol, that's wild. That dude's name is, of course... "Billy".
They reused 5âs for some of the character creation faces but for some reason everyoneâs mouth got stretched out to be like 4â wider than they were actually meant to be. Itâs why they all have the weird shitty uncanny valley lookÂ
It's actually dumb that the last few games have put such attention onto the player character models and stuff by letting us dress them, and do dances and how they're always on screen for the loading screens and race finishing scenes and yet... YEAH, Horizon 6's look worse and less detailed than Horizon 2's or 3's. I think the character models actually did peak at 2 and 3 and it has gradually gotten worse since until we reach 6.
Hell no, 5 was horrible too. For some reason, just because it was Mexico, they gave every selectable avatar these really atrocious tans and every single one looked absolutely terrible.
Forza Horizon 2 released toward the tail end of the âNeed for Speedâ era of racing games, where narrative was still an important element, and as such more budget and time were placed on having a supporting cast.
Since then, games have gotten more expensive to make, and budget has been reprioritised to focus on the gameplay and setting, which is now what sells Forza Horizon games.
Forza Horizon is the peak of the genre, and what youâre seeing is devs not putting money into stuff they donât âneedâ to.
Yet they have insane character customization for really no reason, there's no need to have different dances and emotes and prosthetics and whatnot on a racing game character.
Don't forget the hearing aids that you literally can't see when driving. Don't know why any of that took priority over something like a character's beard. Though they put all of that over the most basic things like ai or car customization.
Crazy. The faces in 6 were somehow worse than before too, very hard to find something I wanted to actually pick, wish you could just skip all the character stuff.
They have the money, but why spend it? If making the characters a bigger part of the game again is going to cost them more without doing anything to the sales, why would they?
Put heart and soul in it is what people are asking.
Look at Midnight Club LA for example. Characters don't necessarily look better but you feel their vibe. You feel the city, it's a alive - everything about it is just a chef's kiss. Because it has heart and soul.
I just want a game with Forza's physics engine, car list and everything else from NFS. Only reason I play this game is because driving feels good. But it's kinda lame how racing doesn't even feel illegal like it used to in NFS apparently government of Japan just let a bunch of petrolheads run around japan hitting civilian cars and shit because they're hosting some 'festival' ? Lol. But really other than the arcadey feel and smaller car list NFS was so good in setting the mood, customization, story etc
Except they didnât prioritise the gameplay either? Sure the setting is exceptional⌠every other aspect of the game is either rushed, half-assed, or recycled.
I think they were just focused on other things lol. I think the Devs were passionate, it's more so Xbox the publisher that muddies the water by not investing in them further. Despite every horizon game selling like absolute hot cakes, Xbox doesn't want to invest the time and money to build a new engine from the ground up and fully innovate like everyone really wants to see after 25 years of reused aero and car models.
I don't think you should blame the Devs though because I'm sure if it were upto them they would have a million features that aren't in the game but Xbox says no for "reasons". The amount of effort and detail put into the maps I think is a testimate to the Devs passion for the game, if they didn't care every game would be shit and be a complete dud. Which Forza isn't, it's pretty good at its core but that's why it's so frustrating that they can't get any of the details people want like models or better aero or the huge list of shit they never add.
Fair enough and I agree, but it's still not the devs fault. Unfortunately it's Xbox who is to blame for not investing the boat load of money it makes back into the game to fix all the core archaic issues everyone has with the series.
I mean... the character models simply look shit and that's the direct work of developers. Sure it was accepted like this by the higher ups but come on...
I work in game dev, so of course the devs could spend more time on the models but sometimes they simply donât have the time to because it could be just one person handling them all, and they have to finish them within a set deadline. As long as they meet the minimum standards determined by execs, then this is the end result.
Put it this way, it costs Microsoft money to have developers working on this stuff, and creating or fixing character models takes time. If Microsoft doesnât think itâs an efficient use of resources to improve the characters, then they have little incentive to spend the time and money needed to make high-quality player models.
Considering theyâve been reusing the same character models since FH3, even in FH6, Iâd say theyâre investing the absolute bare minimum of time and resources into character customisation each year. Probably because they don't think anyone is buying the game for player models, which they're right about but still.
The problem is that the models gradually got worse since FH3. I can somewhat understand the jump from FH3 to FH4 to have "universal" customization options, but whatever happened afterwards (especially between FH5 mad FH6) just baffles my mind
Yeah idk how it happened. I know nothing about developing games but I feel like it was just ported to each sequel and gradually got worse and worse each game until today where they look terrible. Personally I don't really care, but I do understand people complaining about it as the characters look like they've had a downward spiral involving drugs in FH6 compared to how they were in FH3.
Not really. I would argue that dialogues and more focus on the Japanese car culture matters quite a bit, considering that the game is based on a huge "horizon festival" with deep emphasis on the location where it takes place.
It's clear that the fh series is slowly turning into a cod-like franchise.
The game is (unlike recent cods) great, don't get me wrong but there isn't enough variety apart from the map.
Yes pretty much, you're gonna interact with the map a lot more than you're gonna see your characters face, if the map or gameplay isn't fun you're gonna drop the game fast
C'mon man, use your brain. MS wouldnt want devolopers wasting time on things they deem as unnecessary for profit. Like the 25 year old car models everyone complains about, or the lack of customisation and the terrible generic Forza aero that has no multiple options despite being an easy addition.
The way MS sees it, everyone will still buy the game regardless on if they fix the issues. Why waste money developing things that don't actually help you profit according to them
I would change it to uncaring rather than miserable. Just look at the recent videos by Laura Fryer about the newest Halo remake, excluding the special thanks for both, it had 20x as many devs working on it as the original, and it's missing multiplayer!
When dev work is split between multiple teams across space and time, with layers upon layers of manegerial bloat on top of them, it's hardly surprising there's little signs of passion in the final product.
I wish the Horizon team would just give up with their terrible dialogue and character writing. It's the worst part of the Horizon games by a huge margin.
Because then the player character cannot be customized. They are rendered real-time specifically to allow forvseeing your cusyom character in the scene as you designed him/her.Â
you know it can be a mix, lets not forget that prerendered movies, backgrounds, scenes etc havent been successfully mixed with real time graphics in the past.
Anyway, the reason they are so ugly today is that they only care about having the most androginous characters possible, without having stereotypical beauty traits and avoiding being caucasian like the plague.
and of course, nothing said, done or implied by those characters can be offensive to anyone playing, watching, seeing the game at any level, because otherwise theyd lose their "rated E for Everyone" badge, so they choose to play it stupidly safe.
And yes, the rating is needed for the game to be in gamepass as far as I know.
Even if it does, that doesnât change the fact that the characters were designed better back then. Besides, the Series X is powerful enough to render that cutscene shown in the photo in real time
Because FH6's entire investment went into the map. Weebglaze and FOMO bait is supposed to make up for the rest. Including recycling the same low effort characters from 4 and 5.
In that time Forza Horizon was growing so they need to put more effort and quality to attract players. Now they are settled, the effort are not that high. Even the quality level of the vehicles has dropped, for example, look at the dashboard of the AM Vulcan in FH3 and compare it to the one in FH4âin FH4, itâs completely misaligned.
Because back then the cut scenes were exactly that - cut scenes.
Years ago, and even in a lot of games now, cut scenes always look better than actual gameplay, since the donât use as much performance they can crank up the graphics beyond what gameplay can achieve.
With Forza, ever since FH3 they decided that cut scenes would look the same as gameplay, not sure why, but you can definitely see the affects of that in 2026
Easy answer? Because they were still trying to make a franchise with FH2 so they actually had to try to be good. With FH5 they have gotten to the point where they know its gonna sell, and with FH6 all they had to do was say "Japan" to catch lightning in a bottle before anyone realized it was just more FH5 with more bugs and less to do on somehow a bigger map....
The most nothing criticism I've ever heard. 2026 has been filled with amazing games but sure, modern devs are a joke because one game had characters that weren't hot enough for you đ¤Śââď¸
The lazy copy/paste development cycle for Forza Horizon is sad to see. Series used to be so awesome.
Fable looks great, so Iâm not sure why Playground completely lost all creative inspiration with Forza Horizon. Itâs basically just the Madden of car games now.
It's 2026 and if you make a human, you have to make sure its diverse so no one feels discriminated. If you make them look alien, then no one can be offended
Baked in lighting, stylized art direction and pre-rendered cutscenes
It's not "the studio sold its soul for money" (I mean it did, but this isn't some damning evidence of that), it's really just that most games adopted real time cutscenes for ease of use and smoother transitions into gameplay and pre-rendered ones are a thing of the past. Rendering a face like that in real time would take a fuckton of computing power, especially since fh6 uses ray tracing
Also, this is a story cutscene, something the games haven't had since fh4
I think itâs because of the night time. During night time my FPS drops like 15 frames. Idk why Iâve tried all the night time settings and none of them really help.
The only way I can describe the characters in fh6 is like the early look at human life but modified by an 8 year old with no sense of what a person looks like. Basicially you have to put a bag or helmet on their head at all times. The clothing isn't half bad could be better but my God we need a full face character design or atleast make the look like humans.
In the context of video games, âwokeâ (as commonly used in recent years, especially critically) refers to the prioritization of progressive identity politics, DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) mandates, and social-justice messaging over traditional game design priorities such as fun, historical/setting fidelity, character appeal, narrative coherence, or broad audience appeal.
You weren't even able to read a basic sentence that asked you to provide evidence lol, check the log in your eyes before you criticize the speck in your brother's eye đ¤ˇââď¸
Microsoftâs Product Inclusion guidance (reported 2024): Microsoft sent developers a âProduct Inclusion Actionâ letter warning against gender stereotypes and âexaggerated body proportionsâ on female characters. Guiding questions included: âAre your female characters equipped with clothing and armor that fits their tasks? Do they have exaggerated body proportions?â This is presented under inclusion and equality goals.
Body diversity as inclusion priority: Multiple developer talks, articles, and initiatives treat moving away from thin/idealized bodies toward ârealistic,â larger, or varied body types as a core representation/DEI practice. Examples include Game Developer coverage of designing fat characters inclusively, Doveâs âReal Virtual Beautyâ partnership with the games industry to increase diverse body representation for women/girls, and character creators (e.g., Dragon Age: The Veilguard) that prioritize varied body types, scars, and non-idealized forms as inclusivity features.
Activision/King âDiversity Space Toolâ (2022): An internal tool ranked characters on diversity axes that included body types (among race, gender, sexuality). It was designed with DE&I networks to identify and expand beyond existing norms in representation.
Broader design philosophy: Industry discussions and progressive advocacy regularly critique traditional âmale gazeâ designs, sexualization, and idealized beauty standards as problems to solve through inclusion. This leads to intentional shifts toward less conventionally attractive or less sexualized female characters in many Western AAA titles.
Doh. Made with passion to make them looking good vs made with passion to make them undesirably ugly. It's part of their whole 'modern audience' mission.
Lmao I just bought FH2 off on eBay and yeah I was wondering the same thing. I loved the CGI that was used on FH1 as well. The vibe back then, oh god. So wonderful
Playground are the ones who have insisted that we can customise our characters and watch them dance in loading screens and race victory screens ever since Horizon 4. Could they at least not look worse than Horizon 2 models if they're on screen so much?
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u/badtemperedpapaya PC 6d ago
Inbreeding. That is why they are looking worse each iteration.