raycevick
patreon
Comfy
🕑 Added 2021-11-12 20:27:03 +0000 UTC
Like 3.5 million other people, I've been playing Forza Horizon 5. The arcade spin-off of Microsoft's biggest racing brand and as with every other entry in the franchise, I've been having a great time with it. Its setting of Mexico's beautiful, there's a vast amount of content, and virtually every vehicle you could ever want.
There's things that are annoying such as the launch bugs, horrible dialogue, and cringey positive reinforcement of things such as "Top 100%" on leaderboards, but those are generally quibbles at least in my experience.
However, should I ever do a video involving Forza Horizon 5, it's probably not going to be a formal review, because in terms of its objective feature-set, graphical fidelity, and types of gameplay, it's all… pretty much the same as it has been for each entry.
It's definitely refined, it's not like there's been no advances since its first entry back in 2012. Higher textures here, better lighting there, and a more nuanced handling model across the board, but it's all very interactive.
What's surprising about Forza Horizon 5, is people are loving it, and seemingly a new wave of people are discovering it, despite there being very little advancement or change.
It's surprising, because during the same week, Call of Duty Vanguard has been released, and while in a completely different genre and rating sure, it too is a game that's similar iterative of Modern Warfare (2019). Right down to having the same time to kill, animations, and attachments…
And it's being absolutely reamed.
People would probably point out that it's because Forza Horizon 5 could be argued as some of the best in its genre, whereas Vanguard is comparatively weaker to the competition. Perhaps, but Modern Warfare (2019) is in many ways the best of its genre, at least in its core elements like moving, shooting, and animation, all of which are things that Vanguard carry over in the same way Horizon 5 carries over its driving, events, and structure from games that came before.
Now, there are two major differences.
From what I've seen of Vanguard, it's got all of the core-elements as the great games that came before it, but it lacks all of the nuanced detail. One of the problems with game coverage is easy it is to descend into a game of top trumps.
"This game has 40 guns."
"Oh yeah, well this one has 42 guns. It's better."
Vanguard may have all of the same movement, shooting, animations, etc, but does it have the same polished pacing in its campaign? Does it have the top notch scripting, directing players intelligently to where designers intend? Are the enemy placements just as theory playtested? Are there standout stages as original as things like All Ghillied Up were for their time?
If the answers no, then it's not the same game that came out before at all.
But there's another aspect to this…
Forza Horizon's a franchise that I call, comfy. It's the type of game that comes out every 2-3 years with a consistent brand of quality in all aspects, graphics, gameplay, features. It can engage you for 5+ hours at a time, and for fifteen minutes. You can grind towards a specific goal, or drive a 1500+ HP Super Truck through the forests, collecting experience and points just effectively as that grind.
Most importantly, the releases never become overwhelming. Two years is enough time to appreciate the current release, exhaust its contents, let them sit with you, and build up anticipation at the prospect of going through that all over again.
Call of Duty doesn't do that.
I'm still talking about Modern Warfare, because that's the last one I have some thoughts on extending beyond a Beta test, which is why I don't really discuss Cold War, and now that I might have the time soon to play Cold War, Vanguard's come out.
Disney proved that even Star Wars isn't guaranteed to make double its profit at the theatres should it flood the market with yearly releases, and it's the same with all forms of entertainment, including video-games.
Maybe if people had the chance to miss Call of Duty, they'd be okay with something like Vanguard not pushing the franchise.
Comments
The Patyman
Maybe part of the reason why a game like Forza Horizon can exist without much of a change is because of a couple things. One is expectation. For the most part, Horizon has the player living out the dream of being a car collector, being able to take these super rare, fragile, gas guzzling, electricity sipping monsters in some of the most beautiful vistas one can only dream of. The player base doesn’t expect much of a dramatic change. All they want for the most part is more cars and a new location. This dovetails into my second point which is playerbase, as the two are different. I would want to believe that the CoD playerbase expects some sort of change in a title. Not just in the environment, setting, plot, etc., but in the mechanics as well, and how those complement the former. If the game feels like MW2019 but takes place on off-putting maps, the flow will disrupt players. Of course, that’s a subjective matter. But that playerbase has higher expectations when it comes to a new iteration compared to the playerbase of Forza Horizon. And thirdly, it can be due to stagnation and/or poor decision making on the developers/publishers part. I think Angry Joe kind of summed it up by basically saying “it’s CoD WW2 but worse”. It’s lame when you grab a game from an established franchise and the first thought in your head is “oh I think I’ve played this before”. Now there are outside factors as to why Vanguard turned out the way it did, which is why I like to describe it as a game made from refurbished duct tape. The limitations due to COVID have shown greatly, and Sledgehammer really couldn’t do much about it. Horizon kind of falls into that territory as well, but due to the new cars, landscape, tweaks to handling or performance metrics, then that is something that does feel different. Same can be said with my thoughts on F12019 versus 2020 (and subsequently 2021). Sure it might look, perform, do the same things as the former, but the latter feels more refined. Those tweaks do play a massive part in the enjoyment and advancement. Whereas Vanguard…it looks and feels like something we’ve experienced before.
