B-Wald's blog, Tuesday, October 16, 2012

HEY KIDZ! I haven't blogged in quite some time, and with our beloved FH coming out in just one week, I thought it a good time to resume.

Like I just said, ONE WEEK REMAINING! Man, it feels like yesterday it was late May, I heard about FH for the first time, and thought to myself "Damn, I gotta wait ALL SUMMER!" I actually took on extra shifts at work to make the time go by faster.

Now, there's a crispness in the air, pumpkins adorn the doorsteps of the homes on my street, and dry, dead leaves litter the ground everywhere, leaving skeletal trees twitching in the 45~50-mph wind that screams against my window as I write this. Autumn is here, and our game has shipped. One week.

What did you all think of the demo? In the end I give it two thumbs up. I say, "in the end", because for the first ten minutes or so I was quite heartbroken, to be perfectly honest. This was for two different reasons.

First, when you start the short, 1-mile-or-so sprint against Darius while driving the yellow Viper, I thought we were going to be forced to use all the assists and couldn't change anything, even the music volume. This was alleviated when we were given the Lancer and access to the difficulty menu.

This led to the second phase of disappointment: I wasn't playing an exact copy of FM4 on the open road, which is what I'd been led to believe I would be getting, by both T10 and PG staff (i.e. Dan & Ralph), and multiple hands-on reviews.

I wasn't sure at first, as that first race is on gravel, but once I was thrashing the Lancer on the blacktop, I could tell that it was different. I was mad. So, I parked the car (literally- I reversed perfectly into a parking spot at the diner at the SE of the demo map), paused the game, and had a smoke while thinking about this new driving experience.

It didn't take long for me to come around. If this game hadn't had the name "Forza" on it, and I hadn't read all the reviews or listened to the half-truths spouted by Dan & Ralph, this demo would have had me grinning like an idiot from the very first second. There IS enough of the Forza DNA to make it feel reasonably realistic, there's just a little too much grip, the brakes are a little too good, and the crash physics are stupidly forgiving (a 90-mph impact with a Lancer can cause a 5-ton delivery truck to fly backwards down the street? Really?).

When you put it up against any other open-world driving game, Horizon's demo alone wins hands-down. If the TDU games had had physics and graphics like this, no one would have complained. Some may argue the absence of TRUE off-roading is a deal breaker, but given the car list it makes perfect sense. While there are some who would attempt to drive a Pagani Huyara through the underbrush, most of them are not true car fans.

Also, It's worth noting that these may not be the physics of the full game. One of the FM games (either 3 or 4) had a crap-handling demo that people complained about, but the finished product delivered. Since most of the reviewers were actually playing the final build of the game, not the demo, this could explain alot.

So, while I have fallen well and truly in love with the demo, I do still have some minor gripes, and one major beef based on something I heard about the full game.

Minor: No horn, turn signals or highbeam functions, despite the fact Ralph mentioned some of these functions in an article with IGN a while back. Perhaps they'll be in the full game, but I'm not holding my breath.

Music selection is limited: Rock and Metal music is woefully under-represented. PLENTY of car fans and gamers love them some classic rock, old-school metal, and even 50's greaser tunes. They can include all the dubstep, alt-rock and bizarre stuff the kiddies love, but don't deny us our conventional music. Hip-hop is also conspicuously absent.

My final minor gripe is that the car list is rather small, and quite euro-centric. There's only 20-ish American cars, a similar number of JDMs, yet there are over 60 vehicles from Europe. I love cars of all types, from all regions, but a car festival in Colorado would be CRAWLING with Musclecars and JDMs. You'd be much more likely to see a Skyline or Oldsmobile 442 than you would a Reventon or Enzo. This can be corrected with DLC, however.

My one major complaint, and it's a doozie, it that there is apparently NO CIVILIAN TRAFFIC WHEN MULTIPLAYER FREE-ROAMING. This was a total punch to the mouth for me. Weaving through traffic with friends was in the top 3 things I was looking forward to doing in this game. I'm praying they'll fix this with a patch.

Anyway, this game is still gonna be a 9/10 for me I think. Don't let the negativity in my blog here give you the wrong impression: I've put more time into the demo alone than I've put into some games I have the full versions of. This game may turn out to be the greatest time-waster for me in the past decade. I just thought I'd talk honestly about my thoughts, rather than just gush like a moron over how pretty the demo is (it IS very, very pretty...)

I'll finish by sharing some neat demo tips I've either read about, been told about, or found myself:

-There's a hidden STM assist. To turn it off, set the OVERALL game difficulty to "Expert", then pick your individual assist levels (transmission, A.I, etc). This will turn off the hidden STM assist and make it feel more Forza-ey.

-Go into the controls menu, and access "Advanced Options" by pressing X. Set the "inner deadzone" for steering and brakes to zero, and the "outer deadzone" for the same functions to 95. this will make the steering and brakes more sensitive, and make the drive feel even MORE Forza-ey.

-You can free-roam in the area with the large dam in the Viper by completing the Viper street race (3rd and final race in the demo), then re-entering the race in rivals mode. (thanks Trey)

-You can jump almost immediately to free-roam mode by quitting the "Recaro Rush" race as soon as it starts. The only things you are really FORCED to do is watch the music video and race Darius for a mile.

-You can repair your car by pausing, entering the difficulty menu, and flicking cosmetic damage off and on. This is better than just driving with it off in my opinion, because you get the satisfaction of denting bodywork and shattering glass when you wreck.

Whoo, this was a long one, thanks for reading! I'll see y'all in fake-Colorado in a week or so.

-B Wald