Forza Horizon 3

[fragger]

fragger, have you encountered any racers on the beach? You seem to be alive and well 

I'm making sure I'm only on the beach when I reckon you lot are all in bed

[LowPolyOWG]

 

[PZ]

Nice w0#k, AB! 

[BinnZ]

302 cars, omfg!

In GTA I currently own 130 vehicles. Well that is what I got stuffed away in my garages. Apart from that I also have 33 (approximately) Pegasus vehicles and 7 vehicles attached to my yacht. So all together I have just slightly more than half of what you got so far in FH3. 

[Art Blade]

thanks, guys

[LowPolyOWG]

In GTA I currently own 130 vehicles.

And I'm with 7, 5 pegasus vehicles and a Nero and Armoured Kuruma

[BinnZ]

You're a minimalist GKID

[LowPolyOWG]

I think my GTA O habits reflects my real world habits

[Art Blade]

erm, I just added a few more cars to my "maximalist" collection

Rant

BLOODY HELL sometimes this game pisses me off big time

You may remember the last time I posted about something that really annoyed me, having TWO IDENTICAL drivers on the grid that kept adding points to the higher-ranking driver so "they" could beat me with more points than a single driver (which means everyone else) could achieve.

Before that, I noticed that sometimes random AI drivers in a race become super expert pro drivers no matter what difficulty the game is set to. That means, I start a race, notice that I have at least one unbeatable driver on the track, restart the race but first I lower the difficulty. New start, new drivers (their skills are being recalculated before the restart) and usually it goes well. Not all the time. I can tell something is wrong when the AI suddenly is capable of "rubber-banding" which means they get pulled towards me and close the gap, no matter how big it was or how un-skilled they are supposed to be. One of them usually sticks to my exhaust pipe and bumps into me or overtakes me, the next possible opportunity he will take. Bloody annoying if you don't want to race on extreme difficulty.

Then there is only one big race around the entire map, fastest cars take around 12 or less minutes per lap. Normally it's one lap but you can set up more. Thing is, the more laps, the more money and that not additive (10+10+10..) but more or less exponentially (10+20+40.. or so) which means it does pay off to drive more than one lap. Takes time, though.

Because it takes time (10 laps, with breaks, 2.5 hours) I decided to use some type of driving aid (not really, but in a way) which basically is self-explanatory: rewind. You can switch that ability on and off except during events. I decided to switch it on because IF something popped up I wanted to be able to rewind (rather than restart after hours of driving) and continue from before that accident or whatever it might have been. You can go back say 3 seconds per rewind, several times in a row (thus going back like up to non-stop 15 seconds or so from before your crash) and choose whether to resume or to rewind more until you can't rewind anymore. You may use rewind at any given time.

Now. I had AI difficulty set to "average" (something I can beat) and rewind enabled. Started the race and sure enough, crashed a few times into trees, flew off the road, stuff like that. I was glad I had rewind enabled. Those accidents "never happened" 

After a couple of laps I noticed that after a rewind the AI drivers were very close, the game forgot about the gap before using rewind. Alright, no biggie, can handle that, can still drive better than them.

During perhaps lap 5 or 6, the rewind didn't w0#k properly any more. Usually you can watch it rewind, now it went black and then just put you there, some 3 seconds back. Hmm.. well. I don't need to watch, all I want is to go back, works, no problem. Apart from the field getting clustered around me now after a rewind.

Lap 7 or 8, one of the drivers, a "nobody" with rank 17 (me, 500+) and a *bleep* little average Ferrari manages to pull up to my bumper and even overtake me. Same guy keeps following me from there on.

Lap 9, last time I used the rewind. I had just finished lap 8 and was perhaps a minute or so away from the start/finish, I realised that I got reset to a position that wasn't remotely close to where I used the rewind. Actually, I was back in lap 8, about a minute away from finishing it. WHAT THE FLIPPING HECK?? Not going to touch rewind any more this race.

Lap 10. Again the funny guy popped up behind me and tried to overtake me. He did, I overtook him again, done.. until I see the bunch of cars ahead of me. BUNCH OF CARS?? My position was 8/12 out of the blue. WHAT THE..

Managed to overtake the whole field. On my way to the finish, I was now too nervous and wound-up, I managed to crash into a rock I didn't even know existed. Full stop, field starting to pull up and overtake me. OK, let's try the fricking rewind.. hello? REWIND? Didn't w0#k AT ALL. As if switched off. EXCELLENT FEATURE.

A little hectic, I manage to get back and pull up to position 3 when my car slips on the beach near the finish. I spin around and get overtaken again.

I struggle and get back and finish 5th, after two and a half hours. The last lap was REALLY ANNOYING. As was the result, due to all the *bleep*-ups, most of which weren't even my fault.

I still got around 1.6 million dollar. Imagine place 1...

Man. I know that there is no guarantee for "stupid" AI drivers, even if you set them to the lowest difficulty "inexperienced" they can still produce at least one magic super hero that keeps sticking to my tail, seen that happen before. But I think I'll give it another try, maybe only 5 laps and lowest difficulty.

/Rant

[Art Blade]

It just occurred to me that you might not fully understand why I ranted.

See, there is that rewind function that I usually don't use. It allows you to undo a crash, basically. If you crash, fly off the track and so on, you rewind to a point in time when you can still avoid the crash. Neat, and "noob."

Then there is the Goliath race that I usually don't play. It is about 12 minutes per lap so it does take long. One lap is around the entire map (now you can imagine how small the map is..) However, it pays handsomely to win it. I only tried it very few times with lots of restarts, just to win one lap it took forever. I encountered strange AI behaviour as described in my previous post. Not that I can't race, it's that I hate it when I set it to "easiest," thanks to bugs, it still can turn "hardest." So I had been avoiding it.

Today I thought it might be an idea to combine rewind with Goliath. Thanks to rewind, I even dared to set the AI to "average" which makes them quite good drivers. And 10 laps with that rewind as kind of fallback and the supposedly huge amount of money, it was worth a try. Not too exhausting, taking breaks, using rewind.. "let's do it."

And then the broken rewind basically ruined 2.5 hours of racing for me.

I would have done it totally differently and I would have known what to expect if I had chosen NOT to enable the rewind function. It would have been an exhausting race that I'd have tackled differently. But I enabled rewind. I just wanted to pass 2.5 hours somehow racing casually and taking breaks in between, using rewind if I lost focus.. kind of a relaxed way of making money but still, it is a high speed race and still requires a lot of concentration.

It sure is frustrating if bugs, sloppy programming, a *bleep* product, ruin 2.5 hours of your precious time. And almost the whole time it looked as if I could win without problems.

Only the very last minutes, after about 2.5 hours, when I had to overtake basically the whole bunch of drivers although they should have been WAY behind me, only when I crashed and the rewind function DIDN'T w0#k ANYMORE, when I managed to get back to 3rd position like 30 seconds before the finish and then my car spun out.. I could have overtaken the last two and won.. and when I realised I couldn't win anymore because the rewind didn't w0#k and all the *bleep* happened basically because of the rewind.. when I realised that after 2.5 hours I only finished 5th.. that's when I thought, "this can't be true. This can't be fucking true."

[Art Blade]

It was still bugging me so I did some research on the net.

Turns out that all three observations (rewind problems, rubber-banding AI, one or two unbeatable AI regardless the difficulty setting) are actual bugs and commonplace. The exact same problems that I described happened to a lot of players who posted about them on various forums and in various threads. They were obviously equally frustrated.

The rewind seems to mess up after piling up more data than it can handle, like an hour or so. When I noticed I was position 8/12, that was due to the rewind literally putting me back on track, both in time and in space, while the rest of the drivers weren't affected at all and just kept on driving. So I was put behind them. Like, I only rewound my own space and time. As in, I went back in time on my own. Nice time travel concept. How would that w0#k if I time-travelled back to the 15th century while their time had been continuing? Would I be standing in a ghost town, everyone who lived there now being dead, would the town be in ruins or still intact..? 

Other players reported worse stuff which, in the end, prevented them from even finishing at all. Either because they were sent a couple of laps behind the field or the game crashed or they'd get stuck in the race without being able to continue.. weird stuff, and annoying as hell.

Another observation: MS/turn10 are just the same as R*, UBI*bleep* and other major publishers/developers: Support ignores the problems. They don't even seem to bother to respond in any way.

Damn.

[Art Blade]

Alright, today I tested a 5-lap Goliath race without rewind and the skill of the "enemies" set to "new driver" which is the lowest possible. I won the race. Payout (new driver difficulty) was only $700k despite finishing 1st. It surely would have been more on a higher difficulty but then again, it was more because I had rewind disabled. So it was perhaps about the same payout as with rewind on average difficulty.

Remember, 10 laps (average difficulty) finishing 5th paid some $1.6M which means I would have won a LOT more, perhaps about $2.5M or something like that if I had finished 1st. But I don't want to go through that kind of stress anymore, 2.5 hours is terribly long even if it pays well. One hour twenty was about as long as I can stand without going nuts.

The actual racing time was some 56 minutes (1 hour 20 minutes including breaks) and my fastest lap time was 10:48.111 with a top speed of 440 kph (slightly less than 274 mph)

Despite that speed and a really not too shabby race on my part in total, I did have a "new racer" with a car similar to mine and he'd bloody stick to me all the time. He'd rubber-band up to my bumper every time I wasn't going 274mph. I can't count the times I had to reclaim position 1 from him. You need to know that my speed is about as high as it gets, including on bumpy roads. My 2017 Ford GT HE's performance is based on literally months of tuning it to perfection. I broke virtually all speed records with that car and tuning. No way a level 17 newbie got a tune like that. And indeed, it was absolutely no problem to catch up to him even when he was literally miles ahead (ahem.. that happened after I took a screenshot, I lost control and had a stupid accident, a high-speed crash into a rail guard that nearly split my car in half)

The problem was leaving the super-"new driver"-AI behind. It just didn't w0#k.

I took little breaks in between and took a look at the game map that showed the AI drivers and how they were scattered around the map. The last guy in 12th position was really half a map away. Like, he was on the leftmost part of the map while I was on the rightmost part of the map. THAT's what "new driver" should look like, not bumping into me and overtaking me every time I'm not driving like Michael Schumacher.

Bloody hell, it is ridiculous. I might as well have chosen expert difficulty. The only difference would have been that ALL of them would have clustered around me all the time and a constant overtaking and reclaiming of positions. Not what I had in mind when I chose "new drivers."

[Art Blade]

Alright, I actually did it again. 

This time, again 5 laps but this time on "average" AI skills (same as the 10 laps race) and again without rewind.

I won. Payout $735k was less than I expected, so upping the difficulty a couple of notches didn't do much.

However. The first two laps were really cool. I led by miles, on average difficulty. Then came lap three.. which produced an uber driver again. The very same AI pilot that bugged me the last race. Same rubber-banding, same nonsense.. Again, drivers scattered all around the map, up to half a map away..

Here, take a look at the scoreboard, I marked it for you. How is it that I won EVERY LAP (always 1st through start/finish) and that I won the race, how is it that this cheating AI driver (the same that was rubber-banding) managed to get an almost 10 seconds faster best lap than me? It might simply show the rubber-banding. He was way behind and suddenly he was back again. Miraculously made a 10-seconds-jump ahead to where I was. Actually, EVERYONE down to the marked one got faster best lap times than me!!  Also, the last positions don't show the time because I didn't want to wait any longer, look at the total time difference between me and the last listed time

So silly, really, so annoying.. all that, that's no racing fun anymore. It is just plain and simple rubbish.

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[LowPolyOWG]

I remember the endurance races in Forza 3 was a nightmare similar to yours

[Art Blade]

apparently those bugs are indeed not limited to one title but basically all of them.