Forza Horizon 5 appears to be the most played driving game of 2021

Hello and welcome to my blog again!

Nearly about 2 weeks ago, I've made a blog to do with my theory on how this game is released before Gran Turismo 7 and Forza Motorsport Reboot.

Now this time, I'm going to bring up, how this game quickly becomes the most played and popular driving game of 2021, not just only Xbox Game Pass service users would play it, this also attracts several car lovers as they love to virtually drive their performance cars on the roads such as Exotics, Tuners, Muscle, SUVs, Pick-Up Trucks and many others.

This game also features a beautifully recreated Mexico landscape, weather effects, season & time cycle, hidden collectibles, and several other things included.

Articles:

• Forza Horizon 5 Passes 6 Million Players Less Than a Week After Release | RaceDepartment
• Forza Horizon 5’s amazing intro shows why it’s a huge hit on Game Pass - Polygon

Sidenotes:

• I guess that Open-World Arcade-Style Driving Games have officially surpassed Simcade and Sim Racing in terms of popularity even though it's an apple to two different kinds of grapes. Not to mention that back in late February 2021, I've made a thread asking Giant Bomb users which Forza series they prefer, most voted for the Forza Horizon series, this means that in this site, more users prefer open-world driving games.
• Even Forza Horizon 5 has received a lot of great reviews, I don't want Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown to fail in terms of development.
• If I want to play this game, I'd personally choose to buy it in the near future.

I was never super into racing sims, or racing games in general other than early need for speed.

But a year or two ago I got a racing wheel and got into FH4. Enjoyed it but just kind of fell off with other stuff I was playing.

Now, I am having an absolute BLAST with FH5. I like the setting a lot more than 4, just seems more varied. And I like the rollout of new events better too. Plus, the fact that there's actual like "quests" except in a car is neat.

@reap3r160: I'm glad to hear that you're enjoying Forza Horizon 5.

I wish I was enjoying it as much as everyone else. I really enjoyed my time with FH3 (barely touched FH4 though) and I expected to love this one, but I think I actively hate it.

I think most of my complaints has to do with "seasonal challenges". I'm not very good at racing games and I find most of the challenges to be too difficult (some are downright impossible if there aren't enough players participating). The Drivatar AI difficulty is all over the place, and you can't adjust difficulty on those either. So I want to opt out of seasonal events entirely - but you can't filter them out on the map! any offline racing events that can be toggled between seasonal mode can't be filtered out (unless you disable both, which defeats the purpose), so they're always visible on the map, mocking me.

Showcase races/adventure chapters/story races are as bad as ever. They're rubberbanded to heck, and it's easy to make a tiny mistake at the last second to come in 2nd place or not complete all the objectives within allotted time limit, but the game tells you "You Win!" and gives you all the accolade points anyway which is pretty patronizing.

And speaking of rubberbanding, at easier difficulties, you can intentionally drive slower and have all the AI cars get stuck in scenery by failing to make large jumps which I found hilarious. The map this time around seem to have many jumps and rocky terrain which is bad combination. And often when this happened, resetting car position spawned me on top of rocks and couldn't move forward, forcing me to restart. This isn't necessarily a dealbreaker for me since increasing difficulty or driving faster solves it, but it really makes me wonder if they playtested this game at all with people who truly suck at games. For a game that offers plethora of accessibility options (including UI narration for blind people!) and tries to be all inclusive, it sure likes to punish people for being bad at it.

@goosemunch: I feel so sorry for these cars that got banged up against the rock in this screenshot.

Been having a great time with it, I loved Horizon 4 and fairly recently bought and devoured the dlc content, so like Jeff had been saying I have been a little scared that I would bounce off it but the open world is compelling enough that I've been having a great time exploring and doing races.