Horizon 2 felt like you were running the same loop over and over.

- Go to a hub

- Pick a championship to race

- Do the races

- Go to next hub to pick another championship

It's nice that, from what I played in the demo, this seems to be much more about driving around and finding stuff to do like the first Horizon. Plus, it looks absolutely gorgeous.

@notnert427 said:

@shindig said:

@bigsocrates: I still don't want a Horizon every two years, though. I don't want a Burnout that often either. I want something crafted and heavily-anticipated. Not something from a clockwork assembly line.

If you love waiting, might I suggest:

And I'll clarify the clockwork stuff: Forza 3 & 4 hit me pretty much back-to-back. Those games had an event list that probably eclipsed GT's equivalent. On top of that, the rewards were just a tick in a box and some ForzaBucks. I like how they drive but they got stale for me real fast. Horizon was great. It took that formula and brought it to a wide-open space.

And then they did it again. And again. For a fourth time in 2018. They're on a Need for Speed release cycle. By the time it comes out, they'll almost will have levelled numbers with Gran Turismo. It took Polyphony Digital 15 years to do that. Forza did that in a decade, eight years if you consider Horizon a part of the core franchise.

And they'll continue to do that. Forza doesn't bring in Gran Turismo numbers. Horizon's numbers are even less than that. Although this is all coming from a guy who reviews four Milestone games a year so maybe I'm just crushed by racing games in general.

Ahhh this makes me want an Xbone. My old roommate had one and I played a shit ton of Horizon 2, and liked it a lot-way more than Jeff did.

There's got to be a Mad Max Cars Pack DLC in the works for this, right?

I played a lot of Forza 2 and loved Forza 3. By the time I played Forza 4 I was kind of burned out on the concept. Never played 5 or 6 since I don't have an XBOXone. I have not tried the Horizon games and since they released this one for PC as well I might but not for full price.

I saw a reddit post last night that said PC review builds were unlocking, so maybe we'll get PC impressions soon.

@brandondryrock:Gamersyde's looked at it

The promise of new drivers is always something to hold on to when a game does not perform as well as it should, and the release this afternoon of Nvidia's latest ones has proved us right. While we were experiencing quite severe stuttering issues this morning, even at 1080p, our time on the game with the new drivers has been 99% smooth with DSR 1440p. The (minor) drops are now really rare, and they have no negative impact on the experience. We can now say we are relieved for all those who are eargerly waiting for the PC version to unlock on Friday (Ultimate Edition only obviously). If you need proof, simply check out the video inside.

Note: Let us remind everyone that 60 fps racing games don't look very good in streamed videos, even when using our stream, which is way better than YouTube. That's why we advise you to take the time to download the file.

PC used for capture: i7 6700K @ 4.5 GHz, 16 Go RAM (DDR4), Windows 10, Nvidia GTX 1080 Founder's Edition MSI

http://www.gamersyde.com/news_forza_horizon_3_with_proper_drivers-18407_en.html

From neogaf somewhere:

@cirdain: I think that settings menu makes it clear that we're looking at something a lot like Forza 6 Apex (although clearly the streaming engine for an open world will add significant extra burden that Apex simply doesn't need to deal with). Not shocking (they've always talked about sharing the code base even when one game will put in features the other doesn't) but that's definitely an engine that likes to push around dynamic settings that don't quite work out perfectly (if you've got an eye for micro-stutter and get caught out by an inconsistent 60/30 fps refresh rate on a 60Hz-locked screen [as most of us without premium *-Sync monitors are]) so I'm glad to hear a driver update has basically fixed it.

The video is quite something (even if a 1080p capture downscaled from 1440p by DSR). Starting to get itchy to play this, and that freebie copy of The Crew is a long way short of satiating me (despite me being generally vaguely positive on that as a decent open world arcade Need for Speed wannabe).

One thing that is slightly disappointing looking at the game in full detail: the trees - that level of detail and shadowing cascades really makes them stick out in places (in fact, the same but worse happens in The Crew creating trees that sometimes look no more real than the really old "cut-out" billboards of years gone by). The detailed shadows look a lot like Dirt: Rally on Ultra where the incredibly fidelity up close only exists for a very small radius to the camera and is far too sharp which leads to more aliasing issues over something like PCSS (or even just an aggressive blur pass on the shadow layer). It also shows that MSAA and even an FXAA pass isn't enough to really deal with the shader and semi-transparency aliasing. In an era where high-quality cinematic temporal antialiasing is here, it's a shame to see this overly-crisp presentation (The Crew, for me, works much better thanks to the TXAA that leads to a soft but antialiased presentation).

Minor stuff and the general finish is great (plus 60fps in a Horizon game: I'm sooo ready) along with the artistic flair to the landscapes/biomes. I'm still waiting to hear if MS plan to keep HDR as an XB1 exclusive or if they're going to actually think about this as one of the fronts on which Windows as a whole needs to move (OS X already has support for different screen gamuts and so will be working towards functional HDR support while Windows assumes everyone is using an sRGB screen and both nVidia & AMD have to expose an HDR-aware API to individual games - something you can't use properly if you're locked to the Windows compositor by UWP) and so an ideal test candidate to explore that support.

@shivoa: Damn dude. Nice read :)

@shivoa said:

Microsoft confirmed at GDC that they'd be adding native HDR support to Windows 10 and DirectX 12, but it seemingly won't hit until next year. So, unless they're on the cusp of rolling out some major unannounced changes to UWP, it doesn't look like HDR10 support for the Windows Store versions of Horizon 3 or Gears 4 will be forthcoming. It's a bummer, really, because this game and The Witcher 3 are at the very top of my HDR wishlist, but it sounds like CDPR are done with The Witcher and I really don't want to shell out for an Xbox One S just for Forza.

@conmulligan: For UWP games, I think we're stuck waiting for official support; for Witcher 3, I do wonder how far the community could get with hacking their way through shaders and plugging into a injector that enables a HDR surface.

The 3D Vision modders already have that game broken open and the shaders being rewritten to fix any stereoscopic 3D effects being wrong. It's far from trivial and I'm not convinced any mod group will take up the project, but I suspect (as a coder but also without any experience initialising AMD or nVidia HDR APIs) there's nothing technical stopping the work (tweak any shader that needs to use a wider range, replace the tone mapping output shader with an HDR tone map) from being done as a mod.

So hyped! Got tomorrow off to play it. I loved FH2 and this is sounding like more of the same, tweaked in the best way.

i hope i dont run over a chazzwuzzah

@kingpk: I really enjoyed playing Horizon 2, but I felt like I was switching out cars so often I never developed a set of favorites like I had in the original. You had a lot more freedom on what you were allowed to bring to various races, which meant you could reuse cares more often. At least I think so. It's been a long time.

The cross-platform play is going to be the thing to get me to buy a Forza game since Forza 1. I really hope the PC version and cross-platform feature works out. Buddy and I are itchin to race each other consistently.

One of the few games out there that makes me a bit jealous of XBox owners. Looking forward to the Quick Look at least.

I played the demo because I thought that I would love this since I loved FH2, and holy cow was I blown away by how it looked. I normally am not a graphics guy since I just want the game to be fun but man did I spend at least 15 minutes just going around the demo area and looking at the landscape, skybox, etc... Needless to say, I preordered it right then and there.

Something I've not seen in many reviews or even PC discussion: the drivers may have helped some people with stuttering/fps drop issues but it's not a 100% fix (I can attest to at least one PC which had the stutters bad with the new driver - making up a 60fps average by rendering 3 frames at once and then nothing for 2 more ticks being the worst case but even outside of that, the experience was visibly worse than 30fps locked due to frame-pacing issues; I'm normally ok* with 40-50fps and the occasional missed frames in most games but this could get really juddering**).

But the old Apex fix works here (for me): if you're getting perf below where it should be and the new drivers haven't fixed it then go into task manager and find the exe in details. Set Priority > Low.

I was initially unable to get anything like a smooth experience even with the average fps (when turning v-sync off) often going over 100 when at 1080p and medium to high settings (or using the dynamic settings). Dropping the priority means I'm now able to play at a basically perfect v-sync locked 60fps (few drops in urban areas and when lots of stuff is exploding but nothing like the stuttering before - it just feels like standard slight perf drops when the occasional frame is dropped, no time jumps) while running 1440p and everything to Ultra (baring shadows as I don't think they look good with the added resolution - as I mentioned above upon seeing footage of the PC version, they just shimmer like crazy near foliage so I run them Medium to get rid of that effect; they seem perfectly good when going past at 300 km/h despite not being very high-res and whatever setting you use, the more distant shadows are cascaded so lower res for all settings). That's on an OC 1070 so quite a beefy card.

Edit: Oh, and I have to assume someone is going to patch the vehicle upgrade menus on PC because right now it's like amateur hour. Stalling for 10+ frames as it reloads the vehicle (even when the part makes no visible change) every time you change the active item. It's a bad joke.

* My brain/eyes don't really notice 30/60Hz unstable refresh rates usually, unlike aliasing issues where they flag it immediately as weirdness in my vision to be interrogated.

** [game world clock: 0ms] frame, missed update, [16ms] delayed frame from what should have been the last update, another missed update, [33ms] the frame that should have been displayed 33ms ago, [83ms] sudden jump to current time. <-- That jump of 50ms in time in a single frame (when each frame is displayed 16ms after the last) is what makes this stuttering feel jarring, impossible to not throw you off, even if you don't notice dropped frames.

i'm sure my frankenstein of a gtx 1080 and fx 8350 will do fine (?)

i'm still frothing atm. fucking hurry up and update already, driver.

e: and now after playing through some of the beginning bit it won't start after quitting out. framerate was also around 40s and pretty frequent dips except if i dropped quality to low and 1080p and even then not consistent 60fps. getting more and more pressured to get that i5 finally <_< (or it's just this game)

disabled msi afterburner overclock after it wouldnt start, finally DID start, then hard crash as i was playing with settings and again wont start. im patient with this stuff but i might just put it aside and go to the contingency xbone and muck with it later.

tl;dr: IT BROKEN GET YOUR PITCHFORKS GUISE

@ripelivejam: How does it run with everything set to low for you? Or is it crashing before that?

it ranged from 40 near buildings to 60 but it only touched 60 occasionally. and mind you this is on a gtx1080/amd fx8350 (which may be a weak link here...)

i5-4690k, GTX 1070, 16GB RAM

The game defaulted me to Medium 1920x1080. I bumped it to everything on High at 2560x1440 (dynamic off, motion blur off) and it runs alright. ~70fps in free roam. The Jeep race in the beginning saw drops down to 50. The first danger zone stunt jump dropped to 20fps when I hit the ground then back up to 70. It's mostly fine though. The few road races I did hung right around 60.

I'll have to play with some settings. I just fired it up before work to see how it ran. There's a bit of shadow pop-in closer than I'd prefer. I'd love to see how Ultra looks. I'll try that later.

Seems fine for the most part. Could use some work. I'll be going back and forth between PC and XB1.

The business model for this game pisses me off.

I can literally walk into a store here today, and get the deluxe edition of the game for 100 dollars.

But if I want to just get the 60 dollar one, I have to wait 4 more days.

@ripelivejam: Yah man, this is what always keeps me from 100% committing to the PC route. Knowing that even after I invest considerable sums of money to beef up my PC I can still run into this sort of nonsense outside of my control always keeps me back. That sort of stuff literally drives me insane. Had similar issues with a few games in the past and by the time the games actually got patched and worked it soured the entire experience for me where I was playing the game more out of obligation than any fun.

That frame rate option in the menu looked like it locked it to 60, is that not the case then? Hopefully I can hit 60fps on High at 1080p with my 980. I might be jumping back and forth between PC and Xbox anyway.

Now I'm imagining you have an Xbox One-S in one of those glass fire axe cases with "break in case of inconsistent frame rate" stenciled on the glass.

@bollard said:

Turn V-Sync off and you can set FPS to unlocked.

The PC release is a bit of a mess. A lot of PC owners who bought the Ultimate Edition don't have access to their DLC or VIP benefits. Also, it's the UWP, so there's general jankiness. I fiddled around in the store app, trying to get my DLC working and borked the game. The store will let you try to buy the DLC packages up until the point of selecting your payment options, at which point it goes: "Waaaait a minute! You already own this!". It will also let you try to download and install the game a second time, even though it's already installed. I assume that hitting that download button is what broke the game, it started crashing on startup, reinstalling now.

Also, no SLI support (I know, PC master race, first world problem, waaaah I have too many video cards)? Can't find any actual info on this and the new Nvidia drivers didn't include an SLI profile, also didn't think to check GPU usage myself before breaking the game.

Ars has a post about Forza Horizon 3 up: http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/09/forza-horizon-3-performance-framerate-and-4k-tests-in-windows-10/

TLDR: They were able to do 4k High with a locked 30fps that never dropped below that on a 980ti and 4770k overclocked to 4.2ghz. Uncapped, the frame rate was all over and dynamic settings allowed him to get up to the 60fps mark, but the graphics really took a hit.

@briarpack: Ye, I also broke the game by playing through until the tab with all the premium options unlocks and then clicked the "VIP access" button, logged into the store UI that popped up, and everything crashed hard. Then loading into the game world got infected (could do the initial festival UI but the "Drive" option crashed). Then I played in the auction house until that sort of fixed itself (Hey, my Forza Hub rewards finally turned up! Possibly coincidence.) but that game UI tab is still full of links that open up store pages for the DLC and then, even if I cancel the login prompt (it requires a password before taking me to a 'buy this' prompt which, in the store itself, asks for how to pay then errors out with "you already own this"), crash the game.

Seems like no one tested that the Ultimate Edition stuff (like the entire DLC infrastructure) would actually work on Windows before releasing the game. At least this seems like an incredibly common issue (only VIP crown users I've seen are playing on XB1 and there are a lot of non-crown users on every social interface considering the only people who have access to the game right now are Ultimate purchasers and so must also have VIP status - how did the devs not think this through? If only Ultimate people can get first access then surely you'd make the DRM'd online experience so that everyone is granted VIP status by default!)

Thanks for letting me know. Shame about SLI, maybe it'll come later?

stupid question but how are you supposed to know the dlc was included in the ultimate edition, or how does it surface on the pc version? supposedly there were codes sent for the car packs? i did access one of the dlc cars and it went to the link to purchase VIP for $19.99.

@ripelivejam: Not a stupid question, stupid MS: that stuff is all completely broken on PC. The furthest I've been able to get it to force the game to crash as it gets confused about the ownership status of all the DLC.

Some people on PC are reporting they have VIP status and access to the Ultimate launch car pack but lot aren't and when I look at the leaderboards around me and my friends list, lots of people without VIP crown icon despite the only people being able to play today being Ultimate purchasers and so automatic VIPs. Everyone sees the same symptoms: main Ultimate bundle in the Win Store shows all items owned but click through to each DLC item and it puts up a price. If you clock the buy then it spends about a second on the "how to pay" page before reverting with an error message saying you already own it. The issue doesn't occur on XB1 but there are mixed reports from people playing on XB1 to unlock and then going back to PC and using the sync'd save.

Playground or Turn 10 really need to respond to this (don't think they've done so yet) because right now it's a class action lawsuit over deceptive marketing just waiting to happen (people paid extra for specific features that were clearly described and on PC they do not exist as many people who downloaded their Ultimate edition purchase only have access to base edition features).

@shivoa: thanks for the response, hoping it gets addressed sooner rather than later.