Dear open-world driving games fans

So far from what I've heard about Forza Horizon 5, this game has received very positive reviews (Metacritic score: 92%) while it reached over 6 million players in less than a week after the launch.

For me, I haven't played Forza Horizon 5 but I still really want to buy this game and Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown by 2022 since I love open-world driving games during my adolescence, even though I'm more of a fan of Sim Racing, Rally Sim and Simcade driving games in these days.

I also remembered playing the original Forza Horizon and Test Drive Unlimited 2 on Xbox 360, I equally love them both!

@gtxforza: it’s impossible to say. The Forza Horizon series has a long track record (no pun intended) of quality games with great presentation. Everyone expected FH5 to be great and it had Microsoft’s cash backing it at a time when MS badly needed a hit so I imagine the budget was enormous. It was as close to a can’t miss game as is possible.

This game is very much an unknown quantity. Smaller publisher, not part of a massive franchise, a new team making a game in a series that has been dormant a long time. It could be good it could be bad. All we’ve seen so far are cinematics.

There have been a lot of open world racing games in the last decade that underperformed. The Crew series. The Need For Speed series. Even big publishers with big franchises haven’t been able to get it right.

Can this smaller budget team do it on their first try? Who knows? But you can’t compare it to Forza Horizon in terms of being a known quantity with tons of resources. We basically know nothing about it except the general style of game and the setting.

@bigsocrates: I understand what you mean, we will find out how is Test Drive Unlimted Solar Crown's gameplay is going to be when one of the next trailers gets released.

@gtxforza: Not really. We won't know until release or at least a demo. Games can look great in trailers but still play badly.

It's weird to see Test Drive described as not "a massive franchise". I played the first two Test Drive games on MS-DOS probably around the time that second one was released in 1989, and there have been about 20 games in this series. This series predates Need for Speed!

Obviously it's true in the sense the the most recent games in the series were a decade ago and they weren't very good, so it's more about me just being old and having fond memories of those first two games. I really haven't kept up with the series since then :)

Anyway, I love open world racing games, so I'll check this out if it reviews well -- but I'm not getting my hopes up.

@warpr: I know that Test Drive was a long-lasting series back in the day (I also go back to the MS-DOS period) and I've played some of the games, but it never seemed like it was huge; more of a niche series. There's a reason there's a Need for Speed movie and not a Test Drive movie.

What I meant here was more that this game isn't getting the resources that massive franchise projects get. Forza Horizon 5 isn't just a tentpole game for one of the big 3 console companies and a major game from one of the richest companies on earth, it's also critical for the Game Pass project. I wouldn't be surprised if its budget and the person hours that went into it are bigger than what was spent on the entire previous Test Drive series put together.

This new game is likely to have a budget that's like 10-15% of Forza Horizon 5's. Now obviously some companies have pulled off great games with lower budgets so that doesn't mean it will be bad or anything, but it has a greater likelihood than if it had the support Horizon 5 did.

I'm also going to wait for reviews or a demo. I hope it's really good. It might be. We'll have to wait and see.