Forza Horizon 5: Don't be alarmed if the Forzathon still doesn't work

Forza Horizon 5

If you are playing Forza Horizon 5 (and given the numbers it does not surprise us), most likely you have noticed how the Forzathon Shop, which allows you to buy cosmetic items, does not work. Lots of online reports, which sent players into total panic, convinced that it was an error in their build and therefore perhaps having to re-download the over 100GB of the Playground Games game from scratch. Fortunately, however, this is not the case.

As reported online, in fact, Playground Games itself took care of disabling the Forza Horizon 5 in-game shop. And beware: this solution actually has a very specific reason. In fact, the developers have decided to launch the practically complete title, but before activating further online solutions, they have seen fit not to launch the Forzathon Shop. Over the next few weeks Playground Games will certainly decide to activate it, but at the moment there is still no clear release date, since the developers have not communicated it.

Considering the strictly online Forza facility Horizon 5, Playground Games' choice is absolutely consistent and very, very precautionary in this regard. To avoid disconnections or other, in fact, it was preferred to opt to introduce some elements as soon as the servers have stabilized. Risking a major game crash or a slowdown during racing is probably not the best way to build player loyalty. In the meantime, however, it is always possible to earn points for the Forzathon Shop and it could be an excellent opportunity to be ready as soon as the shop opens officially.

Forza Horizon 5 debuted this week, garnering a large number of acclaim from audiences and critics alike. The title is constantly evolving and it is reasonable to expect new updates and new races in the coming months. This is, at least until today, the biggest exclusive of Xbox: have you jumped on board one of the many virtual vehicles?

Forza Horizon 5 is on Xbox Game Pass: you can subscribe by following this address.

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‘Forza Horizon 5’ Has Some Deeply Weird Difficulty Spikes And Valleys

Forza Horizon 5

Xbox

I have been enjoying my time with Forza Horizon 5, a game that can best be described as happiness distilled into open world video game form. The game is a massive hit, breaking 7 million players and destroying old franchise records. It’s an easy Game of the Year contender and one of the best reviewed originals of the year so far.

But while I have enjoyed a lot of Forza Horizon 5 so far, I keep running into particular issues in the game, where something seems…off with the story mode quests that ask you to hit 1-3 stars for certain objectives. In short, what I’ve found is a game where the difficulty is sort of all over the place, and in one instance, I effectively had to almost shut the AI off to progress. Other times, hitting three stars is bizarrely easy.

What I’ve found in Forza Horizon 5’s story missions is that most timed objectives are best solved by avoiding the road almost 100% of the time. If any mission gives you a vehicle that has any offroading capabilities in the least, the best course of action is to see the endpoint on the map, and drive straight toward it, roads be damned.

Forza Horizon 5

MS

Obviously offroading is a big part of Forza, but this is a different level I’m talking about here. I’ve had missions have 5-8 minute timers to hit 3 stars, and making a beeline over the landscape to the end gets me there in barely over a minute. This has happened many, many times, and is pretty weird. Maybe a side effect of open world racing, and not being able to plan for every possible path players take, but it’s pretty strange. Sometimes the game solves this by giving you a timer or checkpoints that force you on the road, but not often.

But the opposite is true too. I’ve done some races where you can’t do the landscape shortcuts, and you can drive literally perfectly and still miss the 3 star time by a huge margin. There’s one mission in a stuntman questline which tells you to beat an AI controlled car to the finish line using a car that apparently has diapers for wheels. On normal difficulty, the AI car would hit the finish line a full ten seconds before the 3 star time itself, and you auto-fail the mission if you don’t beat that car. The only way to progress was to turn the difficulty way down and effectively make the AI drive half speed. It was physically impossible to beat otherwise, and the 2 and 1 star timers didn’t mean anything at all, because if you were driving that slow, you’d just lose.

This is not really an issue when it comes to the actual races in the game, really just the story missions, but it comes up a lot, and I keep finding situation where I’m either beating 3 star times by literal minutes, or driving like my life depends on it and not coming anywhere close. It’s very strange, and there probably needed to be some rebalancing done in this department.

I still love the game, but it’s made me want to stick more to races than story missions, and we’ll see if any of this might get patched in some way in the future.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and its audiobook, and The Earthborn Trilogy, also on audiobook.