Forza Horizon 5 - Co-op Racing

The Trial is a weekly co-operative championship in Forza Horizon 5 against "Unbeatable" Drivatars (game AI). You are teamed with 5 other players and race against the Drivatar team. The finishing position of each competitor is used to decide their contribution to the overall team score. The team with the highest score wins the race. Both teams need to win the best of 3 races to win the championship.

There are other co-operative races in the game, known as the Seasonal Championships however the Drivatar team are only "Higly Skilled".

For all co-operative races, the developers choose the race discipline (Cross Country, Wilds, Apex or Street Racing), vehicle performance limits (D, C, B, A, S1, S2 & X) as well as restricting to a number of specific vehicles.

It's the job of players to have an acceptable vehicle, tune it's performance so it's competitive and race against the Drivatars.

However there are two fundamental problems with co-operative racing. Player skills and attitudes and the Drivatars.

The Drivatars are endlessly frustrating. We know that they emulate the flaws in their player trainers but this seems to be copying players worst habits and mistakes. The problem with the mistakes is they don't recover like people do. More often than not people veer off in a different more predictable direction. Drivatars recover in under half a second and slow down massivly, they then become immovable objects on your path and simply suck all momentum out of your car if you hit them. Hitting them is easy because they seem to make their mistakes in your path. It seems artificial and somewhat scripted. The harder the Drivatars, the worse the "sporting" issue seems to be.

And then we have your teammates.

The theory goes that players are supposed to help each other to beat the Drivatars. The reality is people tend to just race EVERYTHING. A sort of "everyone for themselves" situation and woe betide any player between them and their goal.

People have variable skill levels and that's absolutely fine, we all have to start somewhere. But the majority of players, irrespective of skill levels, seem to think everyone else who hit them "did it deliberately", meanwhile anyone they hit, "was an accident". However, and here is the so very annyoing thing about horizon players, if they hit you accidentally and it results in them taking your position, they KEEP it! In these situations it is impossible to know if that player hit you accidentally or deliberately to get your place and this is where the problems start.

For a lot of people, The Trial is exactly that, something to be endured in order to collect season rewards: - cars, money and much to the chagrin of everyone, clothes. They will do the trial till they complete it and try not to think about it again until the next time.

Fragile Egos

Most racing aggravation problems start because many of us are perfect while the player we where in an accident with was an idiot. i.e. we're not great at taking a critical look at our own actions in a given incident. I've done it myself so can't claim to be any different. I just happen to think I'm "less bad" than most. See what I mean?! Legend in my own lunchtime!

• The driver in front of me braked earlier than I expect and I didn't react in time - their fault for braking too early.
• The driver in front faceplants into a wall, I don't manage to quite avoid them and side slap them back into the same wall - their fault for making the mistake in the first place.
• The driver in front is sliding about and distracting me. I pass them and they get a little clip which puts them wildly off balance and the DNF - games fault for weird physics.
• The driver behind/beside me hit me. IT WAS A DELIBERATE ATTACK!!!! KILL THEM AALLLL!

If I may quote an F1 commentator: -

I see a similar(ish) thing happen with racing in Forza Horizon and posts/rants about other players and the Drivatars on social media.

With people though someone hits someone else there is a kaleidoscope of reactions ranging from "doing nothing" to "over-reacting on a truly epic scale". I'm not claiming to be any different here, you just need to look at my YouTube channel to see that, I do absolutely try my best to avoid all contact - right up to that point where someone pissed me off and then I can become just another fucking ramming arshole playing Forza Horizon! I hate that.

The Toxic Cry For Attention

There is also a certain type of gamer that's toxic as FUCK! I.E. They will go into a race with the sole intent to ruin other peoples fun. It's an old issue and not one that's specific to Forza Horizon, any particular racing game or indeed any multi player game!

I or any other individual can't do much about them outside of reporting the very worst offenders and treating other players how we want to be treated ourselves.

The games companies themselves don't appear to have much desire to combat the issue either. They talk about wanting to rid their communities of toxicity but they would have us believe it impossible in any practical sense. I suspect, given the cost and complexity of creating a system that blocks a toxic player from being toxic is so high that companies don't even try.

Occasionally we see an object lesson for companies that do absolutely nothing about about these players when good people desert the game.

Thankfully these people are rare but you can create one by ramming back so keep that in mind when some douchebag plays dirty with you.

Ranking? No thanks

There is a further "issue" in that Forza Horizon caters to what's known as "casual" players, i.e. people who might play for a few hours a week at most. By and large these players are not motorsport aficionados, don't have much of a clue about racing etiquette and have even less control over their vehicle. The game also has an E for Everyone rating meaning that you'll sometimes encounter little kids as young as 3!

It's sometimes very difficult to keep newness in mind when you're being pummelled from all sides by people that seem to not give a flying fuck about anything other than themselves.

Horizon Open is an optional game mode and the players who aren't very good at racing tend to avoid it or don't hang around very long. The rationalisation is often because it's "full of rammers" but I suspect the truth of the matter is if you hit a player rather than a Drivatar, by and large most players will hit you back. The Trial, on the other hand is different in that you have to do it if you want the seasonal prize. This non-optional nature is why we get a mix of skilled/unskilled all trying to win the race "for everyone else".

The developers could do something about this. Keeping experienced racers away from complete and utter newbs would be a great start - otherwise known as Player Ranking. For example, the game knows how many races we've done, how often we hit things (walls, AI and other players), how long we've been racing, how difficult we like to race the AI, number of clean overtakes and many other metrics that could be used to build a ranking for each and every player. However it seems that for Forza Horizon to be accessible to everyone (I don't understand their logic here) the developers removed any ranking system.

I started recording my races because some of the driving standards are batshit crazy (see, there's that legend in my own lunchtime thing again) and I wanted to make a compilation of "OMG!!!!! Will you look at that!" clips.

Anyway, the links below will take you to each of the different series. A single series is about a months worth of racing split into 4 seasons which surprisingly are a weeks worth or racing. Each YouTube playlist is a single day. Yes I race The Trial FAR TOO MUCH!

Note it's taken many years but I've finally noticed you can run all the seasonal races in co-op mode so the trial is being dumped into the same playlist with all co-op races for a season grouped together.