Overall, my reaction to the Forza Horizon 4 upgrade for Series consoles is mixed. This is still one of the best driving games ever made, it still looks gorgeous and the quality of life improvements delivered by the faster CPU and storage are much appreciated, while the advantages of 60 frames per second in this genre can’t be understated. However, it can’t be right that a next-gen upgrade should compromise on visual features when we know the hardware is capable of more. We did share our findings with Microsoft as soon we saw that something was amiss - and we’re told that SSAO may well be back in the first title update. With a studio as talented as Panic Button on development duties, I remain hopeful that Series X and S will deliver the definitive Forza Horizon 4 console experience in the fullness of time - with no compromises.
This still looks insanely good, but it looks like some of the One X performance settings (or worse?) are being used in the Series X version.
On a positive note, this tells me that Playground is extremely busy with new games. The game is patched by some other studio and clearly not every thing is pushed to limits here.
Yeah, looks like Panic Room used the One X performance mode as the base for the Series X version. I honestly couldn’t tell anyway that some stuff was missing, I was busy racing, admiring the scenery at 4K/60fps.
It seems clear to me that this was quite a quick upgrade. Playground seem to have taken the performance mode of the 1X and bumped up the rea and textures, they are probably busy on fable.
Where? Can you give us a link, I haven’t seen it. Probably on Twitter.
To be honest I expected more from this. It’s not a deal breaker, but I expected more. I guess I was spoiled by gears 5 upgrade.
I’ve added the link to the article to my OP, but here it is again:
We did share our findings with Microsoft as soon we saw that something was amiss - and we’re told that SSAO may well be back in the first title update.
If that’s true, that’s a real shame because FH4 deserves so much more. When they revealed what kind of enhancements it was getting it sounded very promising. On par with PC and what not.
I imagine that the horizon team is already way to busy with forza motorsport and horizon. Plus they may be helping with fable as well. Its a shame they couldn’t give the game the love the coalition gave gears 5 but I understand. This to me sounds like no more expansions for horizon 4 either.
It’s reasonable to expect a few updates due to COVID-19 possibly impacting the development of this upgrade.
Rendering 4K at 60 is the highest priority, and they nailed it. Getting PC parity on other features later on makes sense.
I say this because I agree that we all expect a bit more considering how powerful the XSX is and that I’m sure so many games and both consoles are being constantly worked on for features missing on Day 1.
But I’ll agree completely that the missing Ambient Occlusion does hurt the visuals. Who knows maybe they were looking at implementing RT based AO? Man I shouldn’t get my hopes up like that lol
