Forza Horizon 5's launch has been pretty stellar, all things considered. Sure, the servers have been spotty since its full release about a week ago, but then that’s what happens when you claim 6 million players mere days after launch. Incredibly, more than 1 million of those ponied up $100 for the early-access Ultimate edition.
The stress that the network’s been under has made it difficult to start and maintain connections with friends, so Wednesday’s news that Playground Games has issued its first patch for the title will certainly come appreciated by fans. The hotfix is live as of the time of writing for players on both Xbox and PC, and you can read its full notes over at the Forza Support site.
As a PC player, I’m glad to see the aggressive level-of-detail pop in that plagued Ultra settings has been smoothed out. But for the most part, the big updates pertain to multiplayer integrity. Playground says it’s “improved [the] stability of Horizon Life connections,” fixed the incessant vehicle stopping that would occur whenever players got disconnected and even “disabled Convoy voice chat to help track down the long load times in Online events.”
The stopping bug was an annoying one, especially if you’d racked up a massive skill chain when it struck. Losing connection to Horizon Life would immediately stop your car and end your combo. As for Convoy voice chat, the wording there is interesting — I wonder how long it’ll be before it’s reactivated, though its absence shouldn’t be a huge loss to players, considering most people use party chat or a third-party app for communication anyway.
I can’t evaluate the effectiveness of these fixes, as the patch just came out and I haven’t tried to play online with friends yet. What I can confirm, and what you likely expected if you’ve been enjoying FH5 so far, is that Playground also seized this opportunity to crush several exploits that people have been using to obtain vehicles, Super Wheelspins and effortless XP and credits.
First, the Car Collection glitch. This is one I’d done just yesterday to snag the Impreza 22B STi, which you should only be able to win through Wheelspins and by completing the Festival Playlist. It worked due to a flaw in the Car Collection screen’s design. This menu allows you to keep track of your garage by viewing cards for every vehicle in the game. If a car is available for purchase through the Autoshow, as 95 percent of them are, you may simply press the Y button to buy it then and there.
That’s not supposed to work for vehicles not sold through the Autoshow; however, thanks to a glitch, the Purchase option appeared for whatever card the player’s cursor was highlighting when the menu opened, regardless of whether that vehicle was designed to be obtainable from the Autoshow. By default, the cursor always starts on the upper-left most card — the first vehicle within a manufacturer’s roster. It also keeps its place within the list of manufacturers upon backing out and reentering the menu.
Should the player move the cursor, the prompt to purchase such rare vehicles disappeared. But in some instances — as in the case of the 22B and the short-tail McLaren F1 — the first car in the roster just so happened to be a rare model. The screenshot above illustrates what I mean, though, as I already bought the Impreza and the exploit has since been patched, I can’t demonstrate it in action anyway. Honestly, I feel no remorse for nabbing the 22B this way — just like the Celica GT-Four ST205, it’s not a car you’re free to just buy, and that was a particularly evil thing to do to this Sega Rally 2 fan.
The Super Wheelspin exploit is probably the most infamous. It involved the 1945 Willys MB Jeep, and was less a glitch than simply a huge oversight by the developers that’s frankly inevitable in a game of FH5's magnitude.
The Willys costs just 40,000 credits — a pittance in the Weimar Republic economy of Forza — and with it, you could unlock a Super Wheelspin prize roulette with just five Skill Points, a currency that is obtained by performing driving maneuvers. Every car’s Skill Mastery tree is different and — here’s something I never knew before last week — the same tree doesn’t apply to multiples of models in your garage. This prompted people to buy tens upon hundreds of Willys Jeeps, getting the Super Wheelspin for each one, then dumping them on the Auction House.
As you can see, the spot that used to belong to the Super Wheelspin in the Willys’ tree has now been replaced with a sad score boost:
The last one, which I hadn’t tried but our friends over at Kotaku reported on earlier this week, involved the Goliath street race — one of the longest in the game — and using the built-in auto-steer assist so it’d basically play itself for you. Rig up a rubber band such that it kept the accelerator trigger depressed, set the event for 50 laps and voila — just by completing the run, even with no competitors, you’d stand to win boatloads of XP and money.
All of these exploits are now gone which, honestly, I feel no particular way about. They should get patched because they were never meant to be there in the first place. On the flip side, it’s hard for me to admonish cheaters for farming XP and availing themselves to an abundance of prizes, because FH5 is a game that gifts you three of its most desirable new models literally from the moment you begin playing. Last year, many Forza Horizon 4 players were surprised to find themselves gifted 200 Super Wheelspins at random. It turned out to be a mistake on Playground’s part, but the fact that nobody was exactly sure until the developer confirmed as much says a lot about the nonexistent nature of the Forza Horizon economy.
Whatever you want to do to have fun at the Horizon Festival, do it. That’s what the game’s about. I’m just happy I can start cruising with my friends again.