Topic: The everything Xbox thread

I'm sure one of the regular posters here is from Mexico. Is it you @Eel , I forget who's from where.

I wonder if Forza Horizon 5 looks as much like real world Mexico as Horizon 4 looked like Britain. Cos Horizon 4 was almost photo-realistic in how accurate it was. That was one of the main appeals.

Yeah, that’d be me. That would depend on what part of Mexico they’re recreating. I haven’t seen the trailer yet.

If it’s a cool recreation of a part I’ve visited, I might consider playing it!

Edit: ok, I’m not sure where some of the places in the video are set, but the beach town was a bit uncanny with how much it looks like towns I have right here in my home state, it was like, “wait is that (place)?”. I’ve been to Guanajuato too, and while I don’t have much of a photographic memory, that part looked really good. Though traditional cities and towns like that usually have very cramped thin streets, not exactly racing material.

So… Will the game take place in like… The entire country? That would be crazy!

@Eel

Well yes, for the last 2 games they've tried to make like miniture-ized versions of the whole country. So they just take a bunch of key areas from across the country and then stitch them together as if the distance between the key landmarks was just a lot smaller.

So it'll be like Mexico City and then you'll drive out into the countryside and about 5 minutes drive you'll be in Chichen Itza, or something like that.

The map in Horizon 4 was basically the entire length of England, scaled down.

If they include the Baja California peninsula and it isn’t just Los Cabos surrounded by choyas, then I’ll absolutely buy the game.

This peninsula IS actually famous for being basically one long off-road racetrack.

They could just make the cars faster 😀

(The presentation already made me anxious with how close they were from crashing into one another several times during the gameplay showcase)

Oh, I can tell you, just normal driving can be a nightmare in towns like these.

They go up and down like a rollercoaster, and the streets were planned for maybe a horse or two, not cars.

Many of the interesting tourist spots will probably be off limits unless they do some computer magic to adapt the streets.

As a bit of trivia, the name Guanajuato apparently means “place with a mountain of frogs”. And no, it’s not like frogs are particularly numerous there. Maybe the hills just looked froggy?

I would be shocked and amazed if my hometown was a location in the game.

It’s basically just a place you pass through to visit other more interesting places.

Can't wait till they make Forza Horizon 6 The Netherlands. The game is going to be 5 minutes long!

They had a fair chunk of Scotland in there too - you can set Edinburgh Castle as you're home if you have enough credits.

So... a bit like your forum posts then? 😜

I don't have a 4k display, so it's very hard for the Xbox marketing to get through to me. Horizon 5 just looks like Horizon 4 but with less greenery.

A good chunk of this country is a literal jungle.

Also... I think someone deleted some posts here...?

@gcunit No offense, but I'm afraid that you might be up for a new set of glasses or contacts, because even though I've exchanged my TV for a new one today, when I watched the Forza Horizon 5 reveal on my old 1080p plasma screen yesterday, I could already see that it looked significantly better and more detailed than 4 ever did. They've done a LOT of new things, in regards to both graphics and physics.

The detail on that car in the beginning, which is only possible thanks to the new upgraded engine they're using, is simply amazing and is as close as you're going to get to realism in a game. Previous Forza Horizons obviously also always looked good for the generation that they were released in, but this is truly the next step in racing simcades.

Apparently Everwild has had its development restarted which is why it was missing from E3. To be honest I couldn’t tell what the game was when they last showed it so it’s probably for the best.

@ThanosReXXX I watched it on my 5" phone screen. Maybe I'll give it another look on a bigger screen 😁

@gcunit Aha, that might just make the difference, provided you have a good TV that has super sampling capabilities or any other scaling abilities, then you can still reap the benefits of 4K content on a 1080p screen, because there's still 4 times the amount of pixels displayed, so there's still more detail, even though you can't display the native signal. Ask @NEStalgia, he'll probably be able to explain it better than me.

Either way, I always watch everything E3 on a big screen, unless I don't have a big screen available, but even then, I usually just watch it later, when I got the time, so I can still enjoy everything as it should be enjoyed: like an actual, big screen presentation at a live event.

@gcunit @ThanosReXXX Capcom 1080p stream FTW! For games it's best to let the console do the supersampling. Odds are it's better at scaling than the display. But yeah, 4k rendering sampled down to 1080 is better than native 1080 there's a lot of detail rendered between the 1080 pixels that can be interpolated into the image, plus it's inherently antialiasing. Though on the new consoles with new upscaling methods there's a lot of debate about if native 4k has any value anymore, because they can render a lot more in a scene at low res and the upscaling is looking so close to 4k it doesn't matter if it way native. So 1080 is the new 4k for rendering (not for display)

@jump They didn't actually know what the game was when they last showed it, either (they actually said so I'm the interviews.) Then the director left. . Classic case of building a cool world and then trying to think of a game for it. Hopefully whatever it reboots into will be much more focused.

@Slowdive I would pay freaking Sony preorder digital deluxe prices for that Garfield game!

@JoyBoy Forza Horizon 7: Rhode Island. The entire game is about fitting a Prius within the state borders. On "simulation" difficulty you do it in a nor'easter. In January.

@Eel I'm looking forward to the shootout escapes in the Juarez area. It's a good choice. They can finally include assault weapons in a Forza game and call it authenticity. They were going to choose Rio, but all the geography capture teams they sent never came back.

@NEStalgia Thanks for the input.

As for the next Forza: I'm going with Forza Horizon 6 being all about extremes. Perhaps Russia or any other country in that area, with a lot of mountains, snow and wide open areas as well.

@gcunit Well, there you go. I'd say it's definitely worth it to re-watch some stuff on your TV, then.

Forza Horizon 6: Afghanistan.

Ok something odd happened with my series s.

It would not let me play any games, constantly saying some sort of update was required but unable to download.

I freed up space, checked the system update status (which said everything was ok), tried to check the game updates, which said the same message, restart the console, and then went offline to see if that did anything… And everything worked!

Until I turned the wifi back on. Then it booted me out of the game I was testing with and went back to being weird.

Now, after leaving it alone for several minutes, it started downloading an update for Stardew Valley, it finished, got installed…

And now all the games work fine? What.