| gtotheunit91 said: I personally don't understand why there's this disconnect with reviewers. Motorsport is now an 18 year old franchise and Horizon is now 11 years old. There wasn't much of an issue like this for years.
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I'd say the disconnect started as soon as Horizon 3 breached the 90 barrier:
Here are the chronological order of Forza scores on Metacritic (highest reviewed platform used for the 2 and 3 platform Forza games):
- FM1- 92
- FM2- 90
- FM3- 92
- FM4- 91
- FH1- 85
- FM5- 79
- FH2- 86
- FM6- 87
- FH3- 91
- FM7- 86
- FH4- 92
- FH5- 92
- FM reboot- 84
As you can see, Forza Motorsport starts off consistently 90+ on 1-4, then Horizon 1 launched to a respectable 85. Then Turn 10 rushed out their series reboot on 5 as an XB1 launch title when it wasn't ready for release (with car count from 4 to 5 dropping from 500 to 200 and track count dropping from 26 to 17), causing a huge 12 point drop in average review scores from FM4 to FM5. Then Horizon 2 got a 1 point improvement over Horizon 1. Next was Motorsport 6, which boosted car and track count substantially over Motorsport 5, giving the series a review recovery of 8 points (though still 4 points south of the Motorsport 1-4 average of 91). Then Forza Horizon 3 broke the 90 barrier. This seems to have set in motion the start of the disconnect for critics being unable to separate Horizon and Motorsport as 2 separate franchises. FM7 releases and in spite of big improvements to car count and track count over 6, a noticeable graphics leap on brand new tracks, and numerous mechanics improvements, Motorsport 7 breaks the trend of Motorsport review recovery by losing a point over Motorsport 6. Then comes Horizon 4 and 5 (both in a row while Turn 10 rebuilt their Motorsport engine and started making car and track models from the ground up for Xbox Series consoles), both maintaining the 90+ scores of Horizon 3.
Now drops Motorsport reboot, and it is sitting at 85 currently on Opencritic and 84/84 Xbox/PC on Metacritic. Even though they took an extra 4 years over the old every 2 years release schedule for Forza Motorsport games, in order to boost car and track count as much as possible and avoid the huge review drop they saw the last time they rebooted the series with Motorsport 5, they still couldn't manage an increase in review scores over Motorsport 6 or 7, instead coming in 2 points below Motorsport 7 on Metacritic.
Last edited by shikamaru317 - on 04 October 2023
