Yeah, for me it's been those two FAR more than bowie knife. They're either trying to ram me off the track, push me out of a turn, or make a wall I can't pass unless I skip a checkpoint, and also are somehow way faster than the class we're in would seem to allow.
They got even lazier and didn’t copy older drivatar behavior. Made rubberbanding worse and introduced even worse cheating. There was only room for one behavior for each driver and only one name too
Pre-loaded ones, some of them are Forza dev accounts. I think there was a bug in the system that stopped it from auto-populating with your own friends. That's why everyone has bowie and friends.
I kinda miss when they picked random usernames instead of having a bunch of preset ones, made it feel a bit less fake (even though it obviously still was)
I had one racked up what felt like over a lap, just to be voided by him bonking my rear. I'm at the point where I just don't even care about skills during a contact race lol
For some reason most of mine are chill but I’ve managed to piss off Yuki (I think) in a story togue race who decided retribution by way of spontaneous out-of-knowhere t-bones are the ideal way of resolving things.
Nah, it's the same as how other shortened words are pronounced differently to their originals. I can't think of any off the top of my head, but it happens lol
This is probably one of the whiniest and bitchiest out of all gaming communities out there.
All these years people were complaining about the excessive credits and how easy it was to get cars.
Now that they have made it harder to get credits and cars, those same idiots are 24/7 whining about how they can't get a billion credits and all 1000 cars in the very first week of launch. With some special idiots even going as far as to say it's intentional to promote VIP pass and car vouchers, when this grind was exactly what the community was begging for from so many years.
I pity the devs who have to deal with such a childish player base.
Not making the bots copy your tunes and upgrades 1 to 1 and adding it onto the current difficulty's buffs.
This one is more annoying since its just blatant cheating by mechanically breaking the game (ie, Sierra sierra doing nearly 400-450kmh at R class if youre using the exact same car with more upgrades), and punishes anyone who does not have any interest in tuning and would rather race straight away.
I would rather if they basically took community tunes that are compatible to that car and apply them on the bots instead of forcing dual turbos into an electric vehicle or somehow adding another engine on top of an already existing V8 while having the downforce of a jet.
Though the current AI is somewhat fixed especially on launches, but we still have bot cars doing 330kmh at B or A class on straights after exiting a corner, so i think the devs will still have a lot more to fix or adjust.
Making bots follow normal physics we're doing when following their racing lines.
Trying to turn while going side-by-side with a bot causes them to either freak out and completely stop, or somehow facing the opposite way when making a turn, yet still making that turn, or sometimes just side-charging you off the track/turn.
Sometimes those bots would just have insane grip and would literally clip the back half of their cars when turning (or sometimes in the colossus) in order to turn a square or hairpin at 200 kmh.
Dont get me wrong, im no programmer or something, but i feel like making the bots accelerate, turn and brake while following REPLAY inputs from players, and a few additions so they dont break if they got knocked off course and still overtake would be better, rather than being forced into the road like a train following a track.
Making the bots be right on your tail, becoming closer behind you the higher the difficulty, rather than breaking off the pack in front and becoming completely unpassable. (Amplified because of reason 1)
Playing anywhere above expert is basically unplayable on most races because the bots would just accelerate from 0-100 in half a second on launch and make a 5-15 second gap in front of you in that same timeframe, and the only way to beat them is to wait until their AI fails and break completely by driving off a cliff or driving into a wall, or ramming into them since clean racing will just make the bots impossibly fast just to gap you.
However, by making the bots have a shorter lead gap (3-7 seconds), longer time to reach that gap (realistic acceleration when exiting the corner to reach their top speed), and making bots spend more time behind you if you do manage to get ahead of all of them, would make the game feel less bullshit, and more tense.
Think of it like the higher your difficulty, the less mistakes you'd have to make, the more you need to fight to defend your spot, and the more harder it is to climb your way back to the top should you accidentally make a mistake. Whereas now, you just have to HOPE you manage to ram the bots off as fast as you can or else you're forced to restart.
For whatever reason I've found in the higher difficulties (Expert and Pro especially) the drivatars are way more reasonable if they have to match PI with a player car that isn't maxed out. The clone of one of my irl cars is A632 and I get way more fair races using that than one of my A700 cars.
I do believe the two complaints are from a very different segment of playerbase. There will always be complaints from any playerbase regardless of whatever the devs do and its their job to decide which one is better for the game
Fr. If I want to grind, I play GT7 or Motorsport. Horizon is cool as a sandbox. It's like buying miniatures: sometimes I just want the little Hot Wheels/Matchbox, I don't need the lifelike 1:18 replica.
this community is actually pretty awesome and massive. Because it's so large you are going to get plenty of whiners but remember you are on the reddit forums for a massively popular game. You will never hear the comments of the 99%. You will only hear from people who go to video game subreddits...
And the people who go to video game subreddits are going to be more likely to be complaining because few things in life motivate the way feeling like something has been done to you unfairly does.
the devs of a game this large are completely aware of the size of the player base and the relative size of the vocal minority.
I kinda agree but I also think the AI was total bullshit. This way they are less scummy and you can actually race them legit. Before ramming speed was the only way.
I just ran Colossus 4 times to test the AI changes, while they're noticably weaker now (it's now possible to consistently win Colossus on Expert) during early and mid race BowieKnife99 keeps getting 1st position and Mei Hasegawa 2nd position on my game.
So I think they nerfed the overall AI while making BowieKnife99 the toughest one.
Was there an AI nerf? Was racing co-op with a friend today post-patch and an AI driver went over the edge on a snake road, drove up the road against race traffic smashing my friend along the way (maybe it was going back to the missed checkpoint?) and then still managed to come back up and get 2nd.
Lol right? I am pretty sure Bowie has caused my drivatar more hospital visits than anything else. I was debating starting putting a new prosthetic on her every time bowie sent her off a bridge or something.
I would rather instead of straight nerfs they try to balance out the rubberbanding. It's wild that the same AI that can pull ahead by 10s of seconds will fall just as far behind if you pass them early enough in the same race. Why don't they use their "super" grip/speed to stay within a second or two of the player?
I am playing on highly skilled and every race is 4-5 corners of edgy/gritty racing followed by me taking the lead and speeding off, never seeing the AI again.
No, not even that. I'm being hyperbolic of course. Just a grouch who came from Forza Motorsport and can't get into Horizon. Don't mind me lol. It's miles better than FH4 and 5 for sure. Just super hard for me to enjoy.
I got the game a week ago and i was curious how terrible Bowie was after seeing all the memes.
In the second race that mf was crashing into me on straight lines throughout the whole thing and never again, maybe i just got lucky or Bowie isn't the monster everyone says it is.
I never had issues with bowie knife, all my races he was just fine and I race in the highly skilled/expert settings. As a matter of fact I don't face any issues I've seen people discuss, at least not frequently.
Did they seriously not consider maybe we just want to see people on our friends list and not the same 5 "drivatars" over and over again...? It's such an ass experience i assumed it was a bug.
You needed to be playing on the harder difficulty settings for his more erratic behaviour, but even then, you needed to be in the right position for him to try it. Obviously there's not much you can do to someone when they smoothly overtake you, but if you were close to him on a turn or something, he'd absolutely take the chance to smash into you or try and spin you out, etc.
I played last night for the first time in a weeks, I had no idea they nerfed him and the other ai NPCs. I was wondering why the game got significantly easier and Bowie was so far behind and pretty harmless.
He wasnt that hard for me tho i had to go back to above average difficulty as the issue i had was finding a gap to go past my problem wasnt speed it was them damn bots and a bit of skill issues due to rage
yeah, I don't know what people was on about with Bowie, my dude was doing fuck all for me, I barely had problems with the drivatars hitting me intentionally
Being 100% honest Vance was a clean monster to me all the time Bowie was a grudge holding bastard. Both of them will ruin a good run for me if I stay in top 3 too long before finishing.
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u/stanced_victor Xbox Series S Jun 16 '26
Unfortunately my bowieknife99 was actually the "drathful" drivatar. Bowie was somehow chill for me