Several years ago, I found a new favorite video game. While I adored pure racing games like Gran Turismo and Forza Motorsport, I became addicted to the open world of Forza Horizon. It was the fourth iteration, set amongst a Scottish backdrop, where I really hit my stride. I played nearly every day, finishing all of the weekly challenges. I even wrote articles on here about how to make fast credits. It helped me through the pandemic and by the time Forza Horizon 5 (FH5) came out, I had maxed out Forza Horizon 4 with 999,999,999 credits and pretty much all the cars. I eagerly jumped headfirst into the open world of Mexico on the new game.

(Note: this article is a little random, but it’s car-related, and I do bring you some valuable consumer advice from time to time!)

Love

FH5 also became a daily obsession. I completed all of the seasonal challenges in order to get the reward cars and quickly leveled up. I tried every new game mode, from In a bid to get every car, I started a checklist on my phone. I scoured the auction house, looking to round out my collection. It was simply the most fun I had ever had in a video game.

I made my way through all of the new game modes, from the Eliminator to Hide & Seek. During a difficult time going through a divorce, I decided that I would add on all the add-ons. Why not? No one to get approval from, right? I purchased everything: Hot Wheels, Rally Adventure, and every single car pack. My obsession grew, I even tried to finish obscure challenges like driving on every road and photographing every car. I finished the former, the second one had a few randoms I couldn’t track down. I continued to get more and more cars, even as they kept adding new ones.

By early November, just a few weeks ago, I was close. I needed four more cars, aside from the new Porsches they just added that would be upcoming weekly rewards. A Forza Horizon 5 Facebook group I’m part of came through, I found another player who happily sold them to me at MSRP.

I was ecstatic, I had the cars. I had plenty of credits, close to 700 million. I had a decent rank, rolling over prestige-style to the 2nd tier at 130-something. Then, tragedy.

Betrayal

This week, the unthinkable happened. I was up in the middle of the night, trying to take my mind off of life by playing around on the Series S in my office. I was just running through my garage, adding on some of the preset body kits to spice things up a bit. I decided to hop on the Series X in the basement (I’ve got kids, hence the multiple devices. Yeah, that’s why.) and play Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 for a little. I decided to finish out one more set of races on FH5, and it happened. A pop-up said something about playing on multiple devices, and asked if I would like to move to this one. Uh yeah, I would, thanks.

The image on the left is about a month old but clearly shows where I was. The one on the right is what I was greeted with that awful night. It ended up being about half of the credits, around 80 levels, and a ton of random accomplishments when all was said and done. And honestly, I didn’t care about either of those.

It was the cars.

I lost 25 cars in total, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but that was hours and hours worth of tracking and hunting. Candidly, it was amplified by the fact that both my mom and sister were sick, and I got bad news about both that day. The FH5 thing doesn’t matter in comparison, but it made a bad day worse. The closest video game experience was when my PlayStation was stolen in a burglary after college. The device itself was replaceable, but my entire body of work on Gran Turismo was gone with that memory card.

What’s Next?

I have reached out to Turn 10 Studios via the FH5 Twitter account, since it was about the only way I could find to contact them. I just asked if someone can restore me to where I was. No response so far. I have done quite a bit of digging online and it sounds like they are hard to reach. Other Forza customers have attempted to rectify issues without luck.

On that Facebook group, it sounds like I’m not the only one to lose level and credits. Many commenters asked if I forgot that I was using a modded account. I’ll be honest, I don’t even know what that is, I got all my FH5 stuff fair and square. I also got a lot of heat for going from being FH5 rich to…still FH5 rich. Which is true, and it’s just a video game. It’s a game that I poured hours of time, energy, and money into. It appears that the car packs and add-ons are still there, but I’m not going to bother trying to get back to where I was.

It wasn’t always a positive experience anyway. As Greg noted when FH5 came out, it can get pretty buggy. I had the season change on me every time I logged in, a glitch associated with quick resume feature of Xbox. I used to work in software development, I get it, it’s hard. But you can’t ignore the customer, and without some sense that things are working to get fixed I can’t in good faith continue.

Will I hop back into the fray for Forza Horizon 6? Without knowing if this will happen again, I’m not sure I will at this point.