UX Review: Forza Horizon 5 - menu

Notes on the pause menu experience

Forza Horizon 5 is a great game. It’s vibrant, beautiful, and the team at Playground Games did a good job on accessibility features! From a UX standpoint, they could do better at information architecture and discoverability. Here’s a couple reasons why.

The game

Forza Horizon 5 (2021) is a racing game, developed by Playground Games and published by Xbox Game Studios. It’s the 5th Forza Horizon title, part of the Forza series (Horizon and Motorsport). The players can drive on a fiction open world Mexico, race many events, and collect over 500 cars.

Official announce trailer

Your Ultimate Horizon Adventure awaits! Explore the vibrant open world landscapes of Mexico with limitless, fun driving action in the world’s greatest cars.

The game is available on Xbox, PC and on the cloud. It received a 92 score on Metacritic (for Xbox, and 91 for PC).

Review

Goal: Detect usability issues and identify opportunities to improve player experience.
Scope: Pause menu (main and festival/home).

Main menu (left) and Festival/Home menu (right)

Navigation

• There’s many levels of pages, some you can quick access, some not.
• It requires a lot of clicks and search to access some features.
• Some submenus don’t have reference to the previous page (where they will go back).

Designs and Paints is a submenu under Garage, available only on the Festival/Home menu

Terminology and ease of reach

• Some labels and actions are unclear, players can’t know if they’ll go to a new page or a video without a skip option (DLC menu).
• Some options are only available at specific in game places (festivals, house). Figuring where to open the menu for a car color change shouldn’t be a challenge (as the game let you fast travel to those places).

Pause menu structure for the first level pages, every DLC adds a new category and set of pages on the main menu

• Menu tree and page names change, depending on where you pause the game at.

To select a car players go to Cars > Change Cars on main menu (top), or Garage > My cars on Festival (bottom)

• There’s many menu layouts, players need to figure out how each of them work.

Some of the many menu layouts on the game

Blocked paths

• There’s some locked features that will only be available after a certain event. Not all locked features have in game tips or help text to understand how to unlock them.

Dialog after selecting Accolades: Feature locked. This feature is currently locked. Keep playing to unlock it.

Other points worth mentioning

• There’s no “back to default” for settings, while there’s a lot of customization.
• There’s no tutorial review or quick guide for returning players.
• The game performance can be slow on some devices while navigating the menu, specially on PC.

So, how to improve?

Some recommendations to tackle the previous problems.

Simplify and be consistent

• Group pages by category and review terminology. Same content should follow a name and picture convention. This will reduce cognitive load and help players recognize rather than recall.
• One single pause menu will be easier to learn and players will be able to find what they need. This way, they can concentrate where matters: collecting cars, exploring and racing!

Reviewed structure and terms considering one garage/cars page. In this wireframe I didn’t change much on the main menu grid, but there’s place for improvement and all menu layouts should be take into account.

Guide the players

• Let the players know what’s locked, why, and what to do about it. Instead of “Keep playing to unlock it.”, provide instructions and actionable buttons:

“Finish the tutorial to unlock it. [Resume the tutorial]”

• Let them know what will happen before selecting a page. Example: use icons and/or text to inform if a video will play right away (and give a skip option if they access).
• Let returning players go through a tutorial or have a quick guide on how to play whenever they want.
• Let players go back to default options at settings.

On Forza Motorsports 7: players can see the joystick map, and reset to default if wanted (Image: Forza Motorsports Support)

I only covered the pause menus, but there’s other submenus that could improve. Also, this menu mess is not exclusive for the 5th game, as noted on this Forza Horizon 4 menu overview by Crill. It seems to be common on other racing games as well. Is it a genre preference or problem?

I did this review as a practice exercise. I chose the game after a chat with a friend about confusing and weird menus on games. As part of the UX analysis, I also conducted a playtesting session and looked for game reviews online.

All opinions are very much my own and does not reflect the views of Playground Games or Xbox. Microsoft, Forza Horizon and Xbox are trademarks of the Microsoft group of companies.