How can I fix an infinite loading screen on Forza Horizon 4?
Playing Forza Horizon 4 on Xbox series X, I tried to download and apply an online design to my car. The game displayed the "downloading and saving the design" message... but it got stuck there. After a couple of minutes I gave up and restarted it from the Xbox menu.
Now, when I start the game, it cannot complete the loading screen. It's not frozen, my statistics keep rotating on the bottom... but it never loads.
I tried, without success:
- Waiting over 10 minutes, in case it was just slow.
- Hard resetting the Xbox (completely shutdown, then wait a couple of minutes and reboot).
- Deleting my data and resync'ing from the cloud.
- Deleting and reinstalling the whole game and the DLCs.
How can I fix this?
This is a bug in the way that Forza Horizon 4 manages the save files. It only affects the Xbox Series S/X version of the game.
If you have access to a Windows 10 PC or an Xbox One console, you can fix the issue by following these steps:
- Fully close the game on your Series S/X console.
- Load your save on an Xbox One or Windows 10 PC, using the same Xbox account, and make sure to load your data from the cloud.
- Do something in game to trigger a save, such as changing cars, changing houses, updating difficulty settings, completing a race, etc.
- Return to free roam. There should be a spinning circle in the lower right in free roam when the game is saving. Wait for this to complete.
- Fully close the game.
- Back to the Series S/X console, delete your local game data (make sure you don't delete your cloud data!!!).
- Attempt to load the game again on the Series S/X console.
There is more info on this forum thread.
The steps above were provided to me by the Forza support team, so I guess it's the only workaround available at the moment. They also instructed me to remove any keyboard or mouse I could be using with the Xbox, but I had none.