Playground Games is finally ready to leave the Xbox One behind. Forza Horizon 5 arrived a year after the launch of Microsoft Gaming’s new-gen home console – a compelling system showcase that remains one of the best Xbox Series X games. For as excellent as Horizon 5 is, I have long wondered what Playground could achieve were it able to circumvent the bottleneck created by needing to support decade-old hardware. With the release of Forza Horizon 6 on May 19, fantasy will become reality.
“I think you can’t overstate it. It’s a sea change,” says design director Torben Ellert, as we discuss what the new-gen focus unlocks for the studio. “The interesting space that you get [to innovate] is from where you suddenly have headroom in systems that you didn’t have previously.”
One example Ellert gives is the introduction of Aftermarket and Treasure cars, two new ways to obtain vehicles in Forza Horizon 6 outside of the returning Autoshow and Barn Finds. Parked all around Japan are unique Aftermarket cars which, once discovered, can be purchased at a discount and immediately taken out for a test drive. Treasure Cars are rare spawns inspired by iconic Japanese vehicles, left hidden and abandoned across the map – if you find one, it can be restored and taken out into the world.
Big Ambitions
Tokyo City is an absurdly ambitious proposition in Forza Horizon 6. It feels fantastic to cruise its bustling streets, and to head off-road to hunt for mascots and bonus boards hidden throughout the sprawl. Tokyo City is the largest urban environment to ever feature in a Forza Horizon game; art director Don Arceta tells me that it’s some five times larger than Forza Horizon 5’s Guanajuato. The space is split into distinct districts, each with their own feel and identity.
“Every location that we take on, we always try to push the visuals further along. And this time, because we’ve been able to focus more on current-gen systems, not having the Xbox One X version, has helped us focus in on our rendering and visual fidelity. There’s a lot of new tools and a lot of new systems that we’ve had to put in place because of that,” says Arceta, “but it’s all been worth it.”
I think the fear response was healthy, rather than just full-blown panic
With the full power of the Xbox Series X available, Arceta says that the scale of Japan – and the challenge of accurately bringing it to life – “helped us understand what we needed to push forward.” He continues: “Japan has really dense foliage everywhere, and then there’s a very dense urban area, which is our Tokyo City environment. Those two things were really challenging for us.”
“But that was one of the things that drew us to do Japan this time, this desire to challenge ourselves. We believed, maybe naively, that we had enough experience to attack it this time,” Arceta says, chuckling. “Once you get too comfortable, then I feel like you start to lose a little bit of that innovation.” Ellert adds: “Japan has been on the short list of locations that we would have loved to do many times,, but this time I think the fear response was healthy – rather than just full-blown panic.”
Gradual Evolution
Playground can point to countless other little touches that have been enabled by leaving Xbox One behind to focus its full attention on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X. There’s all of these micro improvements to visual fidelity; I absolutely adored seeing the way water now kicks up from tires while you’re racing in the rain, or how neon shimmers overhead while night driving in Tokyo City.
The studio is promising more focused post-launch support for Forza Horizon 6, designed to more fully complement the seasonal transitions. There’s even some long-requested improvements coming to vehicle tuning and customization, such as the ability to paint liveries all across your windows. There are also more vibrant shared open-world activities, from joining Car Meets without loading screens to new Time Attack circuits and Drag Meets which feature in-world leaderboards that track times in real-time.
It’s all very impressive, although it isn’t merely the result of ditching support for the Xbox One. Ellert highlights that building something like Forza Horizon 6 is an “enormously collaborative experience”, hundreds of fingerprints are all across its design – from new blood to “people who have worked on every horizon game that we’ve built.” Ellert says a lot of the innovation that we’ll see in Horizon 6 is also because of a “maturity of ideas” from a team who has been collaborating closely for years.
“Take the Customizable Garage and the Estate,” says Ellert. The former is a new space included as part of each player house, a space large enough for multiple cars that you can freely decorate and then invite friends into; the Estate, on the other hand, is a mountain valley where you can build and decorate a massive space directly into the open world. “Those features exist because Horizon 5 had Event Lab.”
“We’re very iterative in the way that we build things. We introduced player houses and people loved that. We introduced Event Lab, and people loved that. Okay, so we can smash those things together, and now you can customize your garages.”
Ellert says that Playground is always trying to make targeted improvements like this, searching for ways to answer player requests in ways that might surprise or delight – something which you’ll see a lot of all throughout Forza Horizon 6. Iteration and gradual innovation, he says, is at the heart of the Horizon series. “We could try to do everything. But I often feel best about designs that extend a space until it becomes new, rather than just kind of throwing everything out and saying, okay, here’s something you’ve never seen before. “
Fuelled by Playground’s “relentless pursuit of excellence”, Forza Horizon 6 is set to become one of the best racing games of the generation
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