Maybe I'm being optimistic, but I'm thinking, or more so hoping, that this season will be current street car culture related. It'd make the most sense, with the 7 Eleven Car Meet culture being so connected with street cars and modified cars. The response online to the 7 Eleven collab already wasn't great really, and although I didn't agree with it, I'm hoping the content is good enough, and fitting enough, that it gets the online audience on their side.
In the current gaming world, online discourse and word of mouth is more powerful than ever to affect a games success I feel. It used to feel like online communities were a vocal minority of a games audience, but now with how constant and in your face the algorithmic systems of Instagram and TikTok, I'm finding the negative discourse towards FH6 just keeps trends further and further south. Forza comes and goes from my feeds, and its a pretty minuscule part of the content I consume (typing that phrase felt gross, but anyway), but I know for certain that there's a major portion of particular younger gamers who receive a lot of it, much of it currently negative.
It's only anecdotal, but friends in my life who are casual gamers in the truest sense of the term, felt quite unsatisfied with FH6 and didn't find the enjoyment that they did with 4 or 5. These are people who aren't 'car people' in the slightest, but they're the exact type of people that Playground are trying to cater to as well. Their opinions individually were practically all the same, they felt the game was bland and characterless and cringey, to point of it being a genuine slight on the enjoyability of the game, and felt that they looked past what was pretty much the same in FH4 and 5, because the gameplay itself to them was still fresh and exciting.They quite quickly became bored by the grind of the same exact same game dynamics, fairly plain racing, and extremely plain 'missions', and the total lack of evolution from the previous two. Their view of the game is very different to those online who lament the lack of meaningful customisation, or the game not including a very specific model of JDM car or whatever, their view of the game is one that is after a fun and exciting modern driving game. It feels like the game, while trying to sit so perfectly on a fence between the types of players the game has, isn't really catching either.
I can't help but feel like Playground, quite possibly under the directions of the higher ups at Microsoft, became complacent. Was there a mentality of not messing with the formula? A thought that maybe 'It's Forza, but in Japan' would do all the heavy lifting? It's risk averse and makes sense, but games that with release cycles very rarely maintain their success with that mentality, and eventually the audience grow tired.
In the era of Forza Horizon being an out and out 'mainstream' game, Playground have never really had to deal with major criticisms. Forza Motorsport copped it heavily with FM5, bounced back with FM6, then fumbled greatly with FM7, and then even further to the point of extinction with FM. Obviously there some outside forces that the developers have to contend with. Personally since the release I have felt like the game was rushed, quality of life features that went missing, attention to detail that wasn't as strong as had been. GTA 6 put the whole of 2026 in state of chaos in the gaming world, and I feel that final delay until the current November release affected many other games, I do wonder how much it affected the timeline of FH6.
I'm extremely interested in seeing how PG get the momentum back on the their side, although in the short term, my hopes are pretty subdued. While the critical acclaim is still positive, that's a narrative that they have a relative amount of control over, there's only so much they can do in how the general public see what's on their feeds (Astroturfing exists in other online spheres, but I don't know how successfully it would work in this case)
Frankly, my current experiences of the game are log on when the season changes, check the new Car Pass car, not even bother to do same old grind for a returning Seasonal car, and log off again. I do still sometimes find the moments of glory that my memories of this series are built on, but they're just few and far between now.
Apologies for the ramble, lol
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But yeah, even the worst Series so far (Horizon Mascot Party for me IMO) is closer to an average FH5 Evolving World update (i.e. a very middle of the road update that basically just slaps cars and a cool Evolving World piece in the game and doesn't do anything meaningful with what you'd think it'd do) than Fordzathon was. Sure, Horizon Meets sounds like it's breaking tradition for the series by not including a Horizon Story (which the sixth update has usually always done), but at least it sounds like it's doing something actually decent with its collab instead of just tossing the Donut Media guys into Horizon and asking them to Just Vibe.
