Playground Games has given us a first look at Forza Horizon 6 in a special Developer Direct stream, confirming the May 19 launch date as well as a range of new features coming to the title.
Alongside the confirmation of the launch date, with pre-orders starting now, the stream also confirmed that Premium Edition players can enjoy four days’ early access (beginning May 15), and the title will be available on Xbox, PC, Steam, and through Game Pass Ultimate. PlayStation 5 players will be able to join in later in the year, with no date specified yet.
Described as a “fresh start”, FH6 sees all the action from the Horizon Festival move across the Pacific Ocean to Japan, but the player will take on a new role. You’ll not be the same avatar that rose up through the ranks in FH4 and walked into Mexico as a “superstar” for FH5, but a tourist who dreams of joining the festival.
Table of Contents
- Forza Horizon 6: World Map
- Forza Horizon 6: Seasons
- Forza Horizon 6: Career & Progression
- Forza Horizon 6: Player Houses & Customization
- Forza Horizon 6: Cars
Forza Horizon 6: World Map
Naturally, FH6 follows the theme of earlier games in the series in presenting a “greatest hits” of its destination rather than a one-to-one replica. That means that Japan is condensed into a map intended to bring the essence of the nation and its highly varied landscape over a much smaller space.
Nonetheless the location is the largest ever created for a Horizon game, and brings together various “districts” each inspired by different regions, including mountains — and mountain passes for those classic touge runs — and rural landscapes.
And then there’s Tokyo, which is described as the largest urban area ever in any FH title, at some five times larger than any before, and itself divided into multiple districts. These include industrial, urban, suburban, and downtown areas, with landmarks such as Shibuya Crossing recreated in amongst the Tokyo-inspired streets.
Two additional locations were also disclosed, with both appearing to require game progress to unlock or acquire. The first is “Legends Island”, which looks to be a sort of end-game reward that you’ll need to win the “gold wristband” to gain access, while another is an interactive, user-customizable area called “The Estate” which we’ll cover further below.
Forza Horizon 6: Seasons
Although not fully explored in the stream, some hints were given as to what we can expect from the seasons — a staple feature since FH4 — in FH6. Mexico’s version of the season change was perhaps a little underwhelming, but FH6 looks to have brought back the much more significant changes to the game world previously seen in the UK map.
“Seasonal change in Japan is dramatic, and these changes are widely celebrated in local culture,” commented Don Arceta, the game’s art director. “We’ve captured that in-game so that you’ll see those changes reflected in the world around you as you explore.”
That plowed road shot, inspired by the Tateyama Snow Corridor, certainly seems to attest to that.
Forza Horizon 6: Career & Progression
The core of the gameplay path in FH6 resembles that of FH4, but with a little tweak to how you start out. Rather than already being a racing driver in the Horizon Festival ranks, you’re more like one of the cheering NPC crowd who dreams of joining them.
In essence, you land in Japan and, with the help of a couple of friends — motorsports fan Jordy and local car builder Mei as your guide — earn your way into the Festival in the first place through qualifiers. It appears you’ll start off in regular road cars and progress up to faster and faster machinery, with special events like Showcases and a new Horizon Rush event gating entry to the next stage.
Reaching the top, which we assume to be the aforementioned gold wristband, cements your status as a “legend” and earns you access to Legends Island, with more to explore and more races and events to unlock.
Forza Horizon 6: Player Houses & Customization
As with previous games, there’ll be a variety of player houses dotted about the map — stated as a total of eight — but they now feature some customization options.
While that doesn’t seem to come on the outside, each features an internal customizable space which allows you to store and show off multiple cars as well as decorating them “freely”. We’ll need to see more on this, but we imagine that a lot of the options to add to your space will be cosmetic rewards on things like Wheelspins (or buyable) as we’ve seen with clothing in previous titles.
That’s not just for your own gratification either, as you’ll be able to invite other players over to see your custom garage, and this is a feature taken considerably further with a new area called “The Estate”.
This is basically a very large field that serves as a blank canvas for you to build upon, altering your own game map permanently, with all manner of structures available — and again you can invite other players over to visit the facility you’ve created.
It’s not yet clear what you can construct here or how, but with another four months to go until launch we expect that there’ll be a lot more information to come.
Both features are related to something that Playground calls “CoLab”, which is a collaborative evolution of EventLab. As you may expect, this means you can invite other players to your EventLab projects while you’re building them, in order to create collaboratively (we see what they did there), and rather than being confined to build start points as in FH5, you’ll now be able to make EventLab creations anywhere in the map.
Forza Horizon 6: Cars
It’s become tradition now for a new FH game to launch with more cars than its predecessor did but less than it ended up with, and so it proves with FH6’s 550 count on launch day.
The list has been refocused to give it more of a Japanese flavor, with several cars we’ve spotted making their debuts in the stream, though several high-performance exotic cars remain (and there’s an Italian Passion Car Pack at launch too). You’ll be able to find a full list on our forums before long!
As many probably expected, the cover car for the game is the latest performance car from Japan, the GR GT Prototype as first revealed in full back in December. You’ll be thrust into this machine (formerly the Toyota GR GT before Toyota decided it needed all the brands) right at the start for the initial blast around the map (and what looks like a race against a Gundam suit?!) before you’re brought back to earth and your starter cars.
Joining it on the cover, and representing the off-road portion of the game, is the new J250 generation Toyota Land Cruiser.
A rework of the car classes will also see a new category at the top of the tree. We’ll learn more about this in time, but the usual low-speed “D” to highest-performance “S1/S2” will be joined by the new “R” class.
As well as racing the cars, you’ll be able to participate in Car Meets in FH6. There’s three locations — at the Festival site and at two parking areas representing Okuibuki and Daikoku — where players can meet up and download each other’s designs or even buy their own examples of a car in what PG describes as a “seamless social space”.
There’s other things to collect too, essentially adding scrapbooking to the game. As you head around the game map and discover points of interest, you can create a digital collection of your experiences in a “Collection Journal” which also helps you rank up in the game.
Of course we’re still four months out from FH6 landing on our consoles, so there’s plenty more to come, so stay tuned for all the latest.
