Fuelled by Playground's "relentless pursuit of excellence", Forza Horizon 6 is set to become one of the best racing games of the generation

There's a magic to street racing through Tokyo City. The downtown area illuminated by streaks of headlights, the soundscape suffocating under screeching tyres as the two-litre, four-cylinder VTEC engine set inside my Honda S2000 brushes 0-60 in 5.5 seconds. The adaptive triggers of the Xbox Series X controller whir as the vehicle shifts past 160mph, jolting as I wrestle the speedster into a drift through winding city streets. Somewhere behind me, a Drivatar is swerving into incoming traffic. You have reached your destination: open-world racing like you've never experienced it before.

Forza Horizon 6 makes an astonishing first impression. Then again, the series doesn't have the luxury of doing anything less. When developer Playground Games unleashed Forza Horizon 5 in 2021, the studio quickly set a new benchmark for the genre – FH5 remains one of the best racing games, not to mention one of the best Xbox Series X games and best PS5 games.

Craig Duncan, the head of Xbox Game Studios, recently told me that Playground's defining quality is its "relentless pursuit of excellence." He adds: "We all know what that means for Forza Horizon; we've seen that franchise get bigger and bigger at every turn." To successfully follow Forza Horizon 5, though, merely being bigger or bolder wouldn't cut it. A sequel would need to be special to be worth our attention.

Just Cruisin'

"A relentless pursuit of excellence is in our DNA," says design director Torben Ellert, "but how do you follow up a game like Forza Horizon 5?" Playground Games is wheeling something undeniably impressive onto the starting lineup. The largest, and most densely detailed playspace in its 16-year history; refined driving models applied to each of the 550 cars, the most to feature in the series from a launch day; and the Horizon festival itself has grown to be a more vibrant celebration, more finely tuned to both its location and the wider game's core progression systems.

Forza Horizon 6 isn't a reinvention, then, but a quiet revolution. "I think one of the riskiest things that a franchise can do is to try and reinvent itself. You want to know what's in the box that you're buying, right? And if it's something radically different, well, you best have gotten that completely right," says Ellert, who served as senior game designer on Forza Horizon 4 and 5. "When I stepped up to start working on [Forza Horizon 5: Rally Adventure], it was about really submerging myself in what people want from the game – and that isn't always the same as what people talk about."

If you've followed this series for a while, there's a good chance that any requests you'd make of Forza Horizon 6 are on fine margins. Playground is listening to these requests. The studio has fully overhauled the car roster to be better balanced across all performance classes. Navigation has been streamlined for selecting colors and color types when painting your favorite cars. You can finally paint liveries on windows, and Forza Aero has been updated to be set up per car rather than having the same front and rear aero with no ad hoc adjustments. The thing is, Forza Horizon is played by far more players than series faithfuls, and a number of improvements targeting casual drivers have ensured some massive improvements for all.

Ellert tells me that Playground is driven by this "desire for Horizon to be the open-world driving game for everyone" – the studio drawing from a "huge amount of institutional continuity" and a truly dizzying amount of player telemetry data to help inform its design decisions and directions. "With Horizon 5, we observed large cohorts of players who spend the vast majority of their time just driving."

Driving, not racing. Playground affectionately refers to this practice as 'vibe driving' – describing players who are "just cornering, looking around, and experiencing the world," says Ellert. This sounds like a hyper chill way of interacting with Horizon games, although Ellert says that the vibe drivers have revealed some interesting flaws in the way previous titles have been structured or progression gated.

"When we look at that player group in more detail, we can see they don't have a lot of in-game credits. They don't have many cars. They aren't really engaging with the Festival events, they're not doing Expeditions… they aren't doing any of that, and so they don't have a lot of content available to them. So we have this large group of players who aren't really experiencing the breadth of what we have to offer."

A Festival For All

Is spending hours cruising around in a C-tier Nissan Silva K starter car really all that much of a bad thing? "Well, we're a traversal game," asserts Ellis. "The traversal types are cars, and there are so many of them. They feel, sound, and look so different – players who are just in a few of the starter cars aren't having the full experience." And look, he's not wrong. Speaking from experience here, my time in Forza Horizon 6 was massively improved once I was able to slide into a demonstrably fast 'Aftermarket' Dodge Challenger SRT Demon that I found available for purchase out in some corner of the open world.

Understanding the different ways players choose to interact with the Horizon games led Playground to make changes to progression through the Horizon festival. You arrive in Japan as a tourist, touching base with your buddies before setting off to cruise the streets. As you drive, you discover qualifying events – victory rewarded with a colored wristband that will let you enter different tiers of the festival, earning the ability to officially race better, faster tiers of cars. It's a small tweak with a big impact to the way that you interact with core campaign progression systems.

"We wanted to create a map that was full, rich, and rewarding for people who just wanted to drive around and find things," says Ellert. "You could choose to never join the festival. You could just leave that on the peg, drive around, and do everything else and still have a deep and rich experience. Or you could choose to do a bit of both, or just focus on the festival. We've found a way to cater to these different experiences without privileging one of them over the other; it gave us a lot of freedom."

This means that the main Horizon festival is a progression-driven experience. The dream of racing nicer, faster cars acting as a propellant to you going out of your way to get new wristbands. Only have a B-class wristband but want to race S1s in main events? Then you've got to move up the ranks and earn the right to do it. Thankfully, you will have the freedom to take any car that you own out into free-roam, entering into street races with friends and Drivatars, and even into new Time Attack and Drag Racing events which exist in the open-world regardless of what wristband you're holding.

But what good is this freedom to drive outside of the festival if you aren't earning the credits to buy nicer cars? "We're always looking at the things players are doing, the ways that the game is perhaps not affording them great experiences, and the things that we feel can be better" Ellert continues. For the players ignoring festival events and therefore aren't earning the currency to freely purchase new cars? "We created new systems that give them currency for just exploring. Discovering new regions, smashing mascots, doing Time Attacks – all of this will trickle credits into their accounts constantly."

Ellert tells me that another characteristic Playground identified about the 'vibe drivers' is that "this cohort of players doesn't really go into the menus" – so, what good is trickling credits into their accounts if they don't know how or where to spend them? That's where Aftermarket cars come into the picture, one of the best new additions to the Forza Horizon series. As you explore, you may discover vehicles of varying rarity parked up in unique spots on the map – available for purchase, and at a discount versus what they would be if bought via the Autoshow.

"We look at a player's general campaign status, at how many credits they have, at lists of the kinds of cars that could be relevant or that they could perhaps enjoy driving at their current state of the game, and spawn them into the world," says Ellert. "So by putting the cars in the places that they are, by ensuring players have more credits, and by making these cars cheaper than the Autoshow, my hope is that some more of these casual, cozy drivers will discover more cars – and that more players will experience more of what our games have to offer, all through systems that elevate the experience that everyone can have."