Forza Horizon VI
Year: 2025
Platform: Xbox Series X2 / Windows PC / Mac OS XI
Producers: Turn 10 Studios / Playground Games / Sumo Digital / Eat Sleep Play
Publisher: XBox Game Studios
When the competition for the title of the best open world racing game begins to get crowded to a truly ridiculous degree - and the revivals of Sega's OutRun and Rockstar Games' Midnight Club and the return to form of Electronic Arts' Need For Speed series made quite sure of that - the XBox and PC exclusive (though threats of antitrust suits ultimately resulted in a Mac OS XI port of the game) Forza series had to come up with some new tricks to counteract the AI-generated challenge and immersive story modes of the OutRun series, the realism of Gran Turismo, the immersive depth and almost unlimited customization of the Midnight Club games and the storyline-driven action of the Need For Speed series, the sixth installment of the Forza Horizon series found itself having to find new ways to make itself stand out in a suddenly crowded field. While Microsoft had at one point considered putting the Horizon half of the Forza series on hiatus due to the intense competition, ultimately Playground Games' ambitious plans sold Microsoft's executives, the company promising that it could blow its competition completely out of the water. In order to do that, Playground convinced the vast majority of the staff of the former Evolution Studios to join Playground Games and brought Eat Sleep Play on board as creative backup, these events annoying Sony and Criterion Games to no end but being widely considered as good moves, and the effect was very noticeable.
All of the previous Forza Horizon titles had been located in specific places and 6 was no exception, but for 6 the series moved to the islands of the Caribbean, including Hispaniola, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, the Caymans, the Turks and Caicos Islands, the Leeward Islands (Virgin Islands, Antigua and Barbuda, Montserrat, Guadeloupe, Saint Kitts and Nevis) and the Windward Islands as far as Trinidad and Tobago and Barbados. This massive chain of Islands and the sizable map that resulted from it wasn't by accident, as the creators of the game wanted the game to include a truly vast selection of cultures and languages and backgrounds as well as landscapes. The volcanic mountains of the Caribbean became a defining feature of the game as well as the tropical rainforests of the Caribbean, and as befitting a game set in Caribbean the climate differences, wildlife, scenery and other elements saw a lot of time put in to make them as right as possible, and the characters of the game were spread in a big way across the many ethnic groups of the islands. The weather could be varied to a complete degree, of course - higher regions were more likely to get lightning, lower levels got monsoon rainfall and the volcanoes could spawn spectacular dust storms - and many landmarks both inside and outside the major cities were faithfully recreated, with the developers making countless trips to the region and taking tens of thousands of pictures and videos to give themselves better ideas of what to shoot for. Temperature conditions made much more of an impact for the first time in the series - colder conditions meant more engine power (particularly in naturally-aspirated vehicles) but less tire grip, while hot conditions meant more chances of overheating, and altitude was factored into the conditions as well, as higher altitude regions would have thinner air effecting both power and overheating. One of the games' newly-discovered visual effects was the heavy caking of mud and dirt onto vehicles run off road for extended periods of time, something clearly inspired by the Evolution Studios staff brought on board for the project. Many of the great places of the region's history - the Citadelle Laferriere, the Saltillo San Cristobal and Castillo San Felipe Del Morro, Devon House, the Good Hope Plantation, the Cathédrale de St-Pierre et St-Paul, Historic Georgetown, Old San Juan, the Altos de Chavon Amphitheater - are both faithfully recreated but also central to the game's progression.
For the first time, the Forza Horizon series went to depths of having all kinds of vehicles in the game, not just cars and light trucks. Many large trucks became raceable vehicles, along with a massive selection of motorcycles and all-terrain vehicles, speedboats, personal watercraft and a number of examples of tracked vehicles and hovercraft also came to the series as raceable vehicles, with modifications and customizing ability to match. The result of this was the game included countless makers who had never been involved in the series before - Mack, Yamaha, Kawasaki, Freightliner, Harley-Davidson, Polaris, Campagna, Ducati, Western Star, Pacific, Aprilia, Hino, Kamaz, KTM, Can-Am, Ripsaw, Argo, Suzuki, Arctic Cat, Donzi, Magnum, Baja Marine, Fountain, Sea-Doo, Scarab, Chaparral, Caterpillar - and whole new forms of customization that were worked into the game, turning it from a racing game just on land to on water as well and with great adventures of all kinds on water as well as on land. Each of the land vehicles had their own advantages and disadvantages of course, with motorcycles being fast to accelerate but slow to brake and road motorcycles not having the easiest roadholding, while the trucks took a long time to get going but once they did could maintain speed quite well and were almost impossible to stop. Tracked vehicles had low top speeds but fast acceleration and the best terrain handling possible while ATVs were superb off road but struggled on road and had a lower top speed but we're competitive with just about anything off of the pavement and in tight spaces.
The game's long-existing race formats gained many new additional ones, such as Scramble (checkpoint to checkpoint, how you go between them is up to you), Courier and Escort (make sure the truck gets to where it has to go, with others trying to stop you), Survive the Hunt (cars trying to run away from other cars), Rally (a time trial over a stage or stages), Knockout (a series of races where the last placed finisher is eliminated), Drifter (drifting on pavement in single, tandem or in teams), Relay (races involving relaying of starts and finishes for drivers) and Delivery Racer (race from a boat to a destination or the reverse).