Despite being left with an incurable spiritual absence after briefly enjoying the wonder of omnipresent access to 7/11 onigiri, I do my best to avoid perpetuating the Thing, Japan phenomenon—the tendency of Westerners to romanticize everyday life in Japan Forza Horizon 6, however, seems intent on making that difficult. With a gameplay reveal during today’s Xbox Developer Direct showcase, Playground Games says the next entry in its open world arcade racing series is its biggest, prettiest, and most customizable Horizon yet—and it’s coming in May.
Oh, there’s a giant mecha in there, too.
With the Horizon festival heading to Japan, Playground Games says it’s deeply invested in capturing the sights, sounds, and essence of Japanese roadways—and presumably off-roadways. The studio says it’s blending in-depth photogrammetry and field recordings captured from across Japan with new audiovisual tech like dynamic tire wear and improved environmental acoustics.
It even says it’s paid particular attention to modeling how cherry blossom petals react to passing cars. It’s in Japan, see.
Horizon 6 is, we’re told, bigger—in a lot of ways. Japan is Horizon’s largest open world map to date, and Playground says its version of Tokyo is more than five times larger than the biggest urban areas of previous entries. It’ll also boast Horizon’s widest day one car selection, with more than 550 cars available in-game at launch.
Playground says it’s leaning harder into customizability, too, with open world car meets to show off your best car liveries, fully multiplayer track building, and a wide “Estate” area that you’ll gradually build out with racing and showcase facilities of your choosing. And in the Horizon 6 segment’s closing seconds, it showed a car being approached by the massive metal feet of a Gundam-scale mecha. Not sure how the Horizon festival fit that in the budget, but that’s above my pay grade.
That all sounds fine, but throughout the Horizon 6 showcase, Playground failed to confirm the most crucial feature: Despite repeatedly showing kei trucks cruising unbothered by the roar of player-driven racecars, none of the gameplay footage showed whether we’ll be able to drive and race the noble small-format pickup trucks ourselves. If I’m not able to put an elaborate, user-made anime girl livery on a souped-up kei truck, what has all of this been for?
Whether or not we’ll be forced to endure that injustice remains to be seen—but only for a few months. Forza Horizon 6 will launch on May 19. You can wishlist it on Steam.
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