Based on reports from our sources, PC Gamer can confirm that Japan is large. Not only large—huge, and stacked from top to bottom with stuff to do. At press time, Tokyo was reportedly at least twice as big as Milton Keynes and the island of Hokkaido was said to ‘make the Isle of Wight look like a hatchback’.
Which is why Forza Horizon 6 is headed to the land of the rising sun. In a chat with GamesRadar, the arcade racing sim’s art director Don Arceta said that the series’ Japanese venture would be “our biggest map yet.” But fear not, because it’s “also our most full.”
Just what you’d expect a dev on an upcoming release to say, I suppose, but I’ve got no reason to doubt Arceta. Playground hasn’t run into much trouble creating bigger and more things-crammed worlds over the past couple of Horizon games, and it sounds like the studio didn’t run into any trouble finding stuff to do in Japan, either.
“Obviously, we can’t go bigger without filling it with things to do and see,” said Arceta. “And I think this map that we’ve created for Japan, or Horizon’s version of Japan, is big, but also dense. There’s always something around the corner for you to discover and see. But yeah, it’s bigger. I won’t put a number on it. It is bigger.”
Forza Horizon 5’s Mexico map was, at a rough estimate, a tad over 100 square kilometres (or a touch over 38 square miles). Which is, my journalistic compulsion to tell the truth forces me to say, quite big for a videogame map, so it’s kinda nuts that Horizon 6 will apparently dwarf it.
Unsurprisingly, Tokyo—currently the largest city on Earth—is a big part of that scale: “I think [Tokyo] is probably our most ambitious,” said Arceta. “It’s really layered and complex. And I think players will just enjoy that space. It’ll be something new and fresh.”
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