When it comes to racing game franchises of the 21st century, Forza Horizon has been something of a phenom. Launching as an open-world little brother to Forza Motorsport, it quickly became massive. As most console simulators failed to maintain a foothold and Need For Speed ended up too much of an arcade game, there was a huge white space for Playground Games’ take on the genre to gobble up whole. More than 4.5 million people had played Forza Horizon 5 in the 24 hours after its launch, and it was America’s second-best-selling game in March after releasing for PlayStation 5. There are no signs of the mania slowing down, and with Forza Horizon 6 on the, um, horizon, it seems like it’s going to give the passionate exactly what they desire.
The original Forza Horizon will always hold a special place in my heart. An open-world racer with licensed cars, fun challenges, a killer soundtrack if you ignore a couple of decisions that don’t seem so great in hindsight, and a real festival theme, it united two of my biggest loves: cars and music. That feeling of ripping down dirt roads in a Delta Integrale to the Skrillex remix of “Levels” or blasting through the canyons in an SRT Viper to “Don’t Stop (Color on the Walls) by Foster the People captured a vibe you definitely couldn’t get in the Need For Speed games of the time, much less the closed courses of Gran Turismo. It was just epic, an instant hit that understandably built a huge brand.
The switch from the Colorado setting of the original Horizon to Europe in Forza Horizon 2 was great. Mountain passes, a far more open world to really explore. Admittedly, I wasn’t as attached to Australia in Forza Horizon 3, but Forza Horizon 4 going to Britain felt right. B-roads! Who doesn’t love B-roads? When it was announced that Forza Horizon 5 was going to be set in Mexico, the discourse was loud enough to cause hearing damage. The overwhelming sentiment? Fans wanted a game set in Japan, and they wanted it now.
After all, Fujimi Kaido was a fan-favorite course in Forza Motorsport, and an open-world game set in the mountains of Japan with licensed cars and a decent physics model melds a whole lot of cravings together. Well, five years later, it’s official. Forza Horizon is going to Japan. As Playground Games states:
Japan has been one of the most iconic and requested locations by the community, and bringing the Horizon Festival to this incredible region has been one of our largest ambitions yet. We recognize its importance to our players, and we feel the same way. With the latest advancements in our technology and design, we are creating a game world that we hope you will fall in love with. We can’t wait for you to discover the beautiful landscapes and rich heritage of Japan in Forza Horizon 6 when it releases in 2026.
Exciting stuff, but what can we expect from the latest installment in the wildly successful franchise? So far, we only have a teaser depicting a row of licence plates, transitioning to a computer-generated Mount Fuji. The mountain passes of Japan are such important places for car culture that the setting just feels right, although I’d be surprised if cityscapes aren’t also featured. At the same time, tuning has played such a role in the Forza Horizon series that with this latest journey to Japan, it would make sense to continue existing licensing agreements with brands like Liberty Walk and RWB.
At the same time, I do have some concerns. When Forza Horizon 5 launched, multiplayer was a bit of a mess. In addition, the soundtracks just haven’t hit the same since Rob da Bank parted ways with the franchise after Forza Horizon 2. There’s a whole world of new house music, post-punk, nu-metal revival, and bloghaus from smaller artists out there, with many tracks that make for amazing driving music. As much as I do like the Foo Fighters and Dua Lipa, part of what made the first few soundtracks great is how they tapped into what the Tumblr kids and EDM bros were listening to at that moment. That E3 trailer for Forza Horizon in 2012 with “Show Me A Sign” by Modestep set the benchmark. What a moment captured on your Xbox. Can the new game live up to that?
Regardless, it’s been a bleak past year for racing games, which is why I’m eagerly awaiting the arrival of Forza Horizon 6 in 2026. It’ll launch on Xbox Series X and S, along with PC through both the Microsoft Store and Steam. Give it some time, and Horizon 6 will also show up on PlayStation 5, so if you’re the type of person to Gran Turismo hard, good things should come if you’re willing to wait. There’s a whole lot of hype here, let’s see what Playground Games does.
Top graphic image: Forza
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For me it’ll be hard to top FH4, but that was the personal connections. I grew up near Broadway, and my grandparents lived in Ambleside, so I can attest that they captured the atmosphere of those two places really well.
FH5 was fun, but I have no connections to Mexico, and the entire landscape could get a bit same-y. Still, I’m looking forward to FH6, mostly for the ridiculously wide range of cars. Sure, some people will get all excited about the Ferraris and Porsches, but I’ll be having much more fun holding races between an Austin-Healy Sprite and a Suzuki Cappuccino. Or converting a 60’s Mustang to AWD, and using it as a rally car.
I really wanted to like Forza Horizon,but the arcade handling really ruined it for me. It’s the same as NFS where the only fucking way to drive over 5 mph is sideways. I mean,the cars in GTA even drives better than in Horizon so it can’t be that hard.
I was never into driving games. I used to fritter away way too many hours on MS Flight Simulator and I’ve read it’s awesome now. But I’d rather spend my time reading and commenting on this site and other (non-car) sites. Or out in the real world, talking to people and not in front of a screen. No judgement intended.
Ditto.
I usually listen to the classical music station in 5. Danse Macabre and Holst’s Mars make your race ending seem dramatic.
When this comes out next year, it will have been 5 years since Horizon 5, which seems insane considering every other Horizon game came out 2-3 years from each other. But Japan was probably the most difficult country to reproduce in the game world, so I get it. Plus with all the shakeups the Microsoft game devs have gone through (like the shuttering of Turn 10, so no more Forza Motorsport, which is wild since it leaves Gran Turismo as effectively the only sim game in town), it’s a miracle we’re even getting another Horizon. I just hope that in addition to the location, that they’ve listened to other things the fans have been clamoring for, and that they’ll deliver on them too.
I’ve been watching some of the YouTubes about this teaser release, and some of them mention that time gap but also that support for the XBox One (the 2010s one) is going away this time through. And that this implies there may (or may not) be a change to the game engine.
That said, I loved Horizon 4, skipped Horizon 5 because I’m a Yankee who prefers 4 “real” seasons, and I’m cautiously optimistic about what we might get in Horizon 6.
The blog post accompanying the teaser said Tokyo is in (in some shape or form), so definitely some urban area in the map. It wouldn’t be a game based in Japan without some touge. And I’m really hoping they improve the seasons system beyond what they had in Horizon 4.
Will be interesting to see what we get.
Japan does have very distinct seasons, so I do think we’ll be getting something more similar to what we got in Horizon 4. Although it might be that some areas are more snow covered in the winter than others are, so that we’re not forced to drive in snow everywhere for a week.
Speaking of racing games set in Japan, Tokyo Xtree Racer is out of early access. Steam has it at Overwhelmingly Positive reviews, but I haven’t had time to play it yet. Really want to, as it’s a throwback to 2000s racing games; before loot boxes, limited-time events, cringey attempts to be hip, all the things I find exhausting in Forza at this point.
Excited for this. Really loved Horizon 5, though the game overwhelmed my older XBox One. I ended up replacing it with a PS5; maybe I need to buy the PS5 version to hold me over.
I don’t have much time to game anymore between having a toddler and a demanding job, but I NEED THIS GAME. I am so damn excited about them finally bring this franchise to Japan after all of the years of begging from us fans. Looks like it’s time to replace the ole’ Xbox One S.
Honestly, I’ve wanted a remake/remaster of the original Horizon much more than Japan. With how far the series has come, giving love to the original would make it even that little bit better, even though it’s damn near perfect, in my view. Fixing the tire physics, removing some of the railings that were there to prevent people from traveling where they didn’t need to…. I think it’d be worth it!
I doubt this can live up to the hype. I’ll still likely buy it myself, as I’ve grown tired of 5 after about 4/5 years of constantly playing it, mainly for the weekly awards.
Maybe it’s time I update to a CPU/MB that’s capable of running Windows 11…
Hopefully Horizon 6 has a real campaign progression instead of “welcome back Superstar, here’s a Koenigsegg”. Some decent PC integration that doesn’t comb my system for the latest optional Windows updates before refusing to launch would be a nice change, too.
I’ve been out of gaming for awhile, any newer games compatible with the Xbox One? I use it for apps anymore, haven’t played a game in probably 8 years (vertigo is one factor).
Forza Horizon 4 & 5, The Crew Motorfest, CarX Street…. if you meant racing games.
The new Test Drive isn’t from what I can tell.
FH5, as a heads up, can tend to run kinda slow on the One’s. It took quite some time for my One S to load some things but tended to run fine when it loaded.
Horizon 1 was one of my favorite games in high school, I sank countless hours into blasting my F40 through the streets of CO and making historically accurate rally car liveries. I picked the series back up with 4 and 5, and I think they’ve lost the plot a bit.
-There’s almost too much to do, and no reason to do any of it. The first game had a simple but effective structure – you’re a a rookie and you have to beat increasingly better tiers of drivers and cars to beat the big guy. In the new games, you’re already on top of the world, you can get any car randomly through a wheel spin, and the races aren’t really tiered – the competition will just drive a car in whatever class you’ve chosen for yourself.
-The map design has almost no tight roads. They all seem to be designed for speeding through at 150 mph, but there are very few truly technical sections. Horizon 5 addressed this a bit with the mountain road up the volcano, which was the best spot in the game.Hopefully Horizon 6 rectifies some of this and crafts a better game, not just one with more stuff.
I thought I was pretty jaded about Horizon, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t get a twinge of excitement when I saw Japan. Maybe they’ll turn things around, I might have to try this one after all.
4 and 5 really felt like the world revolved around me, instead of feeling like I existed in the world.
Mexico felt like a Disneyland ride with puppets and dioramas carefully laid out for me to see, but hands must remain inside the ride at all times. All water is shallow enough to ford in a McLaren, walls and fences are cardboard cutouts you can plough through in a Lotus, and nothing ever affects you. Coarse gravel and deep sand are little more than brown paint over pavement. Nothing is ever real.
I had to pretend my actions had consequences, avoiding the walls, lampposts, cliffs and curbs as an imaginary challenge.
That’s it exactly, why follow the roads when you can launch your Ferrari across the sand dunes consequence free? Once again, the mountain road up the volcano was the one antidote. The mountain was covered with thick immovable trees on either side of the road, and even when you got above the treeline it was too steep for most regular vehicles to shortcut up the side. I really hope Japan has more of this.
I really wished the mountain road was longer and had more than one race up/down. I feel like I enjoyed the Fortune Island needle climb more, but that may just be rose-tinted glasses.
Good distraction that they closed Turn10, and effectively killed the Forza Motorsport series with it.
I was so excited when Need for Speed finally did its Chicago analogue… only for it to be a widely panned game right out of the gate. I’ll pick it up at some point when it’s on megasale, which is often is.
The Forza games never really appealed to me, but I might take a chance on one in Japan. Gimme touge and cyberpunk nighttime driving and I bet I’d enjoy it plenty.
If you meant Unbound, I picked that up earlier this summer for like $10 on Xbox, with the added DLC. Mega cheap!
Yup!
I hope they tone down the painfully awkward voiceovers and whatever racing scene they’re trying to emulate. It’s the worst thing to me about Horizon games. The over the top production into something that feels off-putting. I’m not looking for it to be a “normal” Forza clone, but am I the only one that finds much of the extraneous stuff to be kind of awful?
I don’t think you’re wrong, but I don’t think the game’s wrong, either.
I feel the tone aligns with people who promote and run festivals in this age of internet-fueled ADD. Which, I agree with you, is kind of awful. [Insert Fyre Festival joke here.]
Fortunately as an open-world game, I find it pretty easy for me to get away from that ruckus whenever I exceed my tolerance for it. Just go for a cruise across the scenic countryside and leave the noise behind.
(“Yeah, but even if you drive away, there’s still a radio DJ yammering about the festival.” I have good news for you: look in your game settings. You can turn off the DJ and leave just the music. Or you can turn off the radio entirely and listen to the engine.)
I love my brief visits to the virtual world of Horizon Festival in short bursts, coming and going at times of my choosing. Attending a real-world festival (Horizon or otherwise) for 24×7 immersion is definitely not for me.
I don’t like it either, but how else are you going to explain a why races are being held all over the place, and there’s a ton of cars in town… it’s the Horizon Festival. Sure, it’s a bit corny, but it’s also a video game, so who really cares.
Very excited for this.
I understand why it took them so long – they need to absolutely nail it for it to feel authentic.
It looks like that indie game “JDM” got fairly close, so if Forza and its big budget don’t do any better it will be disappointing.
OMG
OMG
O
M
Goodness
I have an excite.