Name: Forza Horizon 6’s Fictional Japan Is Large, Layered, and Full of Surprises | IGN First
Uploaded: 2026-03-14T21:39:32.000Z
Duration: 16 min 57 s
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Part of the way that we design Horizon games is we look at how players receive previous games, how they talk about them when they release, what it is that resonates, what is it that maybe looks like a really great idea on paper, but

Adverbs of manner

just doesn't get picked up when it's actually playable on the sticks.

Adverbs of degree

And the thing that we see again and again and again is that feeling of movement between spaces and moving between a desert and a different kind of desert, that's, that's a very ephemeral change.

But moving from the suburbs into downtown, that is immediate.

Coming out of an alley which is super narrow onto a four lane major road through the middle of a city, that is immediate.

And those super small scale changes create the sense that this map is rich and full of things to do.

I think that was an objective that we set out at the top of this game.

We have known for some time that Forza Horizon 6's Japan is playground Games largest and densest map to date.

We've known too that Playground Games version of Tokyo City is set to be the biggest urban space the team has ever made, and

five times larger than Forza Horizon 5's Guanajuato.

Seeing it in person, however, is something else and obviously extremely exciting.

My own first showcase of the game in action featured a beaming red GRGT, the COVID card for Forza Horizon 6, threading its way from the map's southern end to the north, up through the outskirts of Tokyo City and onwards towards Japan's Alps.

As with all previous Forza Horizon maps, this is not a one to one facsimile of any specific chunk of Japan.

It's a greatest hits tour that captures the look and spirit of areas from all over the country all bundled into a single racing sandbox.

It is without doubt an excellent setting for a Forza Horizon game.

It's one of the first decisions we make and it's historically one of the toughest decisions to make because as you say, it informs everything and there are many components to it that, I mean, Japan has been a location we've wanted to do and it's been on our shortlist for a number of games.

But I think this was the first time that we felt that we could take a shot at it, that the fear was healthy rather than an actual panic response.

I guess in terms of obviously each location offers kind of like new challenges and obviously new gameplay and new experiences, but

for this one, Japan had a lot of, lot of challenges that we had to kind of figure out and I guess approach and try to solve.

And that was kind of one of the things that, at least for myself, intrigued me to kind of like tackle Japan as a location.

One significant rule that the playground team took specific care to abide by was the fact that simply transplanting the Horizon Festival to Japan and dusting their hands couldn't be enough.

As highly desired as the location was, it could never be the only thing Forza Horizon 6 brought to the table.

Happily, Elliot points out that the location does in fact give the team a lot of scope and to make new features, which is something he cares deeply about.

A lot of the discussions that we had all the way back in concept for this project were around, is it just Japan?

Is it a previous game that is on a new map?

We always iterate, we always innovate, we always kind of introduce new features and push the game forward.

So certainly from a design point of view, we were very careful and very aware of the fact that we needed to think about this as a game that was set in Japan, rather than that being almost like a core part of what the game would be like.

We wanted this to be, I guess, the most innovative Forza game that we've made, the most exciting game, the game with where we push on a bunch of different axes and generate these new features that players have been really excited about.

And I guess the key thing for us, because Japan comes with so many expectations and I guess everyone has their idea of what Japan is.

So obviously we had to look at those things like Tokyo City, what they expect, and

obviously mountainous roads, which both offer huge challenges for our team technically and gameplay wise.

And also we have the idea of, I guess, what people expect out of Japan, but

it's also trying to find the things that will surprise and delight players and things that people don't, you know, immediately think of Japan when they say it.

And I think as all Horizons games, we always look for those in every location we look for that we choose.

And yeah, this for Japan, it's no different.

We kind of had those kind of nice surprises and we've seen it with the footage we've shared so far.

It does exist in Japan, which is really exciting.

Entering Tokyo City, I'm taken aback by just how vastly different it is to previous Horizon game Urban Spaces.

This is spectacularly different from Guanajuato and Edinburgh, but that's not necessarily the pleasantly surprising part.

Forza Horizon 3's modern and vertical surface paradise is the closest comparison and.

But the scale of Tokyo City is immensely more grand.

Even skimming around the fringe of the city's heart and escaping via the raised freeway, it's clear that there is so much more to this take on Tokyo City than has been typical of Horizon Games.

The diversity of Tokyo City stems from the fact that even the city itself, which is regarded as a biome of its own in terms of the overall map, is further divided into four districts.

These are quiet and peaceful areas packed with all the charm of a clean but cluttered, densely populated Japanese urban area.

The roads, covered in bike lanes and school markings, stretch out beneath a spaghetti of chaotic cabling.

Next, there's Tokyo City's dockyard, which promises to be an extremely popular destination for event lab creators.

This is a large area that appears primarily filled with containers that the team promises they've placed ramps and elevated pathways around to facilitate the typical over the top driving and stunts we associate with the Forza Horizon Games.

The 3rd district of Tokyo City is the industrial area, which is its own island, reached by crossing the iconic Rainbow Bridge.

The industrial district is also home to Forza Horizon 6's ode to the famous Daikoku parking area, the real life 24 hour highway rest stop that attracts and hosts a regular stream of the coolest cars in Japan and has become regarded as the best car park in the world.

The team confirms this is definitely not the only car park in the game either.

There's not always a feature tied to them, but

alongside the reappearance of petrol stations on the map for the first time since Forza Horizon 3, they help the world feel more rich and authentically car adjacent.

The final district of Forza Horizon 6's Tokyo City is the downtown area, which contains not only the distinct neon elements of Shibuya and Akihabara, but

but also a clean and crisp commercial and banking area.

So even within this single district, there will be multiple different aesthetics.

It's in the downtown area that Arseta notes you'll also see more in World Horizon Festival branding presence inspired by the sorts of banners and signage a real world city would hang and display in certain ways if it were hosting an event like say, the Olympic Games.

This actually goes further than just helping the Horizon Festival feel like a more authentic global event that has in fact descended upon Tokyo City and its surroundings.

It also helps the team integrate people into the Scenes while still keeping them safe from cars.

As the team notes, cars and people don't play nice, and Forza Horizon is not gta.

By having Horizon infrastructure within the city, though, playground can keep people in there and safe from cars.

But players can still see a populated city.

For the first time in a Forza Horizon game.

The team building the world itself has been split into two.

One for Tokyo City and one for the remainder of the map.

Yeah, we have a team making our city specifically, and

a lot of that is it's our biggest city we've ever made.

It is five times larger than the last city we made in Guadalujuato.

And then Tokyo, just as a city itself, it's so layered and so detailed, much more than anything we've done in the past.

And to make Tokyo City for Forza Horizon, we really need a dedicated team.

It covers everything from roads, buildings, foliage, terrain.

Tokyo has all of it where and almost equal parts in it.

It's just, yeah, it's just such a big biome that, yeah, it just kind of warranted its own team driving around in Tokyo City.

How immersed I feel in a place that, that's true of many of our biomes because of the kind of the way that your lines of sight are constricted, but

because it's the city, it feels radically different.

I think one of the things that was really that excited me when we had the first white box versions of the city that we could drive around in, was just how it changed the way I drove around those white box roads.

You find yourself doing a lot more technical, driving a lot more hard 90 turns.

You're driving a lot in the kind of B and A class of cars, which is.

Is quite a different experience to driving around the rest of the world.

So when you enter Tokyo City, unless you're just spinning through it on, on, on one of the motorway links, your.

Your driving experience gears down and you need to interact with the slightly broader main roads and the quite narrow, because we've got some really narrow alleys through the city.

It is a completely different riding experience.

For Assetta, it's his favorite place on the map.

And yeah, this is our first real, I guess, city that we've ever done and it feels like it.

And that also, I love architecture, so it's easy to kind of just say, that's my favorite.