Forza Horizon 6 Devs: Custom Garages, Exploring Tokyo and… a GIANT ROBOT!? | Official Xbox Podcast

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JOE SKREBELS: Hello, and welcome to The Official Xbox Podcast. I'm Joe Skrebels, and I'm extremely happy to say that we are here today to talk about Forza Horizon 6, the open-world, Japan-set, ludicrously beautiful new game from Playground Games. It arrives on May 19th, but I have been lucky enough to play quite a big chunk of the early part of the game, and I am even luckier to be joined by art director Don Arceta and design director Torben Ellert to talk all about it. Thank you so much for joining us. I know it must be -- I'm going to say it's probably quite busy at the moment. Would I be right?

TORBEN ELLERT: Yeah, quite busy, Joe, but I've really been looking forward to talking with people who've played it.

JOE SKREBELS: Yeah, well, look, if you want to ask me questions, please go ahead, but I have a lot of questions for you. I feel like it must be a nice problem to have, to have as much success as Horizon has done over the years, but I guess players must begin to sort of expect to know what they're going to get out of a Forza Horizon game. And I guess an easy way to kick this off would be, what do you see as the biggest changes in Forza Horizon 6 from 5?

TORBEN ELLERT: Going in with the heavy hitters right at the top, Joe, great. I think you speak to probably the most interesting challenge design-wise for this project, which is we are a franchise, and as you say, people have real expectations about what an Horizon game is, what you'll do, and what that will feel like to play, and that gives us a really great place to start from. We also have the advantage that Horizon 5 and Horizon 4 before it have been live for extended periods of time, which just gives us a great way to look at how players play the game and start to understand what it means for different groups of players because, because it is so successful, you get to this point where the game cannot be all things for all people all the time. It has to start to be focused towards the kinds of things that people want from it in a particular space, in a particular way. So yes, it's a huge challenge, but it's also a really great way for us to keep ourselves honest, because we can think about the decisions we're making and look at how people play it and think, is this in line with what this kind of player or that kind of player might enjoy?

DON ARCETA: I think visually -- so I agree with everything that Torben says, but visually I think also for us, one of the biggest changes is we are focused on the current gen currently, and I think all the previous Horizons were on multiple generations. This is the first one we're actually focused on this current generation of consoles and PC, and we're able to actually really just get every ounce of power and graphic fidelity out of the console. So I think that's been a change for us in terms of how we think about how we make content for the game.

JOE SKREBELS: That must be quite a welcome change as well, being able to push it as far as it can go, right?

DON ARCETA: It is, but just every player game, we always take it to the limit, so we're always kind of fighting those demons as well.

JOE SKREBELS: And, Torben, to return to that point where you were watching the way people play these games, I guess, can you dive into, what were you seeing? How do people approach Forza Horizon games?

TORBEN ELLERT: There are a couple of different ways that we've explicitly looked at that and used that to inform the changes that we've made that some of which you will have experienced in the preview build that you got to play. So if you kind of take a couple of those, we observed that there were a fair number of players who didn't have many cars but spent a lot of time just driving, just kind of enjoying the space, but didn't get like a real opportunity to try every different kind of automotive experience that the game offers, and part of that came down to the fact that they weren't interacting with the Autoshow, they weren't interacting with the campaign reward systems. They didn't have a lot of in-game credits that would allow them to buy these cars, and the aftermarket car feature that you will have run across, cars that are for sale in the world, those are informed by a desire to put interesting cars that are relevant for the gameplay you're likely to be playing right now that are cheaper than the Autoshow right in front of you where you'll find them and subtly encourage you, oh, pick up, try this car out, try this car out, take this car to this event. So my hope is that more players will experience more of the wonderful machines that are in the game, how they sound, how they handle, how they look, and by moving that feature into the open world, where we could see from previous games players spend a lot of time, and also look to systems that give them more credits from exploring or smashing mascots and making the cars cheaper when they find them that way, it allows us to create a feature that will serve a kind of player who hasn't had a feature like that in the past.

JOE SKREBELS: It is such a nice feeling seeing that icon pop up on the mini-map as you're going past and stopping. I had quite a whiplash moment where I found this beautiful new car. I didn't realize that its handling was quite a lot looser than the car I'd just been using and immediately drove it into a wall, which felt very appropriate to the way I play these games, so yeah, I mean, it's always a lovely surprise. I guess one thing we should cover here that I got to experience in the preview build, something that, I mean, it's a different experience, but it's a familiar idea, is that get-to-the-festival intro moment that you have in the Forza Horizon games where we've previously had volcanoes and flying out of airplanes and all sorts of stuff, and in this game we get off-roading, someone qualifying for the festival, riding alongside the Shinkansen bullet train. And it kind of occurred to me as I was playing this there must be internally big discussions over what makes it into one of these, such a short section in the grand scheme of playing a Horizon game, but there's so much packed in there. How do you make those decisions? What informs those huge intro moments for you?

TORBEN ELLERT: The four sections of the initial drive kind of fall into two categories. There are two of them that are just in Japan. The first one, which is kind of your welcome-to-Japan moment, and the third one, which is about carments [phonetic] and touges and a launch party. Those are not festival events. They are things a little bit elevated, sure, but if you went to Japan today, you could have an experience like that. Whereas, the second and the fourth sections, those are big. They're bombastic. They're festival events. There are announcers and grandstands and helicopters and planes. And because we took the decision that we wanted to have a campaign progression experience with wristbands and moving up and earning your way to Legend Island, and also an area of the game that was just about exploring at your own pace and driving around and finding things, it felt really natural that we should reflect that in the initial drive of the game so that players could have a feel of it. But obviously, a lot of what we do is about a visual presentation. Let me throw it to you there, Don.

DON ARCETA: Yeah, with that kind of split between Horizon Festival and local car culture, obviously Japan, amazing local car culture, and that is definitely something we wanted to capture in the first moments of the game, but we used it as an opportunity to kind of revisit what our festival is and how that looks. So now we have marshals. We have volunteers. You could kind of get a sense that it's kind of how a global event would be run. So we kind of looked at it at that angle, and that kind of helped us separate those two. And so, yeah, if you play it again, you'll kind of notice those little nuances. Oh, this is a local event, like Torben said, if you went to Japan right now, that's probably an experience you have, and then there's a festival side, which is so grand and bombastic.

JOE SKREBELS: Well, you've referenced it kind of a couple of times already, this idea of how we're approaching the festival in this game and how that ties into the story of your character, the campaign in the kind of mission structure. I'd love to talk a bit more about that because it kind of -- it really -- we'd heard previously that you start this game effectively as a tourist who is visiting while the festival is on and then kind of gets caught up in qualifying for it. But playing it, you really get that sense of, oh, this is the structure of the central -- the golden path of this game is that I'm going through. So to fill those in at home, my preview ended at the point at which I was going to enter the qualifying event to get into the sort of lowest ranked part of the festival. So everything prior to that was proving myself, which is, you know, blessing and a curse for me as someone who's maybe not the greatest driving game player. How did you make that decision to sort of shift that focus from professional driver to aspiring one in that way?

TORBEN ELLERT: I think it came from the fact that we had selected Japan for this location, and we felt that Japan was such an exciting, interesting, intriguing location that many people have wanted from our franchise for a long time, that we've wanted to do for a long time, but then as Don has kind of spoken to, what would it feel like if the festival actually was there? What would -- it wouldn't dominate Japan. It would be part of Japan. So out of that, the kind of logic then leads to, okay, how do we give the player permission to just be in Japan? Well, tourism. You go there as a tourist and you get caught up in the summer qualifiers, right? And then you get to the end of that process, and then you get the call to actually take your shot at joining the festival, like right in at the bottom. So finding a way to just give the player permission to be in that space I think was certainly, from my point of view, was really important because you could absolutely play Horizon 6 and never qualify for the festival if you didn't want to, but that is available as you discover it. As you drive around the map and the map uncovers itself and the fog of war disappears, you find things, you do things, and we really wanted that to be a valid, structured, meaningful way to play the game if not following that golden path and being a legend of the festival. If that wasn't something you wanted to do immediately or if you wanted to take a break from it, we wanted the game to just kind of give you permission to do that.

JOE SKREBELS: Right. So it's about providing a structure but not sort of dictating that you must follow it in that way. It's not being rigid about how you uncover those features.

TORBEN ELLERT: Mm, but at the same time, because we have all of this content in the full game that you discover just by driving, it meant that the festival could be more structured. The festival could take on a format where it's like, no, you do need to qualify, and once you've qualified, you are going to be driving slower B-class cars. You would primarily have been in C-class cars for the qualifiers, and once you get into your first wristband, that moves up a tick to B-class and some C-class. So you kind of move up a little bit, but you're going to have to buy those cars. And because the campaign structure allowed you to just be in Japan and have a meaningful progression that could give you cars and give you houses and let you buy clothes and do all of the things that you wanted to do, it meant that we could create more structure for the festival and what that campaign progression felt like.

JOE SKREBELS: And does that almost offer, you know, for someone who -- I'm not immersed in car culture. I'm much more of an open-world-y, like, explore-y player, but is this almost a way to sort of tutorialize? Like when you're talking about car classes and that kind of thing, for someone who's less immersed in which car is going to be faster than another car or handle better, is that a way to sort of teach a player like me in that respect?

TORBEN ELLERT: It's certainly really helpful. Going back to the point of what do we see in previous games, we see often players will go to the fastest car they can get, and those are challenging to drive. So saying to players, look, if you just want to drive your really fast cars around Japan, by all means do that, because that's a thing you could do if you travel to Japan today. But to reach the highest echelons of the orange and the purple and then the gold wristband, right, you need to build up to that point, and our hope is that by helping people learn how to race and get better at it, by the time they get to those cars and they finally can use them, in anger, at the festival, they're ready for it.

JOE SKREBELS: Nice. To talk about, I mean, the big most obvious change here is we're in Japan now and all eyes have been drawn from the very first time we've talked about this to Tokyo City and, you know, it's your biggest ever open location in one of these games. I've read that you had a specific part of the dev team assigned just to creating that location. How do you even begin with that process? You know, you're very familiar with creating these giant areas, but how do you then kind of switch that up into "we need to make a fundamentally different kind of region here"?

DON ARCETA: Yeah, obviously, there's a lot of learnings that we had from previous games, building urban areas, but as you said, we've never built anything quite like this. And really early in our pre-production, we did do a vertical slice of our city, and that really kind of opened our eyes to all the challenges and all the things that we really needed to figure out. We figured out ways to build new buildings and all their pavements and a whole bunch of other things just to build a city. And then, yeah, after that pre-production, building that vertical slice, that is what really informed us, hey, you know, like, if we want to do this size that we're aiming for, yeah, we need a dedicated team, and we needed all the tech to kind of support that team as well. So that's kind of how we ended up on that. We whiteboxed the whole thing. We've driven it around. We knew all the landmarks we wanted to fit in that city, so things like the C1 loop, Daikoku, Shibuya, and we -- it was almost like -- typically, when we build a Horizon map, it's a greatest hits of, you know, the location, and we had to do that with the city itself, and I think that was a huge challenge for us, just kind of -- it's almost like a map within a map, just kind of piecing this together and making sure that things are spaced apart just right, and all of that work, yeah, required a dedicated team.

JOE SKREBELS: One thing that kind of occurred to me as I was playing this, you know, we're used to these Forza Horizon games being primarily big wide-open spaces, and what that offers to, you know, the AI drivers around you is they can go fast, they can take, you know, they can take very different lines, but driving in a city is very different. Have you had to approach literally how the cars around you drive in that Tokyo location to give it a different feel of what it's like to travel down those streets?

TORBEN ELLERT: The short answer to that is yes, but a big part of it is looking at the space in which the cars are moving, right, the main roads that feed through the city and looking to restrict some of those cars away from some of the smaller roads so that you don't end up in a situation where you have chosen to absolutely bang down a side alley and a Drivatar in a Unimog is coming the other way. So it's about understanding that the complexity of the city's nav data is an order of magnitude bigger than anything that we've done before, and things like some of the shortcuts through buildings that you might have found when you were exploring Tokyo City, those are -- traffic won't drive along those, and we have systems in place to make that the kind of space that feels special to the player because players can take those side routes, and the AI typically won't.

JOE SKREBELS: That's cool. I did find one Drivatar as I was going. It was marked up as a dev's Drivatar whose approach to driving through Tokyo was to go directly through the middle of the street, smashing everything in the middle. I was like someone at the studio has been messing with the -- messing with the formula here. It was very funny to race against.

TORBEN ELLERT: And that kind of, that kind of delightful chaos is really, really what comes from players being together in those spaces, right? And that is just such a big component of what makes Horizon fun and one of the things that we've lent into. The preview build that you played would have had a drag meet and a time attack circuit, and you would have seen times from other players, but you wouldn't have seen other players live in that environment, but we really wanted to reward and encourage players to be in spaces together and have fun together, because that kind of chaos you're talking about, players bring a degree of delight to that space that no AI system can even approach.

JOE SKREBELS: And I love that touch on the time attack circuit of having the in-game screens that are showing you other people's scores, and it gave me that sense of -- I tend to be more of a solo player, but I loved that sort of, just that ray of light of multiplayer coming through and just giving me that prod to, oh, maybe I could beat that time. Are you kind of aiming for that more, that asymmetric multiplayer feeling with those features?

TORBEN ELLERT: Metrical and contiguous I think is the way I describe it, if I were a game design nerd for a moment, because being in those spaces on your own, there are ways to connect with other players, through the leaderboards, through the rival system. If you were in that space and other players were there, you would auto-go through them, they would be present, their times would appear, but you wouldn't be directly engaging with them, but our new link skill system would kind of nudge you to continue doing the same things as other players, like you encounter a player who is going fast and you go fast as well and you both get a link speed skill, and I'm pretty certain that you'll probably want to keep going fast together. So that stage is like, okay, we'll kind of nudge players towards continuing to do things together, and then up from that, we have convoys which are kind of temporary groups that you can link into that then allow you to do gameplay together.

JOE SKREBELS: Nice. Don, I'd love to know from your side as well, you know, we were talking about Tokyo City and obviously it draws the attention particularly before you've had a chance to really engage with the game, but it's such a stark difference to the rest of this world map, and I wonder how you went about creating all the other regions in ways that make them feel independent and unique to themselves as well. You don't want it to just feel like there's Tokyo and then there's countryside, so how did you go about designing a world that feels different even outside of that urban area?

DON ARCETA: Yeah, that's a great question. Obviously, there's a lot of research that goes into when we choose the location, and one of the big goals when we choose the different biomes and regions for a Forza Horizon game is just the diversity. We just want to make sure that each area holds up on its own and it's compelling on its own, just as much as Tokyo City is on its own, and we want to make sure that we have as much contrast between those biomes as well. And then we look at things like elevations, so we have the Alps and, you know, it's all about mountains, rocks, and snow, and then we have the low mountains where it's all about maple trees and touge roads, and we have the plains which is all about seeing that Shinkansen just go across and seeing its reflection in the rice fields. So yeah, we try to target all those really iconic visuals for the region, and just, you know, Japan's a beautiful country, and so it wasn't that hard to find very beautiful places to integrate in-game, but I think the real magic skill that Playground has is finding all those places and making it work in one map and in this map that obviously isn't the size of all of Japan, but it does work, and it kind of dictated our elevation, how the elevation works in our map, where regions live, where Tokyo City is. Yeah, a lot of research, looking at the visuals, what's interesting, but also gameplay as well, what offers unique gameplay, and it's those two things that kind of helped us figure out what's, you know, everything that's outside of the city.

JOE SKREBELS: Well, it's interesting, you talking about those points of interest and those moments where you sort of stop and look and see what is around you, but you have that natural friction, I suppose, with the fact that this is a game designed often to be driven through literally as fast as possible. So how do you create, you know, both -- I guess from both of your disciplines, how do you create a game that can make you stop, and how do you approach stopping people? Is it about putting those aftermarket cars in those interesting places, or you -- how do you approach that friction that we're talking about?

DON ARCETA: The friction, we try to reduce that friction as much as possible, I think, is the short answer. So, you know, making sure that it's easy to beeline across a mountain forest or to, you know, go uphill. We try to keep that as frictionless as possible, and to be honest, we don't -- we try not to kind of rail -- rein the player in too much, but because Japan has so much elevation change, I think there are some natural barriers that happen, like I might be in a car that just can't traverse through that forest, up this mountain, and I think there's more natural friction like that in the game.

TORBEN ELLERT: And from the point of view of how we structure stopping, how we structure distraction, a big part of the change that we made for this game was the discovery map, the way that it uncovers as you drive around, which tells you in a really legible way where have you been, what have you seen. And we kind of have this rule for all of the discovered Japan content that it's there. If you can find it, you can start it and you can play it. Whereas, the festival content, that's a little bit more structured, and that might send you off into the fog to go and find something and do something, and who knows, you might find something along the way. You might run into a rare spawn aftermarket car that you can't afford, and then you're like, "Oh, this will be around for a couple of hours, so maybe I'll go and do something. It'll give me some credit so I can come back and buy this." But ultimately, freedom, really, I think, is a core design pillar for us. It's literally painted on our walls, and we've really tried not to force you to go and do a specific thing but tempt you to go and do a bunch of different things.

JOE SKREBELS: Gotcha. One thing that was included in here that we haven't really touched on was garage customization, which I immediately discovered was a lot more open-ended than I would have expected when I accidentally put a building-sized ramp directly through my garage with a mis-click. Thankfully, could undo that. But can you tell us about this feature, why it's been added? I know there's more to discuss in terms of the estate as well that you've talked about previously, but with this garage element, what were you going for there?

TORBEN ELLERT: It was one of the things I was -- one of the examples that I was thinking of when you asked, at the top, what have you learned and how do you move your franchise forward? Because we look at what players do, and in Horizon 3, I've told this story a bunch of times, but it really illustrates this. In Horizon 3, players picked houses in the world and said, "That house is mine, I live there." Horizon 4, we built a player houses feature. In Horizon 5, we introduced a vent lap, which was a really open-ended building tool, and players started to build photo booths and garages and places to show off their cars like, "I park my cars here." So Don and I talk a lot about UGC and building and giving players agency over the place where they keep their cars and let them build something that is, like, very grounded and realistic and gritty in a garage or something that is wildly ephemeral like a bat cave or a dinosaur jungle or some things I can't even think of that just felt in line with what we saw players doing and something that we know appeals to players, that kind of agency over the world where you earn credits and you spend credits and can get them back, but you kind of earn something and then you build something and that makes it yours in a way that is really, really fun and interesting, and, speaking as a player myself, really compelling.

JOE SKREBELS: How does that work in a multiplayer sense? Are you able to sort of invite people into your garage or can you share the designs? How are you approaching that?

TORBEN ELLERT: Absolutely. You can publish the designs that you've built and generate a share code that other people can -- that you can, like, publish out on your streams or send via social media to your friends. There's an in-game browsing system, so you can find them, like liveries for cars, and you can choose, on a per-house basis, to open it to visitors. Obviously, you would only have had access to the one house, your friend May's house just outside Tokyo City. But once you've built and decorated that, you can say, "Okay, my house is open for visitors." Then another player can go to your creative hub in-game and say, "I want to go and look at Joe's version of May's house," or Joe's version of one of the other houses of the game, or even "I want to go and visit Joe's estate," and then we load you into that space and then they can, like, move around in the space and they can see your character, they can see the cars that you placed, and they can see your dinosaur jungle and everything else that you built.

JOE SKREBELS: And does it tie into the wider progression of the game, or is this a sort of separate track? You know, are you earning more and more props as you go through that festival experience, or is it kind of all there for you to play with from the beginning?

TORBEN ELLERT: It's all there for you to play with from the beginning, because gating a particular kind of wallpaper behind hitting three stars on every leaderboard in the world, every speed trap in the world, feels maybe unnecessarily punitive. Props have a cost, but the cost isn't massive, and if you remove an item, you get the full value back. So it's more about saying, "You have invested some of your hard-earned progression into making this thing," but all the props are available. They're there for you to go wild with immediately, because restricting your access to them just, I mean, it's an easy idea to have, but I don't believe it's really kind of a fun way to go about that kind of system.

JOE SKREBELS: So bat caves day one, that's what we're saying.

TORBEN ELLERT: By all means. I want to see people build bat caves. I really do.

JOE SKREBELS: I endorse that message. We don't have a huge amount of time left. I had one very important question left, which was, are you able to say anything about that mech tease from the end of the developer direct trailer at this point?

TORBEN ELLERT: Chaser Zero, you mean? Yeah, I mean if you drove around the festival, you would have seen Chaser Zero posed heroically there. Don, talk about the thing with the rising sun.

DON ARCETA: Oh, yeah, we placed the mech in the festival, and every time the sun rises, the mech is the first thing the sun hits. So it's a pretty epic moment as the sun rises and you just get that sun glinting off its visor. Yeah.

TORBEN ELLERT: But yeah, the mech, Chaser Zero, appears in one of the showcases that you will unlock as you move up through the progression, and then we'll get to see who can win a race, a car or a giant robot.

JOE SKREBELS: I'm very excited about that. I mean, that might just pull me away from making a bat cave on day one. We'll see. We'll see which wins, mechs versus bat caves. I think that's as good a place as any to say goodbye for now. Thank you so much for taking the time out in this very busy time, and best of luck with that final stretch. Don't forget, you at home, Forza Horizon 6 arrives on May 19th, including on Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, and until then, you can keep an eye on Forza.net, Xbox Wire, and let's face it, the entire rest of the internet to learn more as we approach that date. But for now, we'll say goodbye. Thank you so much, Don and Torben. Have a good day.

DON ARCETA: Thank you.

TORBEN ELLERT: Thanks, Joe.

DON ARCETA: Yeah, thanks, Joe.

TORBEN ELLERT: Bye. [ Xbox Sound ]