Forza Horizon 6’s full map has broken cover, giving folks a chance to stare, gawp, and declare ‘damn, those be some roads’. Naturally, many have run to compare Playground Games’ rendition of Japan to the maps of previous Horizons and having quickly done so myself, I’m still optimisting that I’ll dig this vast expanse of hairpins and turns more than I did Horizon 5’s very green and yellow blob.
You can take a gander at the map below, with Playground having shared what it’ll look like during the summer season. Given that’s when Horizon settings tend to be at their most blandly green, I’m encouraged. Up at the top, you can see some perma-snowy roads in the far north as the developers have previously teased, with switchback-heavy mountain passes leading down into a section ringed by highway. Tokyo sits on the southerly coastal end of that highway, next to some small islands you can cross onto if you fancy a break from the mainland.
While there’s some mild disappointment in the replies to Playground’s Tweeter post about the map that Tokyo isn’t a huge metropolis that takes up half the space on offer, I think it looks big enough to offer a change from the winding country lanes and dirt tracks that Horizon maps are always packed to the gills with. For example, it certainly looks bigger and more detailed than Horizon 4’s Edinburgh, while Horizon 5 was even poorer on the city driving front, with Guanajuato feeling more like a small town.
So, while Tokyo might not be overwhelming in the grand scheme of a sprawling map which also packs a meteor crater-esque valley for estate building off to the side, I’m still confident it’ll serve as an ideal meeting place players will congregate around. Its placement on the map, down in the south below the northern wilds in a fashion which reminds me of GTA 5’s Los Santos, will also probably help in this regard. Edinburgh’s northeastern location wasn’t too much of a hindrance, but I don’t reckon Guanajuato being stuck towards the mushy middle but not totally central – and a decent way away from both stretches of scenic coastline – was a boon to it.
More broadly, Horizon 6’s map not being as blandly rectangular as Mexico was is something else that’ll probably count in its favour, as will the fact it boasts an amount of lakes more akin to Horizon 4’s UK, rather than a few short and narrow rivers like Horizon 5. That’s just what I think based on a brief look at the three maps, but as you’d expect, Reddit folks are already going to town with more in-depth comparisons and dissections.
Odds are they’ll still be going right up until Horizon 6 leaves the garage on May 19th.
