Forza Horizon 6: More Details on The Country, The Culture and The Cars of Playground Games’ Japan

Forza Horizon 6’s sprawling, impressive map is separated into distinct districts, instantly recognizable as soon as you approach. The suburbs are dotted on the outskirts of Tokyo; narrow, undulating streets with telephone wires sweeping overhead, connecting clusters of modest homes.

Tokyo also has a docklands district, an industrial space piled high with huge cranes and colossal freighters, and there’s a delightful dichotomy between the looming, brutalist architecture built for tiny, bubbly city cars to zip around in.

There’s also the iconic downtown area, where you’ll see Shibuya Crossing, Ginko Avenue and Tokyo Tower – breathtaking landmarks bound together by dense urban streets, clever shortcuts and hidden paths, but all designed to support Horizon’s typically fast gameplay.

“The combination of enormous verticality, glass, neon signs, adverts for all manners of things, with Tokyo we’ve created this ultra-high-density space unlike anything we’ve made before,” Ellert adds. “It’s the most visually, radically different space we’ve ever built for a Horizon game.”

The Culture

You won’t end up in Japan alone – two of your close friends are coming to experience this adventure with you. Jordy is a passionate motorsports enthusiast, while Mei is an experienced Japanese car builder, and it’s her character that adds an insider’s perspective to your journey through Japan. That insider perspective was mirrored in the real world by Playground Games’ Cultural Consultant Kyoko Yamashita.

“One thing that surfaced when our team travelled to Japan was how valuable it is to have someone there who knows the place, who can help you navigate some of the things that even a well-researched tourist might not know,” Ellert explains. “It’s one thing to understand it from your perspective, but that inside perspective is so important when recreating a space.”