Previews for Playground Games’ Forza Horizon 5 went live recently and creative director Mike Brown has been talking about various aspects of the game. For example, there’s the influence of Xbox Game Pass on the design, which can be seen in the weekly Festival Playlists. But given the title’s fidelity, how well can it run on previous-gen consoles?
Speaking to Press-Start, he says, “I don’t think we’ve released the Initial Drive for the Xbox One version yet, but there are loading screens. I’ll be willing to admit that. The game actually looks very good on Xbox One, but it doesn’t have an SSD. So there are restrictions of the past.” Initial Drive refers to the segment which showcases the game’s visual fidelity and cover cars, and has been a staple of past titles.
As for the process of downscaling the visuals for the Xbox One, Brown noted that, “If you’re a PC developer, then you are used to just streamlining your technology to work on as lower-spec a machine as you can. Because on PC, the lower-spec machine you can run on that the more gamers that you can bring to the game. And honestly, scaling down to the Xbox One is a similar process. I think that it will be one of the better-looking games on Xbox One.
“I think people are really gonna love it. It’s an Xbox One game, it’s not gonna look as good as the Series X. It is going to have loading screens, that’s the reality of that. But I think it wasn’t any extra complication for us versus making it on a low spec PC. And I think the version that’s coming out people are gonna be really happy with.”
As such, it’ll be hard to make any judgments without seeing actual gameplay footage of the Xbox One version. Considering how good Forza Horizon 4 looks on previous-gen hardware, it’s not entirely unreasonable that Playground Games could make its sequel shine as well. Stay tuned for more details on that front in the meantime.
Forza Horizon 5 launches for Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S and PC on November 9th.