Playground Games has kicked off its The Art of Driving series as it gets closer to the May 19th PC and Xbox Series X/S release date for Forza Horizon 6. The series is going to feature three documentary-style episodes, featuring artists who worked with the studio to create original murals that can be found throughout the map of Forza Horizon 6. The first episode, which you can check out below, involves car photographer and host Larry Chen joining up with artist DRAGON76 (Satoshi Fujita) for a journey around Tohoku in a Toyota Land Cruiser.
“The first stop takes us north to Tohoku,” says Chen in the video. “Tohoku isn’t the first place most people think of when they imagine Japan. It’s colder, quieter, and a little more rugged.” In explaining the choice of using a Land Cruiser for the journey, Chen said, “For a journey through snow-covered mountain passes, there’s really only one choice.” The entirety of the first episode has a runtime of around 21 minutes. With two more episodes to go, the series will feature three more of the nine artists.
Playground Games had announced that it had tied up with nine Japanese artists to create murals for the game earlier this week. In the announcement, DRAGON76 had spoken about making a mural that blends contemporary fashion and cyberpunk elements with inspirations from the Nebuta Festival.
“The Nebuta Festival features massive, illuminated floats called ‘nebuta,’ constructed from washi paper and wire, often depicting figures from Japanese mythology. For this piece, I reimagined one of the most frequently portrayed mythological figures, Susanoo-no-Mikoto, along with a dragon, and rendered them in a near-futuristic style,” he said.
The studio has also given us our first look at the full map of Forza Horizon 6. Through this, the studio has also revealed that players will get to explore various scenic areas, ranging from the snowy Japanese Alps in the north to the bustling downtown streets of Tokyo City.
Among the routes through which players can drive are the C1 Inner Circular Route, which comes in at 14.8 kilometers, and Ginkgo Avenue, which features more than 140 ginkgo trees along its 300-meter stretch. The studio has also gone as far as to call Forza Horizon 6’s Japan “our most dense and vertical map yet.”
While the in-game map will be far from realistic when compared to real-world Japan, design director Torben Ellert has noted that full accuracy wasn’t the studio’s intention. Rather, it was “more about the feel” of traveling through Japan’s varied locales.
“It’s easy to think of an authentic space as a recreation of a place, but it’s less about that accuracy, and more about the feel of it,” explained Ellert. “If you think about driving in Tokyo, for example, what does that look like? What are the things that make it feel like this place? You’d see it in the distance from the freeways, before passing through the suburbs, then suddenly you’re in downtown, surrounded by skyscrapers.”
Forza Horizon 6 is being developed for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S. A Premium Edition is available for pre-order, giving players advanced access on May 15th.