Playground Games has previously touted the absolutely massive scale of Forza Horizon 6’s new setting, Japan, especially with the amount of content packed into it. However, Tokyo City is arguably spectacle unto its own, being five times larger than anything the team has ever built. It’s so big, in fact, that the studio split into two teams with one focused entirely on the city, as revealed by art director Don Arceta to IGN.
“We have a team making our city specifically, and a lot of that is: it’s our biggest city we’ve ever made. It’s so layered and so detailed – much more than anything we’ve done in the past. To make Tokyo City for Forza Horizon, we really need a dedicated team. It covers everything from roads, buildings, foliage, terrain; Tokyo has all of it. It’s just such a big biome that it just warranted its own team.”
“The headline is it’s our biggest ever, compared to Guanajuato; five times bigger than that last urban space,” says production director Mike Bennett. “But also just the diversity of it compared to previous games is pretty massive as well.”
“I think a criticism that could have been leveled at some of the previous games, within Guanajuato, we did have different areas within it – we did have different building styles, and they were really colourful – but maybe it was a bit one-note as you were moving around. There weren’t huge amounts to separate one area from another,” he continues.
“Whereas, I think with our version of Tokyo, it’s very diverse. You’ve got the tall skyscrapers in the central area. You’ve got the suburban areas with the nice houses as you’re heading in. This is probably the craziest feature, actually, we’ve never done anything like it; just the multilayered, multi-level road infrastructure that we’ve got going through the middle. Like, we had to go out and build new tooling to allow us to do this, leveraging what we’d learned through Hot Wheels.”
Like any well-organized concrete jungle, it’s divided into four main districts, per art director Don Arceta: The Suburbs (which he calls “the crust”); the Dockyard with thousands of containers, perfect for drifting and events (“Relive your favorite movie,” says Arceta); the Industrial Area, which is reached via the Rainbow Bridge and hosts Daikoku, the world famous car park; and Downtown, the beating heart of the city and where the Horizon Festival is most visible.
However, it serves as more than just a hot spot for racers in-universe. “You can imagine that one of the challenges we have is, you know, cars can drive everywhere in our game. And, when you’re building a city, one of the things that you expect to see is people,” says Bennett.
“We’re not GTA, and we’re not trying to be GTA, so cars and people don’t always play nice. So we always have this challenge of, ‘So, how do we integrate people into the scene while still keeping them safe from cars?’
“And the nice thing about having the Horizon infrastructure ever present within the city is that we can create areas within the city with Horizon Festival branding, and we can keep people in there, safe from cars, and you can still see a populated city as you’re driving around. So that fiction really helps us tie that in and solve one of those challenges.”
Overall, it seems like Forza Horizon 6 is doing more than just building on the legacy of its predecessors and packing in more fidelity. It’s capturing the look and feel of Japan while completely revamping its approach to city-building and immersion. The result is that Tokyo City, even if it doesn’t have NPCs with full-fledged schedules roaming around to interact with, feels as alive as it can be.
Of course, we’re keen to see how the rest of the region fares when Forza Horizon 6 launches on May 19th for Xbox Series X/S and PC. For an extended peek at the countryside and its many gorgeous sights, head here.