#12. FORZA STREET

An easy pick for the lowest spot in this list. Forza Motorsport has consistently offered excellent simulation mechanics, while Horizon is an incredible arcade series, but Forza Street is really neither here nor there. It doesn’t help that it’s a mobile-only title, which means that it’s lacking in the sort of mechanical perfection, polish, and visual fidelity the series has traditionally been known for. It’s an extremely simplified experience that doesn’t do much of anything you’d expect a Forza game to do. Thankfully, it’s not technically a mainline entry, so it’s rather easy to completely overlook.

#11. FORZA MOTORSPORT 5

As the first Forza game to release for the Xbox One, Forza Motorsport 5 was well-positioned to really leverage the new console to deliver an excellent experience, but the game turned out to be a bit of a letdown, especially coming off of the excellent Forza Motorsport 4. It looked great, the audio design was typically excellent, new features like Drivatars and Forzavista were introduced, and the cars felt really good to drive, but the game was crippled by a shockingly small roster of vehicles and a disappointing lack of track variety at launch.

#10. FORZA MOTORSPORT

The one that started it all. The first Forza Motorsport’s legacy is impossible to oversell, and for fans of racing sims, this was a landmark release. At a time when Gran Turismo ruled the roost, Forza Motorsport came along and defied all expectations by not only delivering an excellent racing sim, but one that was genuinely great enough to be able to go up against Gran Turismo and provide some meaningful competition. Being 16 years old and having been improved upon by numerous sequels, it’s a little hard to go back to now, but the game deserves massive props for setting down solid foundations for the franchise.

#9. FORZA MOTORSPORT 6

After the backlash that Forza Motorsport 5 received at launch for its issues, Turn 10 Studios knew they needed to come back strong with a proper statement- Forza Motorsport 6 wasn’t exactly a strong statement that could make people sit up and take notice, but it was an improvement. The selection of vehicles and tracks was much better, the visuals were beautiful, and the career mode and online were a blast. Mechanically, Forza Motorsport 6 wasn’t as polished in terms of its sim aspects as some other games in the series, which made it a bit of an inconsistent experience, but by and large, this was a really good game.

#8. FORZA HORIZON

Forza Horizon was an interesting and risky experiment for Microsoft’s racing series. After having made a name for itself with four excellent racing sims, with Forza Horizon, the series decided to do something different, delivering a more arcade style of racing in an open world environment. It’s fair to say that the experiment worked out, thanks to excellent driving mechanics and a world that was an absolute joy to simply drive around in. The first Forza Horizon has been improved upon by all of its successors, so by default it feels a little aged, but even so, it’s still a blast to play even today.

#7. FORZA MOTORSPORT 2

Forza Motorsport 2 had a lot of expectations to live up to, not only because it had to build on the success of its groundbreaking predecessor, but also because it was the series’ debut on the Xbox 360, and it succeeded very nearly in everything that it set out to do. It looked and sounded gorgeous, its tracks and cars were brimming with details, the roster of vehicles was vast and varied, and the mechanical polish and sheer range of customization options in the game were staggering, especially for its time.

#6. FORZA HORIZON 2

Forza Horizon 2 didn’t have the novelty factor of the first Horizon game, which meant it didn’t make nearly as big of a splash as its predecessor did, but it was more than a worthy successor, and an excellent evolution of the series’ open world arcade racing branch. The freedom and arcade-style racing that Horizon 1 established were taken to even greater heights in the sequel, while the open world featured here was also absolutely gorgeous and just a pleasure to drive around in. Sadly, the Xbox 360 version of the game as a bit of a mess, to the extent that it almost felt like a completely different game.

#5. FORZA MOTORSPORT 3

As great as the first two Forza games were, it was with Forza Motorsport 3 that the series really came into its own. Turn 10 established the formula that the series would continue to be built on for years to come, and it was with Forza Motorsport 3 that the franchise really solidified its identity and emerged as a true and proper contender to the racing sim throne. Excellent cars, tracks, driving mechanics, career mode, and more came together to deliver what was and still remains one of the best racing sims of its time.

#4. FORZA MOTORSPORT 7

Forza Motorsport hit a relative slump in its Xbox One era, but at least it ended strong. Forza Motorsport 7 wasn’t perfect, no – the microtransactions at launch, for instance, were a bit of nuisance – but in most ways that matter, this might just be one of the best renditions of the Forza formula. Visually spectacular, absolutely overflowing with a ridiculously large selection of vehicles, packed full of content that could keep you busy for dozens upon dozens of hours, Forza Motorsport 7 was a great return to form for the series. Driving mechanics were more polished and refined than ever before, the career mode was excellent, the progression system was genuinely engaging, and the introduction of dynamic weather was an exciting new addition.

#3. FORZA HORIZON 3

Like Forza Motorsport, Forza Horizon really hit its stride with its third instalment. The first two Horizon games are spectacular open world racers though, so that should tell you something about how good the third one was. Australia was an excellent open world setting, not just in terms of size, but also in terms of variety, while the driving mechanics were also better and smoother than ever. It was with Forza Horizon 3 that many started wondering whether the spinoff Forza series had surpassed the mainline games, and it’s easy to see why- this is easily one of the best racing games ever made.

#2. FORZA MOTORSPORT 4

The absolute pinnacle of the Forza Motorsport line of games. Turn 10 kept on consistently improving on the formula with each progressive game in the series’ earlier years, and with Forza Motorsport 4, ended up crafting a veritable masterpiece. Excellent variety in tracks and cars, a ridiculous level of detail that exhibited a true love for the craft, the most polished driving mechanics the series had ever had up until that point- for all of these reasons and more, Forza Motorsport 4 is not only the best Motorsport game, it might even arguably be the best racing sim ever made. It’s that good.

#1. FORZA HORIZON 4

When Forza Horizon spun off from the mainline series, no one could have expected that it would go on to surpass the Motorsport line of games. By the time Horizon 3 came out, the subseries did start hinting at that level of quality- and with Horizon 4, it just blew everyone out of the water. Open world Britain is beautiful, massive, full of varied sights and sounds, and densely packed with a vast variety of consistently enjoyable activities, from excellent racing events to buying houses to competing against Drivatars to just aimlessly driving around the open world. Add to that the ingenious seasons mechanic, which completely changes the world in fundamental ways, and you also get an insane amount of dynamism in the experience. Forza Horizon 4 is easily one of the best racing games ever made, if not the best, and we’d be lucky to see Horizon 5 coming anywhere close to that level.

Microsoft has some fairly big releases lined up for Xbox Live Gold subscribers in August 2019. First up is The Coalition’s Gears of War 4, a solid third person cover shooter that continues the excellent original trilogy. It’s available to XBL Gold subscribers from August 1st to 31st.

Then there’s Turn 10 Studios’ Forza Motorsport 6, one of the best racing simulators ever made. This becomes available from August 16th to September 15th. Xbox 360 players get some rather good releases as well – Runic Games’ Torchlight (August 1st to 15th) and Konami’s Castlevania: Lords of Shadow (August 16th to 31st). Both titles are playable on the Xbox One as well, thanks to backwards compatibility.

Overall, that’s more than $94 in game value for all of these games. Giving away Gears of War 4 is actually a pretty smart strategy for Microsoft. The Coalition’s Gears 5 is out on September 10th, and this allows new players to catch up with the storyline before hopping in. We expect more details on the upcoming sequel’s Horde mode at Gamescom in August, so stay tuned.

The Xbox One Scorpio is going to be insanely powerful- it is at least powerful enough over the base Xbox One, which was rather weak hardware, that it should be able to run all of its games in 4K natively. More importantly, it apparently is extremely developer friendly, too- in fact, we recently reported that it took Turn 10 just two days to port Forza 6 to Scorpio.

Responding to these discussions, Microsoft’s Albert Penello took to NeoGAF to clarify some things about the ease of porting to Scorpio. Penello confirmed that Forza 6 on Scorpio that Digital Foundry saw had only about a week or two’s worth or so of optimizations done- the engine work had been done in early January, but the final hardware arrived only a few weeks ago, which was when the final optimizations were done.

“They got the tech up-and-running on basically a box of parts in Mid-January. It was not a fully functioning box (which is probably where the rumors around the early kits not hitting full perf),” Penello said. “The kits with near-final perf only arrived a few weeks ago. That was when the team started really playing around with settings. So not to be pedantic, but you’re correct the version he saw did not represent two days of work. It also did not represent two months of optimizations. It was maybe a week or two.”

This suggests that it will require trivial effort on the developers’ part to achieve high performance on the Scorpio, then. Finally, Penello also clarified an earlier comment he had made, noting that while he had said that Scorpio adds anti aliasing for all Xbox One games, he had meant anisotropic filtering, and gotten confused.

The Xbox One Scorpio is due to launch later this year. More details about the system will be coming this E3.

The Xbox Scorpio’s reveal last week was was purely focused on its hardware- the specs that drive the machine under the hood and make it the ‘beast’ that Microsoft has promised it will be. In all of this, no new game running on the hardware was shown- but one older game was, as Microsoft showed off Turn 10’s 2015 game Forza Motorsport 6 running on Scorpio to demonstrate not only what kind of visual targets games will be able to hit on the system, but the extent of the system’s deep resources.

Now, Turn 10 has spoken a bit more about getting Forza 6 to run on Scorpio, noting that they were able to go even above and beyond the Ultra settings on Forza Motorsport 6 Apex, the free to play PC variant of Forza 6 that came out last year.

“The crazy story here is that we’ve gone over our PC ultra settings and for everything that’s GPU-related, we’ve been able to max it – and that’s what we’re running at, 88 per cent,” Turn 10’s Software Architect Chris Tector said to Eurogamer. “This is rendering the player LOD for every car, so you won’t see a single LOD pop. [It’s the] top-level model you’d see in race, one below what you see in Autovista, the model you usually only see for the player. And then we balance out LODs across the scene. It’s a disgusting abuse of GPU power is what it is, right?

“It’s horrible but we can do it and we still have the power left over. The awesome part about the whole story [is] that we can spend all this time heading into the future. Instead of saying how are we going to wrestle to get the performance on this, we’re actually saying we can make this quality trade-off or this quality trade-off and spend that time iterating heading towards much better image quality – so instead of stressing about getting to a final resolution for titles or a final frame-rate, we can really drive it all into quality.”

All of which is to say- the Scorpio appears to be exemplarily designed for what it is. It is unlikely that games targeted for its native level of power may have been able to hit 4K consistently, for instance- but in running Xbox One levels of games, its absurd abundance of hardware power and specs means that games will always look far better than they otherwise might have.

The mandate for making the Xbox One Scorpio was to create powerful hardware that developers find it easy to work with- and it looks like Microsoft achieved their goals. For instance, Turn 10, the folks behind the Forza Motorsport series, apparently managed to get Forza Motorsport 6 running on the Scorpio at a native 4K and locked 60fps in just two days.

“This is us. This is ForzaTech running 60 frames a second, 4K,” said Turn 10 Studio Software Architect, Chris Tector, to Digital Foundry. “We’re still running with settings that we would have used in Forza 6… but this is also including 4K content… we’ve got authored assets for this set of the models, cars, tracks everything. We pushed it through and made sure the 4K textures were flowing through. We’ve got them all there at the right resolutions and they’re not giving us enough of a bandwidth hit to offset that. If we drop back to when we originally ran and we didn’t have 4K assets, it was maybe one per cent different. We were very much bound on a different point than memory bandwidth. It’s been awesome and this is the point it’s at.”

The amazing thing about Forza 6 on Scorpio is just how much the graphics on it could be pushed, with plenty of resources still to spare- Turn 10 said that they could push the game to Ultra level settings, and still be sitting at only 88% GPU utilization- which is nuts.

“The awesome part about the whole story [is] that we can spend all this time heading into the future,” Tector continued. “Instead of saying, ‘How are we going to wrestle to get the performance on this?’ we’re actually saying we can make this quality trade-off or this quality trade-off and spend that time iterating, heading towards much better image quality. So instead of stressing about getting to a final resolution or a final frame-rate, we can really drive it all into quality.”

Microsoft insists that this is the kind of scaleability that the Scorpio will provide over the existing Xbox One- if so, then they will have truly accomplished their goal with the hardware. We can’t wait to see how other developers utilize its considerable resources.

In-game screenshot of Forza Motorsport 6 running on the Scorpio:

The Forza series has broken out, and continues to sell surprisingly well with each new iteration. With Forza Horizon 3‘s mainstream success, especially, the series has broken out of its mold of appealing only to the hardcore car and racing game enthusiasts.

According to Turn 10, however, that success has spilled over into the Motorsport games, too. “When you look at the pure motivations of players, you can sort of extract it from the racing genre and start looking at things like exploration, competition, single player vs multiplayer… and not just what they want to do, but why they want to do it,” said Turn 10’s Creative Director Dan Greenawalt in an interview with GamesIndustry.biz. “When you get down to that level, you won’t be very surprised to find that people who like cars, and like open world exploration, gravitate towards Horizon. People who really like hardcore competition and like cars, they gravitate towards Motorsport.

“But then you have this massive group that just goes towards both, because they like playing with a community who like cars. It is a lot more simple than… what I hear a lot is people talking about are sub-genres, and whether things are sims or arcade-style games, and a whole lot of things that just doesn’t prove out in the motivations of our players, nor in the numbers. We have a tremendous number of players playing both.”

Given just how consistently well made these games have been, I am glad they are doing well. Forza Horizon 3 is a system seller game for me- and I can’t wait to see where the Forza franchise goes from here.

Turn 10’s PC version of Forza Motorsport 6, namely Forza 6: Apex has left the beta stage and received a new update to support a number of racing wheel peripherals.

These peripherals include Logitech G27 Racing Wheel, Logitech G25 Racing Wheel, Logitech G29 Racing Wheel, Thrustmaster T300RS, Logitech MOMO Force Feedback Racing Wheel, Thrustmaster T500 RS Gaming Wheel, Thrustmaster T150, Logitech G920 Xbox One Wheel, Thrustmaster TX Xbox One Wheel, Thrustmaster TMX Xbox One Wheel and Thrustmaster RGT Force Feedback Racing Wheel. Support will be added for wheels from Fanatec as well including the CSR line-up and ClubSport V2 Xbox One Hub in late September.

It also noted that Logitech H-pattern shifters barring the G29 are supported with a later update adding support for the G29.

Forza 6: Apex, unlike its Xbox One counterpart, is a free to play racing title that brings over a lot of the tracks and cars while adding high-end graphical options like 4K resolution support. Future titles in the franchise will release simultaneously for both Xbox One and Windows 10 with Forza Horizon 3 on September 27th to be the first game. It will also feature Xbox Play Anywhere support, allowing you to purchase a digital copy on PC and receive the Xbox One version for free and vice versa.

Microsoft will be holding a special Forza event at this year’s E3, the company announced on its official website. Given that Microsoft have already announced that a new Forza game will be revealed at E3 2016, one can probably guess that this is going to be Forza Horizon 3. This assumption makes sense since Microsoft has been alternating between Forza Motorsport and Forza Horizon for quite a number of years now.

“We’re also excited to share information on more of what you’ll receive if you’re one of those 500 lucky fans. In addition to already announced goodies like entry into the Xbox E3 2016 Briefing and a custom-built backpack full of gaming swag, FanFest attendees will be invited to a special Forza Motorsport event at the Petersen Automotive Museum on the afternoon of Monday, June 13 and a can’t-miss “Fan Celebration” event on the evening of Tuesday, June 14 at the Premiere House at Regal LA Live,” the company stated on its official website.

It will be interesting to see if Microsoft will be able to shock fans by announcing a Forza game which is not Horizon. We will see how it all pans out next month.

The NASCAR DLC for Microsoft and Turn 10’s Forza Motorsport 6 is real, and it is out today, bringing with it 24 new cars, a new 10-hour+ Career mode and the Homestead-Miami Speedway. All of this, in addition to an entirely new brand of gameplay.

In the UK, the NASCAR expansion will set you back by £15.99- which implies that its price in North America will probably be $20. This expansion will probably do best in North America, where NASCAR racing is a nationally viewed sport, and permeates pop culture consciousness.

You can learn more about the DLC in the trailer for it below. It is available to download now on the Xbox One via the Xbox Store. Meanwhile, later this year, Forza Horizon 3 is widely expected to hit the Xbox One, which will probably mark the point where Microsoft end their official support for Forza 6– in other words, this may be one of the last big updates for the game.

Forza Motorsport 6 will apparently be getting a new NASCAR expansion pack according to a leaked download card and it will be quite sizable.

As discovered by Reddit, the card states that the expansion will feature the “raw thrills of stock car racing to the world stage [for] the very first time,” and will include 24 new cars from the 2016 season, a new NASCAR World Tour Career mode, the Homestead-Miami Speedway as a new track, new multiplayer events and even some new display features “for the improved drafting and spotting”.

The pack will apparently retail for £15.99. There’s no indication of a release date and Turn 10 Studios is yet to officially announce the expansion. Regardless, like the leaked Porsche expansion pack, you can expect something soon.

In other news, Forza Motorsport 6 Apex is now in the beta stage for Windows 10 users. It’s a free to play, lighter version of Forza 6 with a lesser number of cars and tracks but hey, it’s Forza for PC.