Forza Horizon 5 gives us a high-speed tour of Mexico at Gamescom 2021

Playground games revealed Forza Horizon 5The opening sequence of cinematics and gameplay on Tuesday afternoon at the Xbox Gamescom 2021 exhibit, highlighting the varied terrain, weather, and biomes that players will encounter on the racing game’s open map of Mexico when it launches in November. .

“I think our campaign learns a lot from Horizon 4“, Mike Brown, Can Horizon 5creative director told the media at an informational event last week. The sequence shown at Gamescom closes the end of Forza Horizon 4 with the start of the last racing festival. “There are all these things you can work on, but in a way that feels more structured and directed than in Horizon 4, but keeping the freedom to progress through the game in many different ways. “

At the unveiling, the usual drive-in to the Horizon Festival that has started every game in the series, a cargo jet drops four cars in a display of Forza Horizon 511 different biomes. The sequence begins with a 2021 Ford Bronco Badlands ascending a stratovolcano (Brown said it’s “almost the highest point we’ve ever had in a Horizon game”) and culminates with the $ 2.7 million Mercedes-AMG One hypercar in the plane to the festival. finish line.

In the middle, Chevrolet’s 490-horsepower 2020 Corvette Stingray takes over from the Bronco at the bottom of the volcano and proceeds to plow some Mexican farmland. This is followed by Porsche’s rally pony, the 911 Desert Flyer, which plunges into the dense Yucatan jungle and takes a ride through the Mayan ruins of Ek ‘Balam. It is one of several indigenous temple sites that Playground Games has recreated for players to explore, Brown said.

Image: Backyard Games / Xbox Game Studios

“Having so many biomes creates challenges for us, for when those biomes meet,” Brown said. “And a biome has to blend in with the environment in a way that doesn’t feel like you’ve crossed an invisible line, and suddenly you’re in a completely different place. Instead, the barriers are blurred, so it feels natural. ”Vegetation and ground cover helped Playground Games achieve this combination, Brown said, particularly in transit from places like Mexico’s rocky Pacific coast to a “living desert” still abundant in cacti and other adapted plants.

Seasons and seasonal weather will also return to Forza Horizon 5, following the film’s debut in 2018 Forza Horizon 4. “The seasons will work out a little bit differently in Mexico than they worked in Britain,” Brown said. They will still change weekly, and players can see the effect on things like drying up river beds (providing new courses or shortcuts) and then filling up. Mexico will still have snow, Brown said, but it will be limited to the highest altitudes on the map, like the volcano mentioned above. Spontaneous weather events will include dust storms, also seen in Tuesday’s video, that left the Stingray covered in a thin layer of red dirt.

There is so much to do, not just see, in Forza Horizon 5, Brown promised. The Eliminator, the 72-car battle royale race of Forza Horizon 4, it will come back with some adjustments. “I think the main difference is on the map,” Brown said. “We launched Eliminator about a year later Forza Horizon 4 he left. This time Eliminator already exists as we are uniting the world. So the world now, I think, is a lot better suited to Eliminator. “

There is also the Events Lab, shown during E3 2021, which allows players to create their own courses and races. While the stadium location seen during the E3 demo is “a great place to build, because it gives you a kind of blank canvas,” said Brown, players will be able to use Event Labs’ construction tools wherever they want. for the most part. Some areas of the world will be inaccessible to prevent player-created events from running over pedestrians, for example.

The building will be supported by “a very insightful rules editor,” Brown said. “I wouldn’t dare call it a scripting language, but it relies on some of the design tools that we use to create the different functions of the game.” The if / then nature of the rules editor allows, for example, such granular things as playing certain sound effects or adding score multipliers for overtaking or jumping within a race.

Brown said the fact Horizon 5 got a development cycle of three years, instead of two, which meant that Playground Games could make a bigger investment in the game’s physics and drive models. “We have completely rebuilt the way the suspension works,” he said. “You might think, as I say this, that an improved simulation would make it more challenging, but it’s actually the opposite. The car springs now behave much more like they would in a real car and react to the terrain in a much more authentic way. Improving the simulation also improves accessibility, which is a great result for us. ”

Beyond the cars shown at the Gamescom presentation, Playground Games is still not talking about the size of Forza Horizon 5of the fleet or what, in particular, will comprise it. But “there is literally nothing stopping you from driving a hypercar through the jungle,” Brown said. They will just handle a lot worse than, say, the Bronco. Brown said Forza Horizon 5 It has various types of mud for players to throw themselves into, like a thick, sticky chocolate cake frosting that leaves deep marks on the tread, and sloppy grout that splatters the windshield and hood.

Forza Horizon 5 launches November 9 for Windows PC via Steam and Microsoft Store, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X. The game also launches the same day on Xbox Game Pass for both consoles and PC.