Playground Games has been quietly growing for years, but with Forza Horizon 6 the studio is ready to show exactly what that growth looks like in practice.
The developer now operates across three separate buildings in Leamington Spa, and for the first time in the franchise’s history, the team building the open world was split in two — one group dedicated entirely to Japan, and another solely responsible for Tokyo City. That decision alone says a great deal about the scale of what is being attempted.
Five times bigger than anything before it
Tokyo City is the centrepiece of Forza Horizon 6’s Japan map, which is itself the largest and most densely detailed world the series has ever produced. The city is five times the size of Guanajuato from Forza Horizon 5, and according to the developers it is so layered and technically complex that it simply required its own dedicated team covering roads, buildings, foliage and terrain.
The city is divided into four distinct districts. The suburbs form the outer edge — quiet, cluttered streets packed with bike lanes and dense overhead cabling. Achieving that last detail required entirely new telegraph wire technology developed specifically for the game. From there, the dockyard offers a sprawling container port designed with Event Lab creators in mind, complete with ramps and elevated pathways for the kind of spectacular stunt driving the series is known for.
Crossing the Rainbow Bridge leads to the industrial district, set on its own island, and home to the game’s interpretation of the legendary Daikoku parking area — the real-world meeting point that has become a pilgrimage site for car enthusiasts across Japan. The fourth and final district is the downtown area, drawing on the visual energy of Shibuya and Akihabara while also including a sleek commercial and banking quarter. Even within this single district, multiple distinct aesthetics will coexist.
To address the perennial Horizon challenge of integrating pedestrians into a world where cars can go anywhere, the team has placed Horizon Festival branding throughout the city — borrowing the logic of how a real city might dress itself for the Olympic Games. People populate these branded zones safely, making the city feel alive without creating chaos.
A completely different way of driving
Beyond the visual spectacle, the design team is equally excited about how Tokyo City changes the actual experience of driving. The dense urban geometry encourages harder cornering, tighter lines and more technical car control. Designers have noted that they find themselves reaching for B and A class cars rather than the high-powered machines that dominate open stretches of the map. Narrow alleys, layered freeway infrastructure and multi-level road networks — built using new tooling developed from lessons learned during the Forza Horizon Hot Wheels expansion — all contribute to a rhythm of driving the series has never really offered before.
The city also introduces a new auto-drive accessibility feature, designed for players who want to save their energy for races and events rather than cross-map commutes.
The rest of Japan
Outside Tokyo, the map is made up of five further biomes. The Japan Alps sit at the highest elevation, covered in permanent snow and featuring a working ski resort alongside an interpretation of the famous Tateyama Kurobe Alpine Route and its towering walls of packed snow. The highlands, inspired by the scenic Venus Line road, offer wide open skies and rolling hills covered in susuki grass that shifts colour with the seasons. Low mountains serve as the connective tissue of the map, weaving together tunnels and tree-lined touge roads. The coast brings dramatic rock formations and ocean views, while the plains deliver a quieter, more rural Japan — shrine buildings nestled in fields, overlooked by elevated Shinkansen tracks carrying bullet trains overhead.
That contrast between the ancient and the modern is a recurring thread across the entire map, and one the team seems particularly proud of.
Japan as a design challenge, not just a backdrop
Playground Games is clear that Japan is not simply a coat of paint applied to a familiar formula. The team spent considerable time in pre-production asking themselves whether the location alone could carry the game — and concluded firmly that it could not. The studio’s commitment is to a game that happens to be set in Japan, rather than one that relies on Japan to do the heavy lifting.
Whether it lives up to that ambition will become clear when Forza Horizon 6 launches. But based on what has been shared so far, the scale of the undertaking is unlike anything the franchise has previously attempted.
