After the rumors and so many years of fans begging, it’s finally happening: The Horizon Festival is heading for the land of the Rising Sun. Forza Horizon 6 is coming next year, as Xbox announced during its Tokyo Games Show showcase today, and it’ll be set in Japan. Players have been clamoring for this for a long time—imaginations ran wild as far back as 2018, before FH4’s launch—and it’s hard to imagine any other locale stoking quite as much enthusiasm. Japan has an automotive culture all its own, though, to hear some of the developers at Playground Games tell it, there are reasons why it took Horizon until now to reach the country.
Last week, I had the privilege of chatting with Forza Horizon 6 Art Director Don Arceta and Cultural Consultant Kyoko Yamashita. Our conversation, while very pleasant, was unfortunately quite limited in scope; at this point, Playground is truly only talking about where the game is based. I pressed for more info, like the kinds of environments the map will include, its size, and how it might impact Horizon’s traditional gameplay. The answers were a little circumspect, to say the least, but one thing that certainly became clear was the sheer diversity of this world—an area where FH6 sounds like it’ll put all prior entries to shame.
“To be honest, whenever we picked our locations, Japan was always on the list,” Arceta said when I asked him why Playground decided now was the right time for the series to make the trip. “Throughout each game, there’s been a lot of learnings from past Horizon games up until 5 and up until 6. And I think because of all those learnings, like technologically we’re able to build this game and do it justice, but it’s also how the game’s kind of evolved since [Forza Horizon] 1.”
Naturally, the city of Tokyo will be represented in Horizon 6, and Arceta called that particular part of the map “the most extensive, most complex area that we’ve done in a Horizon game yet. It just has so much depth, with elevated roads and varying sizes of roads.” What’s more, the tech that enabled that depth originated from a somewhat unlikely source.
“A lot of our technology that we produced over the years, in terms of our tools to actually build our open worlds, has really advanced since FH1,” Arceta said. “There’s multiple ways we’ve done it, but I guess one example would be Hot Wheels. [In the Forza Horizon 5 Hot Wheels expansion] we developed technology to actually create our orange tracks in a different way than we did in Forza Horizon 3. This was a brand new way to, you know, quickly iterate, get it to a higher quality, and get something that’s really fun. And we have actually adapted that tech, just as an example, to our Tokyo city. So we’ve actually—it’s not covered in Hot Wheels track—but we used it to develop our elevated roads, which there is a lot of layering of roads in Tokyo, as you can imagine.”
Urban environments admittedly always felt like a bit of an afterthought in previous Horizon games, but density is a key facet of conveying the feel and impression of an authentic Tokyo, and it sounds like Playground has spent a great deal of time adapting its tools to achieve that. Arceta said that not only does Tokyo represent Horizon’s largest city yet, but overall, FH6 is “our biggest map to date” and “probably the fullest map as well—it has a lot of stuff to do in it.”
As fans of the series would expect, regions of the map won’t be digital replicas of their real-life counterparts. When I brought up Japan’s infamously narrow streets, Arceta said that “we’re not doing like-for-like, which you know in Horizon games, we never do. We try to capture that authenticity and that feel and the spirit of the location, like we do in past projects, but also because we want to cater to the gameplay that the franchise is known for.” Beyond the city limits, FH6’s Japan will include coastal regions, mountain roads (we get a nice shot of Mount Fuji in the teaser), and open countryside.
This world will transform with the seasons as well, like Horizon’s renditions of the U.K. and Mexico. The addition of seasons in FH4 really deepened the sense of place in these games, in my opinion, and as Yamashita told me, the way in which seasons affect specific areas of the country influenced which spots were chosen for FH6’s “greatest hits” of Japan.
Forza Horizon 6 – Official Teaser Trailer | Tokyo Game Show 2025
“You don’t have to be a Japanese national, but if you’re born and raised, have spent significant amount of time in the country of Japan, I say it like your body actually starts adapting to the seasons, literally and figuratively,” Yamashita said. “Technically, we even have a word in Japan that says you have like 72 micro-seasons in a year—you know, people are used to saying we have four seasons, but that’s how much there’s a transition.” Yamashita pointed out Japan’s diversity of climates, across a space that is “almost the length of California and a little bit of Oregon combined.”
“When you think of that [area] having such distinct and unique character throughout the four seasons that touches on every single daily, weekly, monthly life level—from food to the colors you wear, to the colors that you just start seeing, you know, in your daily commute wherever you are—that is so natural to the Japanese, but also, I think, so stylish in a beautiful and a unique way to a foreigner or visitor,” Yamashita said. “And [with] Don and his team, we’ve talked about so many different personalities we want to try to extract and bring to life in Horizon.”
One is definitely the image of cherry blossoms in the springtime, which we can see from that excruciatingly vague teaser trailer. Exploration has obviously always been key to Horizon, and the series has tried to work such adventure into the gameplay in myriad ways over the years, from inviting players to snap pictures of landmarks, to sending them out to find derelict barns with priceless cars inside. You only have to think about the potential of a Forza Horizon in Japan for 10 seconds—or play the new Tokyo Xtreme Racer—to envision meeting up with your friends in a recreation of Daikoku Parking Area. How will these sights and gathering hubs manifest in FH6?
Invoking Japan’s legendary car culture, Arceta mentioned all the places “you could just imagine people meeting up and convoying up and, you know, taking pictures again and hanging out. I think because we’re being authentic to the locations we’ve chosen, those areas just naturally have shown up in the map. So yeah—without giving too much away, yes, you know, we have that opportunity for players.”
For every one of my questions answered in this interview, I had 20 more. However, it’s clear that FH6’s reveal is going to happen at a different pace than its predecessors. When the last two games were announced, we were immediately treated to rich, two-minute trailers showcasing the gamut of the open world and the car we’d expect to see on the cover. This time around, Playground couldn’t even tell me which platforms the game will be on, or when it hopes to release next year. (After publication, Xbox revealed in its own blog post that FH6 will hit PlayStation 5 “post-launch.”) No doubt, they’re letting this one breathe because they know how big a moment it is for anyone who’s been invested in this franchise.
“I feel like Japan has been discovered,” Yamashita said, “because of how I’ve seen Japan [evolve] especially in our game space, but [also] the broader entertainment, art community in general, and everything that we love—electronics, you know, from the ’80s to where Japan is today. But I feel like if you ask this question, you know, 20, 30 years ago, when I started in this industry, it was still not as accessible and approachable to a foreigner. Travel was not as easy; the language barrier and the cultural barrier were, I think, much higher. And so, you may have had a pleasant experience, but not go as deep and not feel as if you were maybe welcomed the way that you wanted to be welcomed by the Japanese country and the people. But now that there’s more awareness, and just personal interest levels at varying degrees depending on who you are and who you talk to, I think the wider acceptance and the understanding, on average, of the culture is going to make this installment of the Horizon more welcoming and approachable.”
“To me, it’s like Horizon has finally landed in Japan, and it deserves to kind of have that moment in Japan,” Yamashita summed up. Something tells me the fans will agree.
Got a tip? Email us at tips@thedrive.com