The secrets behind a Forza Horizon world map: Playground Games spills all

November 2021. Nearly two years after the coronavirus pandemic began, the general public has adjusted to a very different pace of life in which their bins go out more often than they do. We’re all thoroughly sick of banana bread and Joe Wicks YouTube workout sessions. We did pub quizzes every Friday on Zoom for a bit, until our whole family fell out over the scoring. It’s been a long time since we went anywhere exotic, so Google Maps has become our favourite source of entertainment.

And then it arrives: Forza Horizon 5’s verdant, sun-kissed Mexico. The automotive holiday destination we were all so desperately in need of, delivered by a game developer with a singular knack for condensing vast and varied areas into one remarkable vehicular round trip.

As Forza Horizon 5 makes its way to PS5 with all the post-launch content bells and whistles it’s amassed since those covid days, lead game designer David Orton and art director Don Arceta have a moment to reflect on a place they created where over 45 million players have since visited. And maybe even share the recipe for the studio’s secret sauce.

“ It is like the ultimate magic trick,” says Arceta. “Whenever we approach selecting a location, it’s a big process. It's almost like choosing a location for the Olympics.”

There are few factors to consider before the team sticks a pin on a map and starts modelling either palm trees or icicles: “Are there iconic roads that you experience in different in a particular country? Is there a new ecosystem or biome [to the series] there? What is the car culture like in that country? What seasons do they have? What unique weather do they have?”

Over the course of five games, the regions which ticked those boxes have been southern France in Horizon’s 2012 series debut, then Colorado in the 2014 sequel. Things seem to dial up a notch or two for Horizon 3’s depiction of Australia in 2016, though. Not only was the game engine capable of humbling just about every other competitor for vehicle and scenery fidelity, it also built a heck of a world map.

One round trip around the outer perimeter of the environment takes about 10 minutes. In that time, you transition from beach to sleepy surf town to dense rainforest, out into the sun-beaten red soil of the outback, back into the jungle, and then into a massive urban conurbation complete with Skyscrapers and precariously placed al fresco dining. It shouldn’t make any sense at all - you’re probably covering an area equivalent to the A19 ring road around York, but the layout is designed to let you suspend your disbelief and enjoy an epic adventure.

With the addition of a changing seasons mechanic in 2019’s Horizon 4, the United Kingdom provided a perfect venue. Here, if anywhere, it makes sense that the roads would be under blue skies one week, and sheet ice the week after. Horizon 4 packed an incredible variation of country lanes, motorways, quaint villages and big cities into its map, so the bar was set very high for the fifth game. In the end, it all came down to a Volkswagen Beetle.

“ We eventually work it down to a short list of about five locations,” says Arceta. And ultimately choice five was Mexico. It was the diversity there that really sold us. And there's a cultural element which we didn't really dig into in past Horizon games, so we leaned into that with our Vocho stories.”

The Beetle occupies a unique place in Mexican culture, ubiquitous in both its factory floors and roads since the early Sixties, and subsequently customised for every possible discipline, surface, and purpose. That gave Playground a unique hook. A set of driving missions in its Vocho Stories that would only make sense in this one particular setting.

“ When we're having these discussions,” says Orton, “it's really inspiring the design team what kind of experiences from a gameplay perspective we can put into it.

“So with Mexico being so diverse that led to this campaign about expeditions where you go to these areas and you set up festival outposts in these different regions, that campaign drive to go and experience the diversity of this map.”

It’s a process that goes deeper than identifying places that look pretty and have roads, then. It’s striking that Playground works art first, and uses the characteristics of that area to inform gameplay.

“We are looking at it definitely from an art perspective,” says Orton. "And then that gives us energy and we start brainstorming: ‘Okay, well there's this new region that we've never had before. What could we do there?’ And then away we go. You get a small idea and then suddenly you're making a campaign.”

There are technical aspects to consider too. As their game engine evolves and unlocks the potential to render scenery, lighting or weather in new ways, the team looks for opportunities there. The volumetric lighting and particle technology levelled up a lot for Forza Horizon 5, which gave Arceta and the team the chance to add spectacular dust storms to the mix of weather events.

Of course, Google Maps will only get you so far. At some point, you have to put the reference books down and go out on a field trip. The pandemic made that harder than usual for Playground during Horizon 5’s development, but where possible the team did visit Mexico to capture photography and experiences that would inform the art, design and open world map.

The ultimate barometer for whether the team has succeeded in building their take on a location is whether players just drive around without an objective. Which of course is a core activity in Horizon 5’s Mexico, and something that Orton, Arceta and the wider team see as strong evidence that their hard work paid off.

Four years later, the allure of Mexico’s roads hasn’t dulled. It’s going to be tough to top that location in subsequent games. Then again, they say that at the end of every Olympics too, don’t they?