Post Script

Creative director Mike Brown on how Forza Horizon 5 puts its best foot forward

Playground Games draws out its racing game from over 100 square kilometres of digital terrain. Forza Horizon 5 creative director Mike Brown (right) explains the art of crafting the studio’s tracks, and the game’s iconic opening setpiece.

The Horizon games are famous for their opening drives – how do you discover those set-pieces in your landscape?

It’s something we’re already working on while we’re still in concept and pre-production phase. We try to have an idea of what route to take and what things we want to see on it really early, and build that into the environment design. The route you take down the side of the volcano was built because we knew we wanted to do it two minutes into the game. Similarly, the bit in the jungle – the reveal of the Agua Azul waterfalls with the flamingos – we knew that was going to be in the first few minutes, so we built the tree tunnel where it closes you in and gives you that big reveal of the waterfall.

Because we know we have this showpiece section right at the start, it allows us to start making big technical investments. When we know you’re going down the side of a volcano one minute into the game, we need to have all our tech in place to allow incredible vistas and draw distances from the top of the volcano. We could have built a world without a massive volcano in it that didn’t allow you to see for 15km – it would have been easier! But the decisions made there have a knock-on effect for the rest of the game – the technical investments we make in the initial drive benefit the whole game going forwards.

With that in mind, what drew you to the volcano as the first thing you wanted people to see?

I wanted something that made everyone go, “Wow, I didn’t know Mexico had that”. And that’s why we drop you on a snow-capped volcano, because I think a lot of people, a lot of entertainment media, paints a particular picture of Mexico as a huge, yellow desert. And as we researched Mexico as a location, one of the great things to me as a British developer was that they have ski resorts and huge mountains and deep snow. And obviously volcanoes are just a cool thing to explore anyway. But I wanted the first thing you saw to genuinely surprise you.

With the map blossoming out from that initial experience, is there still flexibility for that opening drive to change during development?

As we enter full production – the last year or so of the project – we start out with weekly reviews, reviewing the entire piece as a group and drawing up pretty long lists of things to polish or change. We usually change the cars quite a bit, trying different cars in different circumstances. It’s right at the start so we need it to be accessible; we need every player to complete it and not have the car spin out or flip. So we need cars that are fun and easy to drive, nice and stable – very challenging when we usually have a high-performance hypercar on the box that we need to get you in at some point!

The weekly reviews become daily, in which the leadership team and I play it and draw up more lists. Not necessarily changes, but we’ll try a different time of day in this section, or what if we make it rain? In an earlier version of Horizon 5, the part in the jungle was during a tropical storm, so you went from a section in a dust storm to a tropical storm: two of our new weather events we’re excited about. It was cool and visceral, but it wasn’t as uplifting as that section is now. Now there’s sun dappling through the trees, the flamingos, the little village – it feels like a beautiful place you can imagine people living in. We were quite far into development before we tried out different things there.

“Because we know we have this showpiece section at the start, it allows us to start making big technical investments”

What’s the relationship between regular track design and the map? Are you finding routes in the map as it is, or finessing the geography to suit racing lines?

If you look at the map, you’ll see clusters of tight-knit roads where there’s a lot of bends together. Places like Mulegé or Playa Azul – if you look at those road networks, they do look a bit like racetracks. Like Silverstone has multiple race configurations, we build our towns to be like that. We first build what we call a circuit cluster, where we design in cool race routes overlapping each other, so you might have an asphalt figure-eight circuit, and then a dirt circuit that cuts through that. Not all those circuits will appear as official races in-game – we build them so as you’re driving around those towns in free roam they have an authored feel, and all the corners flow together in a nice way like a racing circuit would do.

Once we’ve built that, it’s pretty straightforward for us to say ‘that’s the circuit’, but we also design our base roads with driving in mind, which isn’t necessarily true in real life. In a country like Britain or Mexico, a lot of roads are older than cars and aren’t necessarily made with the mechanics of cars in mind. But ours are – there should be a nice corner flow to everything. That allows us to start picking point-to-point routes further into development, but also it means UGC creators have a lot to work with. When our community start to use roads we haven’t used for on-disc races, the base tarmac will be satisfying to drive and corners will flow – you will be able to just put your foot down to the floor and have a great drive.