Forza Horizon 5 adds a new dimension to Seasons

The rotating seasons which debuted in Forza Horizon 4 will return in the sequel Forza Horizon 5 with an added twist of more varied weather to deal with. 

Talking to IGN, creative director Mike Brown revealed that to make Forza Horizon 5 “the biggest Horizon ever,” they didn’t just want to just follow the formula, saying there’s no point if you’re just “expanding it and offering more of the same.”

With this philosophy, Playground Games wanted to not just offer the biggest, and what looks like one of the most varied maps to date, but also make key improvements to the game such as the changes to the weather and seasons. 

Unlike past games, Forza Horizon 5’s Mexico will be big enough, and technologically advanced enough, to support different weather conditions across different parts of the map, so it won’t just be raining everywhere anymore. 

“Mexico has, I would say, a more interesting seasonality compared to the UK,” Brown told IGN. “Mexico, being a country that has huge elevation changes and obviously quite a large country, has different seasonality in different regions, which we’ve tried to recreate as accurately as possible.”

“It creates great scenarios where you can have snow on top of the volcano and you can go up there and you can even get blizzards up there, while at the exact same time down on the coast it can be blazing hot,” Brown continued. 

There will still be the four seasons rotating in and out regularly, but according to Brown “it affects the different biomes in different ways. You get dust storms in the dry season, you get tropical storms in storm season.”

The massive weather events Brown talks about should give some interesting depth to Forza Horizon 5’s diverse weather, but hopefully, they won’t interfere with or dominate racing gameplay all too much. 

Forza Horizon 5 was revealed at the Xbox & Bethesda Games Showcase with a surprise release date of November 9th 2021, where it will be available on PC, Cloud, and Xbox consoles.