“One of the biggest reasons we went with Mexico is because a lot of things we found with the art and the culture really vibed well with what Horizon has already established over the past four games,” Forza Horizon 5 art director Don Arceta tells me. “There are three pillars of Horizon - fun, beauty, and freedom. A lot of that stuff is also reflected in the culture, so there were a lot of parallels between Horizon and Mexico. We didn't want to just adapt Mexican culture and art into Horizon - we wanted them to coexist and be parallel with each other.”
Building a game based on a certain corner of the world is nothing new for the Forza Horizon series, although Mexico is a far cry from the rainy climes of Forza Horizon 4’s Scotland. Despite the challenges in depicting a new region, Playground Games thinks Mexico is a perfect fit for what Horizon is all about.
“We always go to places where there is a car culture, where there is an existing fantasy,” Mike Brown, creative director on Forza Horizon 5 adds. “The Carrera Panamericana is a part of Mexican and American culture. It’s common for Americans to go on holiday to Mexico and road trip down there, there’s already that nested fantasy. When it comes to representing the culture, we look at the world through the perspective of the driver. And so that's why we see things like the mural artwork on the side of buildings and why we don't go inside museums. That's a perspective we look at all of our game environments from.”
Of course, when representing any part of the world, the team has to be especially careful about how accurately and respectfully it portrays the culture. Playground Games says it has taken extra care not to appropriate Mexican stereotypes in Horizon’s depiction of the country, making sure that the Horizon Festival, the event that your player character directs and expands through racing, doesn’t just slap art on the wall and call it a day. Brown describes the festival as an “international body” that is constantly evolving over the course of the series.
“We also decided not to have a dedicated Mexican radio station,” Brown says. “It was a thing we looked into, such as having a Mexican Rock station or a Mexican R&B station, but after talking to people from Mexico we were told you wouldn't really get that. A pop station would be its own station. Mexican radio stations play American music as well. Instead, we took the approach of building up the stations we wanted and the musical genres we wanted and then infusing each of those stations with music from Mexican and Mexican-American.”
Although ensuring the look and sound of Mexico were accurate and respectful was clearly a focus for Playground Games, it didn’t stop there. In order to properly understand the country, the team also dove into its culture. Brown opens up about some of his favourite discoveries and how they tied into the development of Forza Horizon 5, with his answer sounding suspiciously reminiscent of a certain member of the Toretto family.
“I found it really nice to find out how in Mexican folklore, all of the national stories revolve around family and community,” he says. “On some level, no matter how grand the folklore might be, it always comes back to family. When working through the stories we want to tell in the game, and the characters we want to have and what relationships they would have with each other, it threw up these super wholesome, heartwarming characters and all of it derived from this idea that in Mexican culture, everything should really push back to family and community.”
Beyond the new location, one of the key elements of any Forza game is, of course, the cars. Brown says translating vehicles from the real world to a virtual space is a process that has evolved a lot over the years. On the rare occasion that the team makes a mistake, Brown says Playground takes feedback from the community to figure out what went wrong and prevent it from happening again.
One element of Forza Horizon 5’s development that couldn’t be prevented, however, were the issues that arose due to Covid. Playground Games was presented with a new challenge - while the devs visited car manufacturers for hands-on time with each model for previous entries in the series, the pandemic forced them to innovate.
“We have a team of researchers that are real experts in their field that are used to travelling all over the world, getting time with these really exotic cars, taking literally thousands of photos of every switch,” Brown explains. “The thing that evolved this time is they had to do some of that remotely. So now they have to call up Ford, in the case of the Ford Bronco, and speak to an engineer and talk him through every single photo they need. The process had to evolve to handle it remotely and it took a hell of a lot longer to get all the photos they needed than it otherwise would have. That’s been the process for quite a few of the new cars in the game.”
The latest cars aren’t the only new addition to Forza Horizon 5, though. One of the things that’ll be instantly noticeable for Horizon veterans is the inclusion of a voiced protagonist. “I personally have been involved in characters and scripting for the Horizon games for a long time,” Brown says. “It's a real writing challenge to have one character talk to you a lot and the other characters are completely silent. It makes it a real challenge to not have the speaking character become overbearing or just not sound like a real person because there's never that two-way exchange. We made the decision to give the player character a voice - not necessarily to make them into some over-the-top flamboyant character that you could slap on a vinyl figure, but allowing the player character to speak allowed us to bring more humanity out of all our other characters.”
The introduction of a voiced protagonist seems to have been done to allow for better storytelling and scripted moments, something which is best shown off by Forza Horizon’s big set-piece moments - Expeditions. “I'm really really happy with how our new Expeditions have come together,” Brown says. “They’re these really fantastic, cinematic, over-the-top experiences that allow us as developers to show off a lot of our design, art, and technology. Each of them showcases different parts of what Horizon is all about. We as developers are able to just frantically show off the awesome stuff that the engine can do”.