Forza Horizon 3 (XB1/Win10)

You’re in charge of the Horizon Festival. Customize everything, hire and fire your friends, and explore Australia in over 350 of the world’s greatest cars. Make your Horizon the ultimate celebration of cars, music, and freedom of the open road. How you get there is up to you.

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Today on stage at E3 2016 in Los Angeles, we unveiled the next great chapter in the world of Forza – Forza Horizon 3! The upcoming open-world racing game from the team at Playground Games finds players heading to a brand new locale and, for the very first time, taking charge of the Horizon Festival. In this story, we’re going to break down all of the features that we’re showing at E3 this year to prepare you for the launch of Forza Horizon 3 on Xbox One and Windows 10 on September 27! Buckle in, friends, because we’re heading to Australia!

The Land Down Under

In Forza Horizon 3, Australia is the home of the Horizon Festival. As one of the most beautiful and varied countries in the world, Australia makes the perfect setting for Forza Horizon 3 and the team at Playground has translated the Land Down Under into the largest and most diverse open world ever seen in the Forza Horizon series. Just like the real place, the Australia of Forza Horizon 3 is absolutely massive – in fact, it’s is twice as big as Forza Horizon 2’s map. More importantly, Forza Horizon 3’s vision of Australia captures the spectacular natural beauty, the tremendous diversity, and the environmental variety that makes the country one of the most popular tourist destinations in the world.

Australia’s natural beauty abounds in Forza Horizon 3. From exploring bioluminescent caves that look like something out of a science fiction movie, to skipping across the beach and skimming the ocean surf as you speed past the famed “Twelve Apostles” limestone stacks, there are driving experiences in Forza Horizon 3 that players have never seen before in a Horizon game. Forza Horizon 3 is packed full of incredible diversity. There’s the famed dusty Outback that will be a test of any car’s abilities; blasting through the dense and lush rainforests; testing your driving skills on city streets – the unique driving experiences in Forza Horizon 3 seemingly never end.

Your Forza Garage
You’ll explore Australia in more than 350 amazing cars including incredible models never before seen in Forza, like the stunning new Lamborghini Centenario which was just revealed at the Geneva Autoshow in March and our co-cover car, the brand new Ford Raptor. Alongside Forza favorites, including a new selection of Barn Finds, we’re bringing entirely new vehicle types into the game, all inspired by the diverse world you’ll be exploring. Examples include the Ariel Nomad, Class 10 buggies like the Penhall Cholla, and extreme off-roaders like B.J. Baldwin’s Trophy Truck, and many more. Stay tuned for the full list of cars in Forza Horizon 3 later this summer.

Every Man’s Sky
Whether you’re playing on Xbox One or Windows 10, the world of Forza Horizon 3 is a constant visual delight, bringing you surprises around every bend. The team at Playground have gone to extraordinary lengths to bring you the most visually impressive Forza Horizon game ever, using state-of-the-art technology. But perhaps the best example of Playground’s innovation can be found simply by… looking up.

There’s nothing like an Australian sky – big, bold, and beautiful, with dazzling varieties and subtleties in color and cloud formations. The team at Playground wanted to capture those unique Australian skies in all their glory. To do that, they’ve built a custom 12K HDR camera rig to capture the sky in incredibly precise photos – thousands of photos, in fact, creating a 24-hour timelapse video of the real Australian sky, projected onto the skydome in Forza Horizon 3. For players, it means that you’re not just surrounded by the intense natural glory of Australia, you’re also driving under authentic Australian skies.

You’re in Charge
In previous Forza Horizon games, you’ve been a participant in the world’s biggest cars and music festival. In Forza Horizon 3, you’re the boss. That means you’ll be making the big decisions that affect the festival. From choosing when and where to expand the festival sites, all the way down to the music that is played and the events that take place – the decisions are up to you. Your goal is to win fans until your festival is the most popular in the world.

Now, simply casting you in the role of the “head of the Horizon Festival” is one thing. The real fun is found in the power that you will have in Forza Horizon 3, which sets this apart from any previous game in the series. Simply put, you have the power to tailor every experience in the game to your own tastes. That’s done through a brand new feature we call Horizon Blueprint, which lets players create their own gameplay and instantly share it with friends.

Horizon Blueprint
With Blueprint, you can take any of the hundreds of pre-created events in Forza Horizon 3 and customize them to your exact specifications. That can include things like changing the route for a particular event, the time of day and weather conditions, the eligible cars, event restrictions, and more. You can even give an event its own name, which is important because you’ll be able to share your event and see the events that all your friends have created automatically populated in your world. Those events will even have custom posters automatically generated based on the event type.

Should you choose to play any of your friends’ Blueprint events, you’ll earn the same rewards and the same fans that you’d earn for doing the “preset” event built into the game. Between prebuilt events, your own customized events, and those events that your friends dream up, Blueprint provides a virtually limitless stream of events and fun. But it doesn’t stop there.

Remember Bucket Lists – those lists of special challenges that every player should try before leaving the Horizon Festival? Blueprint works with them too. Players can use the Bucket List Blueprint to create brand new challenges, using the same tools that the game designers use. Choose a challenge type, the car you wish to use (including its livery and tuning setup), set the conditions, choose the music, give it a name, and set the difficulty by completing the event yourself. Then you can send that Bucket List Challenge to your friends as a direct challenge to see if they can top your score.

Hire and Fire Your Friends
While Horizon Blueprint is set to quite literally change the game in Forza Horizon 3, it’s only part of the story. Remember, as boss of the Horizon Festival, your goal is to earn fans. That means attracting the best drivers available to join you and help bring more fans to the party. That’s where Drivatars come in. Drivatars have become a huge part of the Forza experience, and being able to drive with and against the Drivatars of your friends and acquaintances is a uniquely Forza experience. With Forza Horizon 3, we’re taking that one step further, giving you the opportunity to hire and fire your friends – or, more precisely, your friends’ Drivatars.

With the new Drivatar Lineup feature, you can hire a friend’s Drivatar just be finding them in the world and beating them in a race. Once you’ve got them onboard, you’ll earn rewards based on their performance in the Horizon Festival. With only a limited amount of slots available, you’ll only want to keep your highest-performing friends in your Festival – and you’ll be informed how things are progressing each time you log on to the game. If your friend isn’t getting the job done, let them go and look for another hot shoe to take their place.

Customize It
With 350 cars to choose from in Forza Horizon 3, players will be have no shortage of options when it comes to finding the car they love. But for those who love to customize, Forza Horizon 3 will be a gold mine. We’ve got a wealth of new visual customizations for a huge number of cars in the game, including new off-road and rally parts, more than 30 new rim styles from manufacturers like Rotiform, Fifteen 52, and ADV.1 and, for the first time, widebody kits from industry leaders like Rocket Bunny and Liberty Walk. And that’s in addition to the full slate of livery and tuning options that Forza fans have come to expect in the series.

Your Festival, Your Soundtrack
Naturally, music plays a huge role in the Horizon Festival and, as the boss, you’ll have say over that as well. For Forza Horizon 3, we want you to drive to the music you love. We started by adding more radio stations – featuring new music styles like hip hop, heavy rock and punk – alongside Horizon favorite stations like Bass Arena and Horizon Pulse. Forza Horizon 3 will feature stations from labels like Hospital Records, Epitaph Records, and Vagrant Records, as well as the latest music from cutting-edge Australian label Future Classic. That’s more radio stations, covering a broader range of music, than ever before.

But that’s not all. In Forza Horizon 3, we can ensure that you are driving to the music that you love with the brand new Groove Radio station. Groove Radio lets players stream their own personal music collection from the cloud – just add your music to your OneDrive, create a playlist in Groove Music on Windows 10, and Horizon 3 will stream that playlist into your game on Xbox One and Windows 10.

A Connected Adventure
Forza Horizon 3 will be the most connected, most social racing game ever. That starts with Forza Horizon 3 being the first Xbox Play Anywhere game in Forza history. When you buy the digital version of Forza Horizon 3, you’ll be able to play the game on both Xbox One and on Windows 10. You can play, save your progress at any time, and pick up on the other platform. Even better, with the power of Xbox Live, you’ll be able to seamlessly play with your friends regardless of whether they are playing on Xbox One or Windows 10.

We’re making the most of that cross-platform play with our four-player campaign co-op. Everything that is in Forza Horizon 3’s solo campaign can be played with up to four players in cooperative mode. Drop in our out at will; everything you’ve earned in a co-op session with friends will carry on with you once you go back to solo play. You never have to play the same content twice if you don’t want to and your time spent in co-op will always be time well spent.

Auction House, Storefronts & More
As we touched on earlier, Forza Horizon 3 will carry on the long tradition of Forza games being a home for creators. From painters and tuners to photographers and more, creativity is a cornerstone of the Forza community. That’s why we’re so excited to be bringing the Auction House and Storefronts features to Forza Horizon 3. With the Auction House, players will be able to buy and sell cars between one another and the Auction House will act as a hub for fans to find the coolest cars, with striking paint jobs and fantastic tunes. The Auction House will feature a new rating system for painters and tuners based on how many downloads, likes, and uses their creations have, so browsers can quickly identify the community’s top creators.

Storefront is the place where players can show off their latest creations – including liveries, tuning setups, photos, and custom vinyl creations. You can easily follow someone whose Storefront creations you like, and you’ll be informed each time they create something new. Best of all, Auction House and Storefront features will work seamlessly across both Xbox One and Windows 10.

Between Xbox Play Anywhere functionality, four-player campaign co-op, Auction House and Storefront, as well as social features like 1000-player Car Clubs, Car Meets, seamless multiplayer with no lobbies, Playground games (including an all-new mode called Flag Rush), Rivals events, Online Free Roam and the new Online Adventure, Forza Horizon 3 is packed with amazing ways to enjoy some of the best cars in the world.

With Forza Horizon 3, we’re building an entirely new and different vision of the Horizon Festival, a place where you’re in charge. For Ultimate Edition owners, early access to Forza Horizon 3 begins on September 23; the rest of the world will head out to the Festival on September 27. Ensure your place at the party by purchasing Forza Horizon 3 now (see our full story on the different versions available for purchase) and also take a look at how we’ll be awarding long-time Forza players in Forza Horizon 3 with our Loyalty Rewards story. Look for more on Forza Horizon 3 here on FM.net and on Forza Hub throughout the summer!

With Forza Horizon 3, Turn 10 and Playground Games affirm the series’ status as the driving game for everyone The new emphasis on off-road options isn’t at the expense of traditional races, thanks to the sheer volume of activities. All the while, Playground Games’ calculated kitchen-sink design philosophy and rich reward system persistently tempt you to explore beyond your comfort zone, whether it’s gifting your first Ariel Nomad buggy or reminding you that stunt races can impress thousands of fans. Enhancing your own brand might feel like a strange motivation to hit the road, but pulling off sick e-drifts on a mile-long series of curves makes the PR work worthwhile.

Forza Horizon 3 is a masterclass in open-world racing and bigger and better than its excellent predecessor across the board. It looks fantastic, the car selection and customisation is second to none, and the size and variety of the sprawling Australian outback is magnificent. Above all, Horizon 3 never loses sight of the fact that tearing through postcard-perfect locations should be fun, and it puts the tools in our hands to keep it that way, always. This is the racing game I’ve been waiting for, and it's officially my favourite thing on four wheels. A fair dinkum triumph, mates.

But right now, we need a racing game like this. We need one that we can recommend to friends who aren't dedicated to the genre, confident that it will dazzle and thrill them as much as any online shooter or action epic might - even as it serves multiple subcultures of racing and car fans. The team at Playground Games get away with it because amid all this added value and feature iteration, they never forget what they came here to do: put you on the open road, amid beautiful scenery, and allow you to let rip behind the wheel of something gorgeous or growling, obscure, iconic or insane. They came here to plant that big, fat smile on your face. Forza Horizon 3 is, quite simply, the best racing game around.

FORZA 3 HORIZON IS AS BEAUTIFUL AS IT IS ENGAGING

Forza Horizon 3 is as much a driving game as a racing game. Through a superbly realized version of Australia as well as a wide variety of terrain, cars and challenges, this free-roaming car simulation offers a valuable playbox. But it also managed to muster "cor blimey" moments that made me feel a whooping rush of speed and liberation.

My expectations for Forza Horizon 3 have been quite high over the past few months, but after hours and hours of gameplay, extensively delving into each gameplay feature, it’s safe to say that Playground Games has managed to shatter every single one of them. Providing a deep, fun and addictive gameplay experience, Forza Horizon 3 is one of the best racing games of the generation.

That's kind of where Forza Horizon is at right now: It's a series that's consistently enjoyable on an every-other-year cycle. Playground Games' take on Australia falls right in line. It's not quite the leap that the franchise made from the original Horizon to Horizon 2, but it's not on cruise control, either. There's enough variation here -- from the feel of cars to the game modes to the radio stations -- that this is another excellent installment in an always-excellent series. And, since variation is a key reason for Horizon 3's success, well, Australia seems like it's probably the most perfectly appropriate setting.

It's released on September 27th for both Xbox One and Windows 10 PCs. It's an 'Xbox Play Anywhere' title, which means a single purchase price gets you both versions, with progress and achievements shared across the two. It also supports cross-platform play in its new, four-player campaign co-op mode.

Developer Playground Games' Ralph Fulton introduced an impressive demo of this mode, with Xbox One and Xbox One S players joining two Windows 10 PC players for a race. Check out the demo in the video below. When you accept an invite to play, your game world - including time of day, weather, traffic and Drivatar opposition - synchronises instantly and seamlessly with the host players. That's the promise, anyway.

Fulton confirmed all the other details from the earlier leak: Horizon 3 will feature the largest map and car roster of the series to date, and its cover star will be the outlandish Lamborghini Centenario.

As reported, the game is set in Australia, and the environments on show included a desert of rolling sand dunes, sweeping coast roads, cliffside beaches, and thick jungle. Fulton promised new vehicle types, and along with the expected muscle and hypercars we saw some extreme off-roaders: dune buggies and rally-raid trucks.

Garth wrote:One of the highlights of the MS conference here, looks amazing.

AXL wrote:I also got a definite Motorstorm vibe from this. I wonder if any of the Evo people are at Playground Games?

Buffalo wrote:

AXL wrote:I also got a definite Motorstorm vibe from this. I wonder if any of the Evo people are at Playground Games?

There are...