Forza Horizon 5’s new features enable anyone to be a creator

If you watched the debut trailers during the Forza Horizon 5 reveal, and paid attention to the later blogs, you start to piece together countless improvements Playground Games has made in the three years since the incredible Forza Horizon 4. Forza Horizon 5 wants to give players more creative freedom, more ways to customize their cars and characters, and more ways for people to, well, play. Highlights we’ve found so far include:

• EventLab. For the first time ever, Forza Horizon has a full-blown level editor. This isn’t like the event editor from Forza Horizon 4, which lets you design custom races using pre-existing tracks. No, this is a “create-whatever-you-want” and “you-control-the-entire-event” level editor, which showcased some incredible-looking footage in Forza Horizon 5’s debut gameplay trailer. It looks like the game will give you a wide assortment of building pieces, options, and tools to create literally anything you could imagine, meaning Forza Horizon 5 just gained infinite events with the help of its already-talented community.
• Updated UI. Forza Horizon’s UI for settings and options has remained mostly the same for several years now, but Playground Games is apparently changing that with Forza Horizon 5. Systems like tuning and painting are being completely overhauled, to make everything you do in Forza Horizon 5 easier and more efficient.
• New car customization options. Something I’ve been asking for from Forza Horizon games for ages is improved car customization options, which haven’t received a noticeable update since Forza Horizon 3. While we haven’t seen it in action, Playground Games has already promised a ton of new customization options, like over 100 new rims, new visual options, and thousands of performance upgrades. Hopefully, this means players will have more control than ever over how their car looks and drives.
• New character customization options. The focus of Forza Horizon games is cars, of course, but recent entries have placed increasing importance on your character as well, especially as they enter the spotlight more in Horizon Stories. Forza Horizon 5 gives you much more control over your character, with more diverse options, new customization options, prosthetic limb options, and even the ability to alter pronouns, voices, and more.
• New accessibility options. I’ve already written about how Xbox is a leader in gaming accessibility, and Microsoft recently celebrated Global Accessibility Awareness Day. While Playground Games isn’t sharing any details right now, they’ve already promised that Forza Horizon 5 will be its most accessible game yet, and I can’t wait to see how they’ve further improved accessibility in what will likely be one of the best racing games out right now.

When you put all of this together, it’s already blatantly clear that Playground Games wants Forza Horizon 5 to truly feel like an open-world car sandbox, where players can do whatever they want and look however they desire. With improved online multiplayer capabilities to power all of this, Forza Horizon 5 isn’t just the biggest Forza Horizon game yet, it’s also most accessible and personal, with limitless potential backed by a community consistently more creative than I am. I can’t wait to jump into Forza Horizon 5.

Forza Horizon 5 launches on Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, Xbox One, PC, and Xbox Cloud Gaming on November 9, 2021. The game will also be available on Xbox Game Pass day one. If you’re interested in what Forza Horizon 5 has to offer, you can preorder the game now (and gain four days early access with the Premium Edition). With all these new additions, it seems certain Forza Horizon 5 will become one of the best Xbox racing games around.