Forza Horizon 6 Steam Launch Races to Record 273,148 Concurrent Players
As for why Forza Horizon 6 is proving so successful, a few different factors are at play. Among them are simply the location and graphics: unlike past entries, Horizon 6 is based solely in Japan, and uses the custom, ray-tracing powered ForzaTech engine.
An Xbox interview with Design Director Torbern Ellert and Art Director Don Arceta highlights the high amount of care that went into faithfully reproducing iconic parts of Japan, including of course modifying locations for gameplay practicality. It's not a 1:1 recreation, by any means, but what's there is incredibly faithful, just with widened roads and other Forza considerations taken into account. There's also an aspect of cultural respect at play, with Japan's trademark sakura cherry blossom trees being indestructible.
Forza Horizon 6 faithfully recreates nine distinct regions of Japan, including Tateyama Kurobe's towering snow.
Another point in the game's favor is strong PC performance. Even with Ultra settings and ray tracing enabled, an NVIDIA RTX 5070 Ti can still achieve 75 FPS at 1080p without the need for Frame Generation. With Frame Generation enabled (up to 4X MFG on NVIDIA), absurd heights of 257 FPS can be reached on even the laptop version of an NVIDIA RTX 5070 Ti at 1080p, and 205 FPS on the desktop card targeting 4K.
While AMD's GPUs don't have the same Frame Generation benefits, OC3D benchmarking reflects strong performance with those cards as well, though last-gen NVIDIA users and AMD users will need to drop some settings to maintain 60 FPS.
It's a good showing from Xbox Game Studios, hopefully to be joined by Fable in Autumn. For now, Forza Horizon 6 is available for $69.99 USD on Steam, should you wish to join the high-fidelity races across The Land of the Rising Sun.
