As expected, Playground Games will be showing a live stream from 1800 UTC today, January 31, detailing all the latest developments in Forza Horizon 5.
It’ll be the first time we’ve seen Mike Brown, creative director at PG, and the team since before Christmas, when the Let’s Go stream revealed all that was coming from Series 2 and Series 3 during the winter break.
After eight weeks away from the cameras, the new Let’s Go stream will, first and foremost, deal with what’s coming up when Series 4 gets underway this coming Thursday, February 3.
We already know quite a great deal about the contents of S4, thanks to some official announcements on the Forza Motorsport China site. That comes as less of a surprise given that the nature of the Series has a Chinese focus, coinciding with the Chinese New Year (or lunar new year) on Tuesday, February 1.
For example, there’ll be four new cars coming, with the debut of an all-Chinese brand in the Forza series and a pair of cars from a brand now Chinese-owned.
NIO will become the first Chinese marque represented in any Forza game when the EP9 electric hypercar appears during the first season in Series 4. The car once held the EV record at the Nurburgring — albeit on slick tires — so should provide interesting competition to the likes of the Rimac C_Two.
That’ll be followed in the Autumn season by the more day-to-day Wuling Hongguang S, a mini-MPV which is one of the country’s best-selling cars ever — and that’s quite a lot of cars in a country of over a billion people.
Two new MGs will come to the existing stable of cars from the brand, but they represent quite different areas of the company’s ownership. There’ll be the X Power SV, a V8 sports car that hastened MG’s downfall, and the MG3 hatchback which was partly responsible for its rebirth under Chinese ownership.
In addition to the four cars above, we’ll also see two new Porsche models, an updated version of the Volkswagen Golf R, and the Mazda 323 GT-R homologation hatchback — although you will need the Car Pass in order to sample the VW, Mazda, X Power SV, and the 2010 Porsche 911 Sport Classic.
The stream should also make clear what the main Series 4 event, the Horizon World Cup, is all about. This too was revealed by the Forza Motorsport China official site, and appears as though it will feature a handful of appropriately balanced vehicles from France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK, and the USA, with players earning points for their chosen nation through Playlist activities.
We’ve also heard that the Playlist itself will be reworked in response to community input, and the Series 4 update is also set to introduce re-editable EventLab/Blueprint events. That will allow players to come back to their saved custom events — or fix or improve them — rather than requiring everything to be done in one sitting.
In addition to the full S4 update, we’re likely to learn more about bugfixes and other tweaks which the team has been working on since returning from its winter break. There’s also been a suggestion from the official Forza Support channel that PG is investigating the ability to use external editing software to create vehicle liveries, although it’s not clear if this will be part of the Series 4 broadcast or not.
Players looking for information on the next series of Forza Horizon 4, Series 45, can tune into the earlier Forza Monthly show. This gets underway at 1700 UTC, also on January 31.
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