The latest Forza Horizon Let’s Go stream has revealed the contents for the upcoming Forza Horizon 5 Series 40 update, due to arrive on consoles (and PC) early next week.
Series 40, which will get underway on Thursday November 7, will be the first of FH5’s fourth year, with the third anniversary of the title coming up on November 5 — at least for players with the early access afforded by buying the premium edition.
As usual we got a little teaser from PG last month, which revealed only the name — Horizon Track Day — so the stream is our first look at the upcoming changes.
Forza Horizon 5 Series 40: Stadium Oval & World Changes
The Horizon Stadium is getting another makeover, this time bringing back something we’ve seen before: the Oval.
This short-course oval will return as a permanent addition across the four weeks of the Series again, just as it did in Series 20 back in April 2023. You can visit it at any time for some high-speed oval action — alongside the track’s regular race start-point.
During the Summer season the Oval will be a Playlist event location as you’ll need to find and smash ten Helmet Pinatas for the Collectibles event, as this prop makes its own return.
Probably the bigger change to the game world comes by way of a suite of themed EventLab props and settings. These are all geared around the Halo series, from fellow Microsoft family member Halo Studios.
In total there’s 71 new props, directly from Halo’s map-making Forge mode, allowing you to transform Mexico into a world from the 26th Century.
There’s a variety of barricades, totem rings, Pelican dropships, crates, shields, and health packs for you to play around with. If that wasn’t quite enough you can also change the sky to Halo day and night options, featuring the eponymous Halo stretching out above you.
Halo music will also be made available, with three tracks from the original soundtrack appearing in the Horizon XS and Radio Eterna channels.
Forza Horizon 5 Series 40: New Free Cars
We hope you like the 2023 Porsche 911, because although there are four new vehicles available this series, they’re all variants of this platform.
To be fair, there is quite a bit of variety as the update brings a racing model, an off-road model, a track toy, and a very high performance road car, but if the 911 does little for you then you’re not going to be all that enthused.
Three of the four are available in the usual way, appearing as season rewards for scoring 20 points (and 40pt now looks set to be the permanent preserve of the new Horizon Backstage Pass), but you’ll need to jump through some specific hoops for the last of them.
The rewards begin with the series’ cover car, the naturally aspirated GT3 RS, before moving onto the all-wheel drive 911 Dakar — which, curiously, is branded as “Rallye” here. After that it’s the GT3 R race car and the all-new rewards round out with the Turbo S which you’ll have to earn through completing a special seasonal championship.
Once again we’re not seeing any new vehicles as Series rewards and there’s no further additional car pack DLC. We’re expecting this pattern to continue through future series though it’s not clear how long it will continue as there’s more than a few hints now that FH5’s monthly support is on course to be phased out.
Forza Horizon Series 40: Other Changes
Aside from a handful of bugfixes, that’s pretty much it for Series 40, but there is one significant other change coming to the Let’s Go streams.
With three years of the preview streams under its belt, PG has decided to “put a pause” on them for the foreseeable future. That could very well mean we’ve now seen the last Let’s Go, and while there’s still some monthly content updates planned it’s another hint that FH5 is reaching the end of its particular road.
It took FH4 around a year to be succeeded once the Horizon Backstage feature was added, and new cars stopped coming around four months before that. Given the shift to smaller content updates over the past few months and Horizon Backstage being added in October, we were already suspecting that the end was nigh. The decision to end the live streams only adds to that, and makes us wonder how long it’ll be until we hear about Forza Horizon 6…
However, we’re likely to still have a few months of updates (and recycled playlists thereafter), starting with the Horizon Holiday Mixup which is due to begin on December 5th, with new cars, new clothing, new stadium decorations, and a fresh Showcase Remix.
As for Series 40, the update is due to go live around 1800 UTC on Monday November 4, with the Playlist commencing at 1430 UTC on Thursday November 7.
See more articles on Forza Horizon 5 Game Updates.
