Playground Games has given us a look at what the upcoming Series 6 of Forza Horizon 5 will bring with it when it lands on Thursday March 31.
As with every Series so far, S6 has a particular theme which is officially known as “Horizon Customs”. While you might think that applies to car modification, it’s actually something a bit wider-reaching.
The monicker applies to two separate things. Firstly, there’s a new section of Horizon Open, called — you guessed it — Custom Racing. This allows players to select a car class and race type and simply drop into rolling multiplayer lobbies, rather than having to wait for their preferred type of racing to show up in Open Racing or Horizon Tour.
That’s actually part of a more significant overhaul for Horizon Open which also sees levels and leaderboards make a return. Each time you race in Horizon Open (except for The Eliminator, which has been moved to a new tab) you gain XP towards a new Horizon Open level as well as your overall level.
Score enough points and you’ll unlock special badges which you can attach to your player profile, visible as you’re driving around Horizon Life, and you’ll be able to compare your level to your friends’ levels in the Leaderboard.
The other meaning of custom refers to player creations in the form of EventLab levels. Across S6, the Festival Playlist will highlight EventLab races with two user-generated levels each week. These races have been a bit hit-and-miss so far on the Playlist, but the S6 events promise to be something special.
There’s a whole load of new props for EventLab too, but more importantly a new function which allows creators to alter the effects of gravity. This lets you set the force to anywhere between 10% of normal and 200%, which could lead to some dramatic effects in your courses.
In addition, FH5 will get its first new Story, Drift Club Mexico. That will see FH4’s Rob returning from Horizon UK and Fortune Island to get drifters sliding about the streets of an entirely new continent.
Complete all six chapters of Drift Club and you’ll win the Ford Mustang Mach-E 1400, one of nine new cars coming to FH5 over the next month: four on the playlist, and four through Car Pass.
The Playlist is somewhat British this month, with the McLaren 650S Spider and 765LT joining the 650-based ATS GT and the Ascari KZ1R. That last machine might not sound too British, but it was built on an industrial estate in Banbury in Oxfordshire — actually in the building that now houses the Haas F1 Team’s European base of operations.
It’ll be the BMW M5 V8-powered Ascari that’s up first, as a Playlist prize for Summer, with the 765LT following in Autumn, the ATS GT in Winter, and finally the 650S Spider in Spring. Each is available for 20 points, as Series 6 keeps the lower points threshold.
The Car Pass cars for the next four weeks start off with the unusual front-wheel drive Oldsmobile Toronado, with the racy McLaren 620R following a week later, then the 2021 MINI Cooper Works JCW, and finally the Porsche 911 Speedster.
There’s also a small list of patch notes for the update, including some tweaks to vehicle visuals and sound (such as louder superchargers, something we can all get behind), and fixes for various small glitches here and there.
The update for S6 is expected to arrive on Tuesday March 29, with the Series itself getting underway on Thursday March 31.
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