‘Forza Horizon 5’ creative director interview: capturing the true spirit of Mexico

Just before the release of 'Forza Horizon 5' next week, we had a chat with the game's creative director Mike Brown.

Just in time for Forza Horizon 5’s release next week, we had the opportunity to chat with creative director Mike Brown, who shared some interesting comments about the upcoming racing game. 

Forza Horizon 5 is set in a lush open-world Mexico, moving away from the previous game’s Britain and doubling down on seasonal extreme weather conditions. As we’ve mentioned in our review, the Xbox and PC racer perfects the series’ formula, offering fast-paced gameplay, an inspired and varied setting, and impressive next-gen graphics.

Our wide-ranging interview covers all sorts of Playground Games-related topics, touching upon Mexican spirit and culture, technical challenges and achievements, what could possibly be next for the Forza Horizon franchise and connections to Fable’s much-anticipated reboot.

This interview has been edited for clarity.

FTW: One thing I was wondering – correct me if I’m wrong, this is first job as creative director?

Mike Brown:  Err, yes. First full game. I mean, I would claim Fortune Island and LEGO Speed Champions DLCs as well (laughs). But this is the first full title as creative director. 

With this being your first full game as creative director, and knowing that often job roles’ meaning changes from studio to studio, can you explain what your work on Forza Horizon 5 consisted of? 

Yeah, so, the creative director effectively leads the development of the project. Any creative decision making and ultimately most decision making within game development, and being creative on some level, funnels through me. I defined a vision for the game that we’re trying to achieve, and then my job is to gather people around that vision – making people believe in it, and help all the team to push towards that across the three years of development, to achieve our goals, that vision, and to hopefully produce a fantastic game at the end of that.

Final non Forza Horizon 5-related question now, I promise – it’s about Fable, of course, I have to do that. Sorry. Are you going to use some of the tech on Forza Horizon 5’s lush open world in your upcoming Fable game? Do they have some design idea or philosophy in common which you can talk about?

So, I’m not really able to talk about Fable too much. I’ll just say that, at Playground Games, we’re one big studio, we talk to each other a lot, we share a lot of really important creative and development philosophies.

Speaking of Forza Horizon 5, how different was the creation process moving from the UK to Mexico, such different places?

As a British game developer, it was a lot more challenging having to recreate Mexico rather than having to recreate Britain. I think, when you’re recreating these big open worlds and then setting them in a facsimile of real-life locations, you do kind of have a responsibility to the people who live in that place to represent it in a way that’s real and authentic. And in the UK, some of that just happened automatically as UK devs, even minor things like road markings, street signs, hallmarks, roundabouts – all feel like they do in the UK. And that just happens naturally when you are a UK dev making that. When you’re making Mexico, all that stuff is slightly different or behaves in a slightly different way. We could just make it kind of similar to Britain, but the problem with that is, when a Mexican player plays it, it’s natural and obvious they would think “they didn’t do any research, they didn’t care.” And that’s talking about really basic stuff like street signs, you don’t want to do that for architecture, history, culture, even just the way plant life grows along the roadside. All this stuff, people that are from a location are just naturally aware of it and, if we get it wrong, then they’ll just feel the game is a cheap copy of their country rather than the authentic representation that we strive for.

Geographically, the game map is so diverse that, at times, you don’t even feel like you’re in Mexico, at least based on the idea of Mexico we have outside of that country. How did you make sure that such a degree of variety didn’t come at the cost of not being faithful to what Mexico really is?

As we researched potential locations, one of the things that made us fall in love with Mexico is how much it surprised us, how many things it has that we weren’t expecting. I guess, like you, most of the things I’ve seen of Mexico are from films and TV, which focus on a particular area of Mexico, usually quite close to the U.S. border, or you have a picture of holiday Mexico that’s like a Caribbean coast with beautiful tropical beaches. But Mexico is one of the largest countries in the world and, when we started to research, we asked ourselves what are their natural parks like? What are their mountains like? What else is there? In our initial research phase, we were just blown away. I remember when – this is the very, very first level of research – we went to the Mexican tourist board website, and there they’re like “set your next adventure in Mexico”. And then it starts to list and show all these amazing things you can see in Mexico. And that’s just how Mexico is trying to sell itself to the world, probably conscious that, like you said, people have a view of Mexico which is really kind of narrow versus what the country really offers. 

I’ve seen that happen to Italy, as well – a country that’s so big and so diverse, from the outside you only get to know a tiny part of that, usually the southern. Speaking of that, which area of Mexico would you recommend anyone to visit in the game? I’ve fallen in love with the deserts…

I do love the deserts, I think what’s great about them, especially coming from Horizon 4, is there’s just nothing like that in Britain. They just allow for such foot to the floor, super high-speed driving, so I can see why you’d say the deserts. My personal favorite, though, is the canyon. I just think that the road that snakes through the canyon is one of the best driving roads that we’ve ever had, and it’s a really beautiful area. The soundscape is fantastic as well. Even if I’ve seen it a hundred times, every time the train comes passing, I drive along – it just feels so engaging and exciting trying to race the train, even if you’re not in the showcase event. I still find myself having to race it anyway [laughs].

Based on your research and how you’ve grown attached to the project after all these years, what’s the true spirit of Mexico and how did you make sure you depicted that in the game?

That’s a great question. So, this isn’t necessarily obvious but, when we spoke to Mexicans – we worked with a Mexican writer, a Mexican culture consultant, and Mexican actors as well – one of the things that you keep just learning in every area of the game is how all Mexicans love their stories, their folklore, and culture. All point back to the idea of family and home. And those two phrases – they’re obviously very comfy in their hearts, but they mean a lot of things as well. Home, it can be a house but I think, more than that, it’s the place where you’re from, the place where your family is from, and a place where you have an attachment to. And, as you speak to Mexicans, they talk about their street as home, their state as home, their country as home, they feel a connection to all of that. And, as I was meeting and talking to the many different Mexicans making this game, it’s that connection to home and then the follow up of – they want to show it to you, they want you to see that home, they want to bring you in that home, they’re really proud of it, they love it. And they just want to bring you in that family and share it with you – it’s just this. This recurrent theme that happens all across Mexican culture. Every Mexican story eventually pulls back to those feelings of home and family. These are the things that underpin so much of it, especially the narrative in the game, the way the characters just talk to you and the way they’re just so excited that you as a player are visiting Mexico and they get to share that home with you. 

You said there’s this feeling of home, of being there with Mexico. Was it hard to replicate that with the challenging times we’re in, with the pandemic and all?

It wasn’t ideal. I do think it’s always important – when we talk about Covid, we have to remember that Covid is affecting the world in lots of really, really awful ways, sometimes in the worst possible ways. And I don’t want to make it out as though making it a little bit harder to make a video game is comparable to that. I guess, in terms of our ability to research Mexico, we were lucky that we started working on this title at the very end of 2018, so we had all 2019 where we were able to have research trips in Mexico, spend a lot of time in Mexico, have environment, concept, lighting, audio teams out there, grabbing all the reference that we wanted in order to help build the world. It wasn’t really the plan, but a thing that happened through that is – when we go to a town or an area of any of the countries that we’ve researched, we try and find local photographers, because local photographers are really reliable and know all the beautiful places in that local area: they shoot them just because it’s their job or they’re hobbyist photographers. And so, we meet all these people and say, hey, can you show us all the beautiful areas to get the best pictures around here? And when we have a photographer, we kind of end up using them more as a tour guide, and they show us the areas and the awesome things there. This time around, when we got to know we wouldn’t be able to travel to Mexico, we had a list of contacts who’re on the ground in Mexico and knew how to use the camera, who we could say, hey, we really need some reference of this building, this side, this pyramid… In one case, a volcano – we sent someone on a volcano for us, very good friends (laughs). So, obviously, it would’ve been easier without a pandemic, but I think our timing was such that we were able to do quite all our research before that happened and making a good contact list allowed us to carry on the research afterward. 

Car culture is an important piece of the puzzle when it comes to Forza Horizon exploring a specific nation, but you have so many cars in the game that it might feel like Mexico is just in the background, for that matter. So which were the steps you made sure to take for that in the game? I’ll just mention the “Vocho”, which was like a way to make people breathe the Mexican car culture. 

Yeah, so, I think you’ve called out one of the best ones – the Vocho story. It’s a little strange, because the Beetle is obviously a German car, but it’s culturally very Mexican. It’s really the heart of so many Mexican stories when people get to talk about their cars. Our Mexican writer wrote some of the Spanish language content in the game and also wrote a lot of  the dialogue from Mexican characters when speaking in English – he had a Vocho as his first car, and so there is a lot of his own story in there. I think one of the other Horizon Stories which he also wrote, and I think it’s a story full of heart, history and culture, is the Lucha de Carretas, which is Mexican wrestling but instead of wrestling in the ring, they’re wrestling in cars. Even that one brings with it some of the classic stories of Mexican wrestling, and then plays them out… in cars! Which sounds quite ridiculous, but it’s often how we approach these things – how do you tell this particular story where everybody is in a car, how do you solve this particular narrative problem when everybody is in a car? I think that, with the general story that underpins the campaign, when Ramiro brings you on an expedition to explore Mexico, a lot of that is culturally very modern Mexican, because it comes out of the idea of how Mexicans just look to share their country with the world. They’re so proud of it, so excited that you’d visit and they get the opportunity to show you around. And I think that is a pitch we took very early when we started looking into Mexico and it’s something we wanted to represent in the game. And that became those expeditions where Ramiro is taking you around the world and showing you all the spectacular things that Mexico has to offer. 

You mentioned the Lucha mission, and there are situations in the game, like when a board is placed on a roof, where you almost feel like you’d want to get out of the car and grab it [we both laugh]. With such an extensive avatar creation tool in place, have you ever considered or would you consider that in the future – to get out of the car?

I don’t want to speak about our future plans too much. Maybe. I do think that on a design level you’d need a bit more than a board on a roof to justify getting out of the car, I think you’d need a very strong suite of reasons as to why I need to get out of the car. Sadly, no, I don’t think it’s in the near future. 

And, speaking of the future, any place you’d like to visit for a future game?

Err, we have a policy against discussing that, unfortunately. [laughs] 

I’d suggest Southern Italy, after you briefly touched upon that country in Forza Horizon 2… But the community has been requesting Japan for a while now.

I knew you’d mention it. 

Looking at the campaign, it felt progression was streamlined compared to Forza Horizon 4. Was that on purpose to allow people to have more fun in easier ways throughout the game, maybe?

Yeah, you’ve probably noticed that you unlock content much faster than you complete it. We did that on purpose so that you always have a load of choices, whatever you’re going to do. First of all, we kind of like that, when you’re driving towards an activity, some other things distract you and take your attention away. But, more than that, we always want players to be faced with multiple different choices about what they can do next and never feel like, oh God, I have to spend the next 30 minutes on something I don’t really like. We kind of acknowledge that not every player is going to like every single [activity] in the game, so we want players – as individuals who have different likes – to have different contents, put aside things that are not their bag and focus on the things they do enjoy. I think our campaign this time is much more – you said “streamlined,” I think it’s more compelling as it gives you more goals and more recognition for the things that you’ve done, and drops those big bits with showcase events, expeditions, Horizon Stories on you, in a way that is kind of predictable. So you know that if you play for the next 45 minutes or one hour, then you’ll get your next chapter unlocked or you’ll get to play an expedition or showcase event and you’ll have this spectacular moment that will put a smile on your face. 

This is your first native Forza Horizon Xbox Series X and S game, after you had a next-gen upgrade on Forza Horizon 4. Is there anything that these two powerful platforms have allowed you to achieve that you couldn’t in the past? I have an idea about that – with all this content, thanks to the SSD and the Velocity Architecture, getting in and out of an activity is so fast that you go through lots of them in a few minutes, even races or boards that I love so much. It’s so fast. So rewarding, every time.

Yeah, the SSD is really a great addition, I think. I don’t know if you’ve played the Xbox One version yet, but as an experience, that’s the thing that impacts you the most. Obviously, the graphics are fantastic on the Series X and there are times where it just looks genuinely breathtaking. And it’s also the technology we’ve been able to unleash, visually, to just feel that frame and get lost into it. But I think you’re right, the SSD and the speed allows you to jump into an activity and, more specifically, to jump between cars is the thing that keeps engaging, keeps you playing and keeps you having fun because you just never have that downtime. You’ve probably noticed that we unlock cars quite a bit quicker in this game than we have in previous games, and part of that is because we know – and we can tell from the way the players play the game – players will play for longer and have more fun if they get to experience lots of different cars. We have a massive car list, over 500 cars, and each of them has a really great reason to be in the game – there are so many different experiences through that. And the more we can get you into different cars, the more you just keep feeling engaged, feel like you’re feeling and playing new things. That’s a challenge on last-gen, because every time you change a car, we have to load back the car, we have to load back the other cars that get to be on the grid. You’ll sit through a loading screen. Whereas now, it’s a couple of seconds to load your new car, plus a full grid of cars for you to race against. You don’t really notice that it’s happening. And that, as a matter of fact, just keeps you engaged. Over the course of one hour, two hours, the game gets you into so many different vehicles and experiences that you’re just constantly feeling like you’re seeing and playing and driving new things.

And what’s your favorite car, among the new ones? One you’d recommend people to play?

The Lotus Evija is really, really fun. It’s electric, you can stick the race slicks on it, you can go from 0 to 290 in about 18 seconds. And it’s just a ridiculous car [laughs]. With the fact it’s electric, it always makes me laugh because it doesn’t sound fast. It sounds like an electric motor, and in the world it just goes like whoosh-whoosh-whoosh. So, yeah, that’s one I’ve really enjoyed, just because as a car it almost shouldn’t exist, a car shouldn’t be that fast, that quick. I think it’s 0 to 200 in 9 seconds, it’s – I’ve owned cars that didn’t go 0 to 60 in 9 seconds [laughs]. 

So, 30 or 60 frames per second?

First of all, it’s great the game has a choice, and we’re very proud with the way the game looks both on 30 and 60 – I think both versions look fantastic. The reason that we default 30 is 1) we think it offers a great experience, and 2) by defaulting to 30, it allows us to bring forward technologies that you wouldn’t be able to have at 60, and maybe some people would rather have higher frame rates than those high fidelity shadows, the soft shadows you get from distant objects, and the really high-quality lighting we’re able to achieve at 30 frames per second. But I think at that frame rate we get a really beautiful final frame, and there’s technology in there that comes into our engine that allows us to scale up. On PC, you can benefit from that technology whatever frame rate you want, if you’ve invested in it (laughs). I think there’s technology in there we wouldn’t go after if we were 60 frames per second default. And that’s a benefit for everyone, as that technology scales across all the platforms.

I was actually a bit surprised when you announced you were going to have 30fps at all. I thought you were transitioning away from that.

Yeah, I would just say, when we’ve offered the option in the past, not as many people picked 60 frames per second as you’d think. I won’t give you the figures, but it’s surprising. 

Disappointing.

[Laughs] The game looks great at 60, it’s 4K as well, so you don’t have to sacrifice resolution – it’s just some lighting technology, some shadow stuff that we disabled. I think, once you’re driving at that speed at 60, you can have a really great time even without those high-quality shadows. 

Yeah, someone said this is the first native 4K game in both performance and graphics mode.

Actually, we didn’t know we were the first – I think Digital Foundry said that. Honestly, we play with all those different options to try and determine what gives the best final frame. And resolution is really important for the image quality, because you risk having a bad job with aliasing, and all your assets could look blurrier. And we just felt, when you’re turning things on and off to make sure you can hold that resolution and that frame rate, we found the 4K image at 60 frames per second, with some of the new shadow and lighting technology turned down, that was what gave us the best image quality. I think you’re referencing that Digital Foundry piece, and they felt we made the right calls there and that gave us a really great final image.

It’s a tremendous achievement. One final question: you’re day one on Xbox Game Pass, and you’re going to be the biggest game in the subscription – at least up until Halo Infinite releases in December… 

[laughs] At least… ? 

Your thoughts about Xbox Game Pass, and being there day one?

Game Pass opens up a huge number of players, and one of the great things about Game Pass we realized through Horizon 4 is that there is a viral sharing back to Game Pass games. One person who’s playing a game like Horizon and then we have multiplayer, cooperative content, they can say to their friends, hey, there’s this game, it has these co-op things we could do together. And, because it’s in Game Pass, if that friend has Game Pass, they already own the game so there’s no friction whatsoever. Or, they don’t have Game Pass but they’re more willing to pay $60 for the game, they can get a trial with Game Pass at $1 for a full month. The barrier to entry is so low for your friends to come and get to play with you. This way, we’re able to get more than one person to play and bring their friends along with them. The other great thing as well about Game Pass is we stay in Game Pass. We never have to worry about being traded in or passed on to a friend, we’re always there. So, a player sees we’ve added a new car to the game that they want to drive, and they’ll just jump back to the game. Yeah, Game Pass is, as a developer, fantastic. I don’t want to say it makes our lives easier, because it’s not necessarily true. But there are realities to being a Game Pass game which are really well suited to the kind of game that we are.

And has being there right on day one changed your approach to its live service, seasons, game design, etc.?

Obviously, our objective is to keep people playing. The longer we can keep people in the game, the better it is for us. Game Pass just makes that a little bit easier. And, you’re right, the seasons, the Festival playlist, the regular new cars – all of that is geared towards keeping people in the game, keeping people happy, and giving them new things to see and to do. We’ve added new cars every single month on Horizon 4, and we’ll continue to do the same and more with Horizon 5.

Forza Horizon 5 is releasing on Nov. 9 for Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S and PC.

Written by Paolo Sirio on behalf of GLHF.