As per our in-depth interview with the team at Playground Games we talked about the numerous changes brought to Forza Horizon 5 thanks to the added power of the Xbox Series X and S consoles and modern PC hardware. Turns out, by switching to a main platform with SSD storage -- it helped fundamentally change the design.


With the arrival of the Xbox Series X and S consoles and the shift to faster SSD storage, not to mention SSDs being common in the PC space, Forza Horizon 5 allowed the team to make fundamental changes to the design based purely on how fast things load.

“The Xbox One was our lead platform, it's where most of our players were, so we had to design around the fact that it could take a while to load things,” Mike Brown, Creative Director at Playground Games says. “One example of that is when you arrived at a race we defaulted to keeping you in the car you were already in. And we would then load in cars that were similar to that car.”


“That wasn't necessarily the best experience because we have 500 cars and the game's great when you're jumping between different cars and you're seeing all those different driving experiences,” Mike continues. “But, when you change cars on the base Xbox One it incurs a load. We've always designed around that limitation to not have a player sit through that long load heading into a race.”

“That’s not a problem anymore, [in Forza Horizon 5] we give you a lot more cars earlier in the game than we ever did. Not only that but the game will prompt you to change cars much more often than it ever did. One, because we believe the game is more fun when you're jumping between different cars and having different driving experiences and experiencing that diversity. And two, because we are designing around the SSD and knowing that PC players and everybody on the Xbox Series X and S now has an SSD.”

Our Full Forza Horizon 5 Interview