Forza Horizon 6 developer Playground Games has finally addressed its player community after months of constructive feedback about the game has been met with nothing but radio silence from the renowned British studio.
“Hey Horizon Community,” the post on the studio’s social channels begins, “We’re reading all your comments about Forza Horizon 6, and we realize that we haven’t been talking with you as much as we could be. While we continue to deliver regular content and fixes into the game, we want you to know we hear your feedback about our post-launch updates and we’re looking into future changes to both in-game content and the ways we communicate with you. Stay tuned!”
Forza Horizon 6 got rave reviews upon its release – including a 10 out of 10 from IGN – but Playground’s lack of communication with its players has frustrated the community. As detailed in videos from Forza Horizon content creators STEVIO2175, AR12Gaming, HokiHoshi, and Ericship 111, players are upset at the live service game’s complete absence of communication from Playground as well as some features from previous Forza games that are missing from the newest Horizon.
“It just feels like the community engagement between the developers and us is just nonexistent,” STEVIO2175 said in his excellent and thorough 19-minute video on the subject from late August. Players are feeling like they have to spend their time in the Horizon Festival playlists in order to get access to the new cars – many of which are recycled from previous Horizon games – rather than play in whatever modes and ways they want.
Playground’s Forza Monthly show that directly interfaces with the community has also been absent, leading some in the Forza space to wonder if it’s a side effect of new Xbox CEO Asha Sharma’s big “reset” and subsequent layoffs. The lack of in-game voice chat in Horizon 6 is also on the community’s list of constructive criticisms – a particularly curious omission from FH6 given that the previous entry in the Forza series, 2023’s Forza Motorsport, has voice chat to this day. “Voice chat alone could make FH6 Japan ten times better,” STEVIO2175 said. “But the thing that bothers me most at the end of the day,” he added, “is that the devs have not responded at all. No communication, no public responses, nothing.”
More to the point, STEVIO2175 said he believes that most players don’t feel like this game has replayability past single player. “Until the socialization and community features get added, if they ever do, player interest is going to continue to drop,” STEVIO2175 said. “And I hope they figure this all out before PS5 hopefully still gets this game.”
On that note, Microsoft and Playground still have not announced a release date for the PlayStation 5 version of Forza Horizon 6 despite it being October now and the last the companies said, it’d ship on PS5 this year. That looks increasingly unlikely by the day, but perhaps it’s for the best if Playground needs to iron out all of its communication and content roadmap criticisms from the community before launching on another platform.
A second team at Playground is also in the stretch run of development on the Fable reboot, which is due to be released on Xbox, PC, and PS5 on February 23, 2027. It’s fair to wonder if Fable has been pulling real sprint to the finish line. We finally got to play Fable at Gamescom in August and were quite pleased by the combat
Ryan McCaffrey is IGN’s executive editor of previews and host of IGN’s weekly Xbox show,Podcast Unlocked, and a co-host ofNext-Gen Console Watch. He’s a North Jersey guy, so it’s “Taylor ham,” not “pork roll.” Debate it with him on Twitter at@DMC_Ryan.
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