| Ryuu96 said: Imagine if Forza Horizon 6 doesn't make 2024 but is released in 2025 alongside Fable. As long as Fable delivers, Playground would feel on-top of the world, all the awards or nominations they'd get in 2025. They'd be rolling in money as well and they'd be the talk of Xbox studios, Lol. I do hope Horizon 6 is 2024 though but I wouldn't be mad about a 2025 release. |
Horizon 6 should release this year. If you look at the Horizon series development history, Horizon 1, 2, 3, and 4 each got 2 years of development time (Playground even managed to release Horizon 1 just 2 years after their studio opened in 2010). Horizon 5 was the first in the series to receive 3 years of dev time, likely partially due to covid hitting 5 months into it's 2nd year of development and partially due to AAA games taking longer to make than in the past. November 2024 would make 3 years since Horizon 5 released, which 3 years should be enough since Covid wasn't really too much of an issue after Horizon 5 released. It just wouldn't make sense for the first 4 games in the series to get 2 years of development time, the 5th to get 3 years, and then for the 6th to shoot all the way up to 4 years, double the development time of the first 4 games in the series.
It would be in Xbox's best interest to keep the release cycle as short as possible, now that we have multiple sources saying that Xbox is planning to start next-gen early in 2026, if Horizon 6 releases in 2025 and moves the dev cycle to 4 years, the next-gen Xbox wouldn't see it's first Forza Horizon release until 2029, 3+ years after the generation begins. Sticking with 3 years per Horizon game instead would see Horizon 7 releasing on the next gen Xbox in it's 2nd Holiday season in 2027 most likely, 2028 at the longest if they decide to move to 4 years then and make it next-gen only instead of Series S/X and next-gen Xbox cross gen.
However, I do see one possible reason for a delay pushing it to 2025, it is the first current gen only Forza Horizon game and will therefore likely have a big graphical leap, and they may want a longer dev cycle in order to push out both a larger than Horizon 5 map made with higher quality textures and such and more car models than Horizon 5 (which would take time since Turn 10 only has 500 some odd current gen cars done and Horizon 6 released with over 700 cars).
Last edited by shikamaru317 - on 02 January 2024
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