http://www.ign.com/articles/2014/06/03/a-sunday-drive-with-forza-horizon-2-ign-first
On Lighting:
“Light is a really big deal for us for this game, and the reference points we’ve chosen for this game are famous for their quality of light,” says art director Ben Penrose. “So on this game we didn’t want to leave anything to chance. We didn’t want to give you an impression of what the places are like that we visited and have tried to reproduce. We wanted to model it as accurately as possible and have all that stuff work with the physically based set-up that we’ve got from Forza 5.”
“So what we’ve settled on is a physically accurate model of Earth’s atmosphere,” Penrose grins.
“With Horizon we pushed dynamic lights with the headlights,” says Penrose. “Now every single light in a scene is dynamic, which is only something we’ve been able to achieve with the switch to a next-gen platform.
Removing invisible walls:
But Playground wants to take that further, so the team has torn down the barriers that largely kept us from leaving the road in the original Forza Horizon.
“We’ve taken the view that, if there isn’t a barrier in the real-world, if there isn’t a wall, there shouldn’t be one in our game,” says Fulton. “We want the player to be able to drive wherever he can in the real world.”
Map size:
“So that means that not only is the world of Forza Horizon 2 bigger than the one in Horizon, it also has three times more driveable area; a three-times bigger play space
Content:
“More than 700 events across the world, contributing to, I think a conservative 100 percent completion time of well over 100 hours. We have absolutely packed this game with racing, with non-racing, with discovery, and the ability to just point your car in any direction and just explore. So that’s freedom."
On Multiplayer:
“One of the few things they could do was plot a group GPS route to the other side of the world and they would start racing each other to that point. Rather than sticking to the road they would try to drive it as the crow flies, barrelling across fields and through the forest.
“I lost count of the number of people who came running to my desk over the next few days saying, ‘You’ve gotta include this in the game.’ And that’s how the cross country event was born.”
PGR lives on:
The other change to the second-to-second racing is the Skills system. It was a fun yet ultimately quite peripheral part of the original Forza Horizon, and Fulton agrees. But that’s changing with a little help from PGR.
“I think no game since the PGR series has put style on the same pedestal as winning,” says Fulton. “It’s as important with Forza Horizon 2 to drive with style as it is to win and we’ve put the Skills system front-and-centre in everything you do.”
