A reader is impressed with new Xbox game Forza Horizon 6 and tries to imagine an alternative future where it became one of the format’s biggest exclusives.
Like many people, I’ve been massively enjoying Forza Horizon 6 over the last week and I would say it is easily my favourite game of the year, which also seems to be what Metacritic thinks. I played it on PC and I cannot think of any other Xbox game, that isn’t Forza Horizon, that has come anywhere close to that level of quality since the Xbox 360 era. And that, unfortunately, is a long time ago now.
It’s not just quality though. There’s something about Forza Horizon 6 that feels exciting and of the moment. In the zeitgeist I think would be the word. Not only is everyone talking about it, but nobody seems to have a bad word to say about it, whether they particularly like the genre or not.
And then I see today that sales of the games – not just how many people have played it for free on Game Pass but actual sales – are 5 million, which is apparently well above anything you’d ever expect of Xbox recently. Which only hammers home the idea that Forza Horizon 6 is something special.
As many people have said over the years, the problem with Xbox is they always want to take a shortcut on everything. They’re always looking for a secret move that will leap them ahead of Sony and, of course, it doesn’t exist. But while there’s always been a lot of talk about losing the Xbox One generation, when everyone got settled into the ecosystem of the Xbox or PlayStation, I think the problem was earlier, with Kinect.
It cut the legs off the Xbox 360 and allowed the PlayStation 3 to overtake it in the end. Absolutely nothing good came of Kinect and at the same time Microsoft stopped tending to its first party developers properly, shutting them down or letting them run off – like Bungie did.
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The impression I get is that Microsoft though they had it in the bag with Xbox 360 and immediately got over confident and, well… you see the situation they’re in today. But the bigger problem is I don’t see any way back now. Xbox has been a punching bag for far too long now and nobody trusts them with hardware anymore.
So while something of the quality of Forza Horizon 6 would’ve been a definite system seller 10 years ago, it’s not now. It’s just something to make a note of, so you remember to buy it on PC on PlayStation 5.
Forza Horizon is by far the best thing Xbox has at the moment, but it doesn’t help their console business because no-one’s going to buy a console for that. They don’t need to because it’s multiformat (or will be) but I don’t believe they’d do it anyway.
But the thing with Forza Horizon 6 is that it’s very mainstream friendly, in a way things like The Outer Worlds definitely isn’t. Halo and Gears Of War used to be, but they seem very old fashioned to me now and that’s even if they’re good games, which I doubt the they well be (the Halo one isn’t even technically new!).
The only thing that might have some reach is the new Fable but although it’s by the same people as Forza I don’t think it has much of a chance. The original games were never that good and there’s nothing from the new trailers that makes me very confident.
Who knows, maybe it will be another blockbuster but it’s still a drop in the ocean and will do nothing to change the fact that Xbox is now just a third party publisher and nothing more. The sooner they accept that and stop pretending they’re going to go back to making exclusives the better.
The chance for Xbox to rival PlayStation was decades ago and while I wish it had, because I don’t like the free reign Sony currently has, that chance is never going to come around again. Which makes the glimpse Forza Horizon 6 has given of what could’ve been kind of cruel.
By reader Jason
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