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Cold Open

Two months ago, Forza Horizon 6 opened its gates in Japan to some of the best reviews the franchise has ever seen. Since then, it has lost people’s save files, accidentally handed out close to a billion credits, wiped every Rivals leaderboard in the game, and — just recently — given away a paid car pack to players who never bought it.

That’s not a disaster story. That’s a live game finding its feet, loudly and in public. And it makes for one of the more eventful opening quarters Playground Games has ever had.

Welcome to the first State of Forza Horizon 6, our quarterly look at where the game has been and where it’s going. Today we’re covering the full stretch from launch day to right now: three Festival Playlist series, one very bad bug, one very generous glitch, and a studio that has been patching at a genuinely relentless pace. Let’s get into it.

Segment One: The Launch

Forza Horizon 6 arrived on May the nineteenth, twenty twenty-six, on Xbox Series X and S, plus PC through Steam and the Xbox app. Premium Edition owners got in four days earlier, on May the fifteenth, which is where the first wave of impressions came from.

Those impressions were strong. The game landed at roughly ninety-two on Metacritic, with an average critical score around ninety-one out of a hundred. That puts it near the top of the entire Horizon run, and comfortably among the best-reviewed games of the year so far.

The pitch was simple: Japan. More than five hundred and fifty cars, the largest map the series has ever built, and a setting that suits the Horizon formula almost suspiciously well. You get tight urban streets, mountain touge roads, and wide open coastal runs on a single map, which is not something Mexico or Britain could offer in the same breath. Playground added Touge Battles as a proper mode, brought in Car Meets as shared-world gathering points, and layered a Fog of War system over the map so discovery actually feels like discovery again.

Commercially it was in good shape before it even shipped, with reports of half a million Steam sales a month ahead of launch. So: a big, confident, well-received debut. The kind of launch that buys a studio some goodwill.

They were going to need it.

Segment Two: Series One, Welcome to Japan

The first Festival Playlist series, “Welcome to Japan,” ran from May the twenty-first through June the eighteenth. It set the template the game has followed ever since — a four-week series, split into four one-week in-game seasons that cycle through summer, autumn, winter and spring, with ten reward cars to collect and a hundred and eighty points on the table.

Two reward cars per week, plus two more gated behind cumulative point totals across the whole month. It’s a rhythm Horizon players know well, and Series One mostly existed to teach it to newcomers while the world was still fresh.

It also gave us our first look at how the new online layer behaved under real load — which turned out to be a recurring theme. If you’ve ever wondered why certain race classes fill instantly while others leave you staring at a lobby timer, we dug into that in our piece on why S1 and A-class matchmaking works the way it does. Short version: the population concentrates hard, and everything outside the popular classes becomes a coin flip.

Series One was smooth. Series One was pleasant. And underneath it, three separate problems were quietly building.

Segment Three: The June Reckoning

This is the part of the story where it gets messy, and it’s the most important segment in this episode.

Problem one: save files were disappearing. Players started reporting that entire saves were being wiped — hundreds of hours, whole car collections, gone without warning. Playground eventually confirmed it and opened an investigation. The triggers turned out to be varied and genuinely alarming. On Xbox, the most commonly cited culprit was Quick Resume: suspend the game, come back, and find your progress reset to zero. On PC, it was a crash during a save write, or a conflict with Xbox app cloud sync.

The strangest detail? Specific cars were implicated. The 2003 Ford F-150 SVT Lightning and the 1993 Schuppan 962CR were both linked to save wipes when upgraded or painted. Which is a remarkable thing to have to write down. Both of those, incidentally, were Series Two reward cars — so the game was handing players the very vehicles that could destroy their progress.

The guidance that came out of it was blunt. Xbox players were told to install the latest system update and disable Quick Resume for Forza specifically. PC players needed Gaming Services updated to version thirty-seven point one-one-four or higher. And if your save was already gone, the advice was to stop playing immediately, don’t start a new session, don’t create a new save, and open a support ticket. Support could sometimes restore your inventory. Your level, XP and skill points were not coming back.

Problem two: the money printer. Players discovered that a GMC Hummer EV could be nudged into a broken state and then taken into The Eliminator, which paid out absurd sums. We’re talking bank balances hitting the game’s ceiling of nine hundred and ninety-nine million credits, in minutes, with no skill required. It spread exactly as fast as you’d expect.

Problem three: the XP wall. Progression between levels twenty-six and one hundred in online Horizon Play had been tuned so punishingly that some estimates put reaching level one hundred — which is tied to an achievement — at around a thousand hours of play.

All three came to a head with the June the fifteenth patch, and how Playground handled it tells you a lot about the studio.

On the Hummer exploit, every flagged account was rolled back to a ten-million-credit ceiling. No bans. No suspensions. The support FAQ said, and this line matters: “As this error was on our side, no further action will be taken.” On the XP wall, Playground admitted the scaling was never intentional, and anyone who had already ground their way to level thirty-two was pushed straight to level one hundred with the achievement attached. And drag tires, which had been quietly dominating cornering performance well outside their intended use, finally got nerfed.

We covered that patch in detail at the time in our Series Two update breakdown, and the tire change in particular reshaped the meta enough that we rebuilt our touge guide around the post-nerf reality.

The pattern to take away from June: when the mistake was Playground’s, Playground ate it. That precedent becomes relevant again shortly.

Segment Four: Series Two, Horizon Decades

Series Two arrived on June the eighteenth and ran through July the sixteenth, themed around iconic cars across the decades. It was, in our view, the strongest content series of the quarter.

The reward car list was ridiculous in the best way. A 1993 Porsche 911 Turbo S Leichtbau, of which only eighty-six were ever made. The 1998 TVR Cerbera Speed 12, a car so unhinged its maker decided the public shouldn’t have it. A 1988 Lamborghini Countach. The 2017 Saleen S7 LM with thirteen hundred brake horsepower. And the 1993 Schuppan 962CR — rare, gorgeous, and as we now know, briefly capable of eating your save file.

Series Two also brought The Trial back to the Festival Playlist, the six-versus-six team format restricted to Horizon Legends with a Gold Wristband, and introduced the Evolving World Car Meet at the Hokubu Time Attack Circuit. We argued at the time that the location was the real story there — putting a social hub on a proper circuit changes what people do when they show up.

If you’re catching up on what you missed, our full Horizon Decades guide breaks down every week of it.

The other significant addition was structural: Series History Rewards. These are cars unlocked by lifetime Festival Playlist points rather than by any single series. The first is the 1972 Mazda Cosmo 110S Series Two, unlocked at five hundred lifetime points. It’s a quietly smart idea — it rewards consistency instead of punishing anyone who missed a month.

Segment Five: Series Three, Italian Exotics

Which brings us to right now. Series Three, “Italian Exotics,” went live on July the thirteenth, with its Festival Playlist running from July the sixteenth through August the thirteenth.

The headline is Italy. Ten reward cars including the 2024 Lamborghini Temerario with its combined nine hundred and seven horsepower, the Ferrari 296 GTB, the Maserati MC12, the Lancia 037 Stradale and the track-only Pagani Huayra R. Alongside it, the paid Italian Passion Car Pack at four dollars ninety-nine, free with Premium, headlined by the 2025 Ferrari F80 and its twelve hundred horsepower — the most powerful road-legal Ferrari ever built.

There’s also an Italian takeover of the Aftermarket dealership near the Horizon Stadium, fifty-two new EventLab props for creators, and a Tank Latte Cup collectible hidden in the Ito region. Our full Italian Exotics breakdown goes car by car.

But the real news in Series Three wasn’t a car. It was the reset.

Playground wiped every Rivals leaderboard in the game. All of them. The reasoning: the boards had been polluted by glitch exploitation and by drag tire times set before the June fifteenth physics change, and there was no clean way to surgically remove them. So everyone starts fresh. Clean times already banked toward Collection Journal items stayed unlocked, so nobody lost rewards — just rankings. PR Stunt leaderboards are next in line once those fixes land.

It’s a decision that stung a lot of legitimate players, and we still think it was correct. A leaderboard full of impossible times isn’t a leaderboard.

The patch alongside it was substantial too: reduced AI collisions on corner entry, a fix for the LINK Clean Sweep skill not counting, the Auction House price cap removed for cars you can’t buy in the Autoshow, and a sweep of exploit closures covering AFK credit farming, Estate skill point farming, and the Eliminator trick that let players make themselves un-challengeable. That last one had been distorting the mode for weeks, as we noted when head-to-head objectives suddenly became unavoidable.

Segment Six: The Car Pack That Gave Itself Away

One more current item, because it’s the thing filling forums this week.

When the Italian Passion Car Pack rolled out on July the fourteenth, the entitlement system misfired. Some players got the cars early. Some Premium owners saw them appear as free, which is correct but confusing. Some players who legitimately own the pack got hit with a “requires purchase” error, particularly when switching between machines. And a number of players who never bought the pack, and don’t own Premium, simply found four Italian exotics sitting in their garage.

Cue widespread panic about bans.

Here’s the thing: the June precedent answers this. When the Hummer glitch handed out near-infinite credits, Playground rolled the credits back and explicitly stated no further action would be taken, because the error was theirs. A store granting content it shouldn’t have is the same category of problem — arguably a milder one, since players didn’t even have to do anything. The realistic worst case is a quiet rollback that removes the cars later. Not a ban.

Segment Seven: Where It Actually Stands

So, the scorecard after one quarter.

The game itself is excellent, and that was never really in question. Japan is the best setting the series has had, the driving is superb, and the critical reception has held up.

The live operation has been rocky but honest. Save wipes are genuinely the worst thing that can happen to a player, and that took too long to get in hand. Stability has been a recurring theme too — we’ve had to publish fixes for both startup crashes on Steam and the shader-related crash that kills sessions about three minutes in.

But the corrections have been fast, and crucially, they’ve been fair. Playground has consistently chosen rollbacks over punishment when the fault was theirs. They fixed an XP curve they admitted was wrong and handed players the levels back. They nuked their own leaderboards rather than live with dirty data. That’s a studio taking the long view, and after a quarter of watching it, we’d rather have that than a studio that ships clean and then goes quiet.

Segment Eight: What’s Next

Two things on the horizon.

The next content series is Horizon Mascot Party, themed around the mascots you find all over Japan. Expect new cars, new events, and a themed Evolving World Time Attack Circuit.

And the bigger one: PlayStation 5. Forza Horizon 6 is confirmed for PS5 in the second half of twenty twenty-six, with no firm date yet. Whenever it lands, it brings a large new population into a game that has spent its first quarter learning hard lessons about scale. Ideally, those lessons hold.

Sign-Off

That’s the state of Forza Horizon 6 as of late July. A superb racing game that launched strong, stumbled through a difficult June, and came out the other side with a studio that has shown it’ll fix its own mess rather than blame the people playing it.

We’ll do this again next quarter, once Mascot Party has run its course and the PS5 version has a date attached. Until then — if you’re chasing the Series Three rewards, you’ve got until August the thirteenth, and the Temerario is worth the points.

Drive clean, and we’ll see you at the festival.

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Sources for this episode: the official Forza.net Series One, Two and Three announcements, Forza Support documentation on the Italian Passion Car Pack and save loss issues, and Dexerto’s reporting on the June credit rollback.