Forza Horizon 2

Forza Horizon 2 moved the fictional car festival from Colorado to sunny southern Europe, specifically to a setting inspired by France and Italy, and delivered an open world with no loading screens between drives. Playground Games used the new ForzaTech engine, shared with the main Motorsport series, which gave the game a more realistic weather model, including storms that change road grip in real time. For the first time, the festival was split into several separate hubs, between which the player freely drives across vineyards, coastal roads, and mountain switchbacks, with traffic and non-playable drivers reacting more naturally to the player's actions than before.

A key change from the first game was the ability to leave the road practically anywhere — fields, dirt tracks, and dry riverbeds became shortcuts, and the game actively encouraged players to seek them out. The car roster totaled over two hundred licensed vehicles, from ordinary hatchbacks to supercars like the Bugatti Veyron, each with a finely modeled interior and a fully usable cockpit view. A new feature was the Drivatar system, which projected the driving style of the player's friends, controlled by artificial intelligence, into the world, making it possible to race against virtual copies of real people even offline.

The game supported seamless switching between the solo campaign and online multiplayer while driving, without interruption or menus, a revolutionary approach to open-world racing games at the time; a group of friends could meet in one shared world and move between individual events together. The atmosphere was rounded out by a lineup of radio stations with a varied musical selection and the festival's easygoing summer tone, which defined the series for years to come. Although the game also came out on Xbox 360 in a different, separately developed version, it was the Xbox One version that made full use of the new console's power and set the bar for the visual and atmospheric quality of every subsequent Horizon entry.