Editor's Note: You may notice the video up top features some content thats blurred. This is because we can't reveal what Forza Horizon 2 looks like in motion just yet. But stay tuned for a teaser trailer this Friday!

We’re poised on the start line of our first race in Forza Horizon 2 in the very latest mad minotaur out of Sant’Agata Bolognese, the new Lamborghini Huracán. The replacement for the best-selling Gallardo, the Huracán cuts a menacing shape across the screen. Its 5.2L naturally aspirated V10 protests as it snarls through its rev range. It’s like a lion on a leash, straining to set off.

The warm Italian sun overhead bakes the bright yellow bodywork of the Huracán as a quintet of aerobatic jets streaks above the assembled grid, belching fingers of iconic green, white, and red smoke behind them – the iconic tints of il Tricolore.

The racers hit the gas and, almost instantly, the bulk of them divert through a nearby field of crops in a desperate scramble to save a few seconds on the way to the first checkpoint. It’s a brief but frantic off-road stampede as cars jockey for position while hurtling across the bumpy paddock. Fences splinter. Plants are scattered and threshed by the screaming pack of supercars bearing down on them.

The off-road adventure is cut short when the race re-joins the road and begins winding along the ocean. This segment demands a little more finesse than the foot-to-the-floor blast through some unfortunate Italian farmland. There are not just walls and guardrails to avoid here, but civilian cars. Our opponents dart around the sluggish locals, some successfully, some less so, as a rudely shunted sedan is sent spinning into our path.

Deftly drifting the all-wheel drive Lambo around the seaside bends, and threading it through the traffic, the handling remains instantaneously familiar. Forza’s typically top-notch driving dynamics feel as if they’ve again made the trip from the Motorsport series to Horizon 2 more-or-less unadulterated.

In other words, the Southern European setting was immediately fresh, but things remained the same behind the wheel.

Or at least, they did until the weather took a turn.

Royal Pedigree

“We set Playground up nearly five years ago,” says Forza Horizon 2 creative director Ralph Fulton. “And we had an ambition. We wanted to make the best racing games. We wanted to make racing games which innovated. We wanted to make racing games which pushed the whole genre forward.”

Playground Games set up shop in Leamington Spa, around 90 minutes out of London, England – a country fertile with racing game talent and brimming with studios past and present that are famous the world over for their first-class racing games. It’s this rich turf that Playground has drawn its team from, and it’s this team that are responsible for Playground’s well-received 2012 debut, Forza Horizon.

“We had a vision,” says Fulton. “We had a vision of a festival of cars, of music, of exciting, action-packed adventures on the open road. And we were really lucky, because Turn 10 believed in that vision and they believed in us; they enabled us to create that.

“And I guess really the proof, the test, came when we launched that game. We sent it out into the world, and you know what? We were blown away by the response. People got it.

“People connected with it. People had, what l like to think of as an emotional response to it. I still see to this day people coming to the Horizon festival for the very first time, because Horizon on the Xbox 360 is still selling, and they’re articulating their experiences using some of the words we used in our original pitch, that we use to discuss the game with the guys at Turn 10 or amongst ourselves.”

These philosophies – beauty, freedom, and fun – are writ large across the studio from top to bottom. Literally so, in fact. The words are very much printed on the walls inside Playground’s creative epicentre. Even now it’s very clear how these words that defined the essence of the original Forza Horizon are continuing to inform Forza Horizon 2 in many crucial ways.

European Vacation

A great deal of Horizon 2’s beauty comes from its wonderful new setting. Southern Europe forms the basis of Horizon 2, specifically the South of France and parts of Northern Italy. Fulton confirms that these areas were considered as potential spots for the first Horizon, but they were being looked at as two separate suggestions.

“These parts of Europe were on the table for Horizon 1, but we were actually talking about them individually,” he says. “We could do Northern Italy, or we could do the South of France, around the Côte d'Azur.”

“What we were able to do with Horizon 2 was say, ‘You know what? Let’s throw a net over all that. Let’s see what we can get from these areas combined.’

“[It’s] a place of vast landscapes, amazing vistas, beautiful, unspoilt scenery, and incredible diversity. From the foothills of the Alps, right down the Mediterranean Sea. From the rolling hills of Tuscany in Italy, across the border into France and beautiful Provence and the glamorous Côte d'Azur. Incredible variety, amazing landscapes, amazing vistas for you to explore. So that doesn’t hurt, having a beautiful world to start with is a big start.”

We saw but a small sliver of the world that will feature in Horizon 2 but the difference between it and Colorado from the original is stark. The few parts of Horizon 2’s we saw already display a huge amount of variety, ranging from quiet country roads framed by undulating pastures to narrow, cobblestone streets in a small European town. From dusty dirt tracks to concrete tunnels piercing through mountains.

However, looks aren’t everything when it comes to the places Playground has chosen to replicate in Horizon 2.

“We have these iconic towns and iconic cities in this part of Europe, but we didn’t pick them purely because they were beautiful and they had that visual diversity,” explains lead game designer Martin Connor. “One of the big decisions as to which ones we used and which ones we didn’t use was the road network that these towns are built upon.”

“So over the years that these towns and villages and cities have been expanding the road networks have become almost spider web-like in nature, so you can imagine from a racing game’s perspective the sort of options that gives you.

“You’ve got some of the denser towns in Tuscany where it feels almost claustrophobic, and then you come down to the Côte d'Azur and you’ve got boulevards that are, like, 80 to 100 metres wide. That’s 250 mile an hour racing, weaving through the traffic as you go. And it’s that sort of variety that we have because of the towns and the cities that we’ve arrived at.”

That said, it was going to take more than a picturesque setting to get Horizon 2 looking its finest. The original Forza Horizon was an excellent-looking game but, with the advent of new hardware, honing the beauty pillar of Forza Horizon 2 required more complex solutions.