To say that Forza Horizon 3 has been a success might be understating things. It was named best racing game at both the 20th annual D.I.C.E. Awards and The Game Awards 2016, and picked up a BAFTA nomination for Best British Game at the 13th British Academy Games Awards for good measure. It was the most played game on Xbox in Australia in 2017 and is the best-selling Xbox One game down under since the launch of the console. Worldwide it’s moved millions of copies.

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It’s one of the most critically-acclaimed racing games ever made.“I think, to date, more than 9 million people have played Forza Horizon 3,” says Ralph Fulton, creative director at UK-based Forza Horizon developer Playground Games. “But if you’d told me right back around the launch window that that was going to be how it panned out? That's astonishing; that was beyond wildest dreams territory for this team.”While the Playground team was confident in the game’s quality they were nonetheless unprepared for how Forza Horizon 3 was received.But where would the team go next? How exactly do they follow up what happens to be the highest-rated Microsoft exclusive of this generation?The answer, it turns out, was right on their doorstep.

“ I think this has been, more than any other, a passion project for the studio.

It's not just a summer festival anymore.

“ The [sky] assets that we create are full of these sheer, huge amounts of data; each shoot is 1.5 terabytes of photography that we process.

Forza Horizon 4’s heavily-stylised version of Britain stretches from the centuries-old streets of Edinburgh to the quintessentially English villages of the Cotswolds, covering a variety of other distinct, postcard-perfect locations in the process, like the North of Scotland and North West England’s famous Lake District. It’s broad and absolutely gorgeous. For a man from the other side of the planet, Playground’s Britain looks to me like a decade of Top Gear episodes brought to life.After a short glimpse at the foundations of Forza Horizon 4 it’s difficult to imagine the studio setting it anywhere else, although before I arrived at the studio Britain was not my first guess for the next stopover in the Horizon series. Fulton admits even he had to be convinced.“I think I started from a kind of cynical position,” he says. “Why would I want to spend my time in Britain, when previously Horizon games have taken me to an exotic place? You know; Australia.”“But, by comparison, I grew up in Scotland. I’ve lived in Scotland for 30-odd years; I’ve lived down here [in England] for 12. I’m super familiar with it, and familiarity breeds contempt, a little bit.”“This team during the concept for Forza Horizon 4, I think they did a really great job of trying to challenge those preconceptions and show us just what a great country we live in here,” says Fulton. “How varied it is, how beautiful it is. How historic it is, as well. I think we have our sense of history and that combines with our landscape to make a very unique location. So they did a great job of coming and saying, ‘Hey, we should consider Britain where we haven’t previously.’”“I think this has been, more than any other, a passion project for the studio. I think everybody, as soon as we made that decision, was, like, ‘Yeah, we’ve got to show Britain at the best it can be.’ The most beautiful. The most varied. We want this to be an advert for the country that certainly we all live in and, for most of us, we hail from. And think that’s been a really important paradigm shift in the way that we make a Horizon game.”Forza Horizon 4 goes far beyond simply dropping the Horizon festival into Playground’s home turf, however. The team isn’t just bringing Britain to the open world racing scene; they’re bringing all four seasons along with it.“’Seasons change everything’ sounds like a neat tagline, but it’s a really honest description of what actually happens from season to season… in our game,” says Fulton. “I think it’s testament to the production team and our tech art team, and our environment art team here at Playground who have managed to create basically four worlds the size of Forza Horizon 3, in one, for this game.”The Playground crew has lined up a series of four screens, all in the same location of the map but each in a different season. The game is unsurprisingly exquisite but it’s the seasonal differences that are especially show-stopping. In summer the sun beams upon a small cottage tucked away in the Cotswolds area and grass glows a bold green. You can almost feel the warmth. Winter is a starkly different story; dusted in snow and noticeably more dim, thanks to the lower sun – with the skeletons of leafless trees silhouetted against the sky. Autumn is cool, all tinged in browns and yellows, with leaf litter carpeting the asphalt. Spring looks damp and fresh. It’s no exaggeration to say it really is four worlds in one.Gathering a huge amount of environmental reference material is a crucial part of bringing a Forza Horizon game to life but studio art director Ben Penrose explains that this has previously been done at one particular point in time.“So we’ve gone over to Australia in the past and done all of the sky captures that we do; we’ve got all our photogrammetry information, all of our general photography reference for the artists,” says Penrose. “This time around it was a process that went all the way through the year.”“So we were capturing spring, summer, autumn, winter – not necessarily in that order – but we were getting everything. And that’s important to us because it means we’re capturing every single nuance about each season in the UK.”The sky is supremely important, partly because it usually takes up half the screen real estate, but also because it drives the game’s diverse lighting scenarios.“One of the most ambitious things last time was that we actually took this rig out to Australia. We actually captured a whole summer’s worth of lighting and that became the lighting in Forza Horizon 3. When we started looking at what we were going to do this time, with seasons in the mix, obviously shooting for a whole year blows that ambition out of the water, to another level. The assets that we create are full of these sheer, huge amounts of data; each shoot is 1.5 terabytes of photography that we process. We have dedicated people in house that just process skies as a full time job.”Wood explains that each day is basically a series of images, and that each moment in that time lapse is a unique lighting scenario in game.“They’re a lot of work to make but we get a lot of value from doing them,” he says. “When you start to think of seasons and the UK when it comes to sky capture, there’s a huge diversity in what happens throughout the year, which is kind of what makes it worth us doing these captures seasonally.”“In the summertime the sun actually rises in the north east and has quite a high sun arc, and sets over north west. Whereas the most extreme opposite to that, in winter, the sun actually rises a full 90 degrees around, has a very shallow sun arc – the sun never really gets high in the sky – and then it sets around in the south west.”The difference this makes in game is significant, with noon in winter feeling cool and subdued, with the sun casting long shadows, and noon in summer being the complete opposite. But there’s still more the team discovered capturing British skies for Forza Horizon 4.“There’s a thing about Britain that’s captured in those new data pieces which is really specific,” says Penrose. “We get all the contrails in this country overhead, which we didn’t actually get very much of in Australia – I’m guessing because you guys don’t have so much air traffic, right? Because it’s such a huge space. Everything’s so condensed here.”