[Editor's Note: We can't reveal what Forza Horizon 2 looks like in motion just yet. Stay tuned for a teaser this Friday, and then we'll show you more of the game than you can handle next week during E3!]

“ The warm Italian sun overhead bakes the bright yellow bodywork of the Huracán as a quintet of aerobatic jets streaks above the assembled grid.

Royal Pedigree

Just wait until you see the nighttime racing in action.

“ We sent it out into the world, and you know what? We were blown away by the response.

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 green, white, and red smoke behind them – the iconic tints of il Tricolore.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.Then the weather took a turn.“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.”“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.