In a new interview with Traxion, former Forza Horizon developer Gavin Raeburn has talked about their new racing game being built over at Lighthouse Games, whilst also touching on 2021's Forza Horizon 5 and how the Xbox title was impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.
First off, let's look at FH5 here, which we find particularly interesting. Raeburn says that the team at Playground Games was just starting to turn its attention towards Fable before the pandemic hit, which forced the team to go all-hands-on-deck with Horizon 5 as the team adapted to work from home.
"It was an interesting time [...] I was looking at Fable, which we were kickstarting at the time. We were building that team, and COVID changed everything. We had to make sure Horizon 5 was successful, and that meant I had to devote all my time to it.
What I realised was how much we need to work as a team. You lose that when people are working exclusively from home. It’s like having a dismembered body. Everything’s working as it should, but nothing’s quite connecting. I think you can see a little bit of that in Horizon 5."
Nowadays, Raeburn is at Lighthouse Games; a brand-new studio formed this year in the same neighbourhood as Playground. The Forza Horizon co-creator says that whilst this new team is indeed building a racing game, it's "trying to create something very different that can play in the same league". "It’s a delight to play our game every day", Raeburn adds, before going to talk about the risks that can be taken with a fresh team and new IP.
"In every way, we have to draw on everything that we’ve learned from previous games and apply that same ethos when Playground started. How do we change? How do we take racing, driving and car culture somewhere new?
That’s exciting because you can’t do that once you have an established brand. Particularly a successful one because, by the very essence that it makes money, no one is prepared for you to say, ‘I’ll throw that in the bin. I’ve got this brilliant new idea."
It sounds like Lighthouse is trying something different for a racing game, then, and we're very excited to see what all of this Forza Horizon alumni comes up with at their various different ventures. Remember, Playground itself was formed of former racing devs including those who worked on PGR - and now we have both Lighthouse and Maverick Games cooking up something new in the racing genre.