The mainline Forza Motorsport series from Microsoft and Turn 10 used to come out at a fairly reliable cadence. Starting with the original installment way back on the original Xbox in 2005, they released a new game every two years, right up until Forza Motorsport 7 in 2017.
In the intervening years, the Horizon series from Playground Games rose up to fill in the gaps, running on the same internal ForzaTech engine, but expanding the action across vast open worlds. When this cycle started, Horizon was seen as the fun spin off game compared to Motorsport’s serious simulation focus.
Something must have broken along the way, because now in 2023, we’ve had two unaccompanied Horizon games while the main team at Turn10 quietly worked on rebooting the core franchise. In that time, Horizon has gained a much bigger profile. Horizon 4 and 5 are some of the most breathtaking and enjoyable racing games you can play right now, and still easily available on Game Pass as of this writing. The maturity of the engine also means that they’re fairly easy to run on PC.