Why Sim Racing Needs Forza Horizon 6

As someone with thousands of hours in iRacing and ACC. It's nice to pick up the controller, to just have some dumb, random stress-free fun.

i´ve played forza horizon 6 and wreckfest 2 i think i´m ready for iracing

Like youtuber Raycevick said a few years ago: "your simulation is still a videogame and in a lot of cases a really bad one". The intrinsic motivation of getting better is one thing, but most people want a good career mode, progression, and variety. That's not tied to a specific license, or way of racing or anything. Racing games should be good games too.

Sim racing is fun, but blasting down a motorway at 200mph whilst listening to your favourite tunes, then launching 600m through the air and crashing into a train is what my brain needs sometimes.

Makes me more sad on how AC Evo have backtracked on their career/open world progression aspects they promised initially. A more realistic version of a game like this within the Eiffel forests with less warping around and fast travelling would have been so much fun to experience. I'm more worried about that game over time.

I love sim racing, absolutely love it. All sorts. But sometimes. After a long day of racing and burning myself out mentally. This is the exact kind of game I can just have fun and unwind with. Forza is the perfect blend between sim and arcade racer. It’s not a sim and I don’t want it to be. It needs to be approachable for younger people and people new to racing games. But also engaging enough and realistic enough to keep the real car people happy. Which it does. Real sims are out there, and very accessible. Forza is Forza, and for what it does, it’s perfect.

The main reason I love this, and it's refreshing compared to sim-racing all the time; sim-racing is always just racing tracks/circuits specifically built for racing, with race cars specifically built for racing. I want something that replicates the feeling of driving down a mountain-pass, using a stock road car, with road tyres, and maybe something approximating real minor upgrades to boost a little more performance out of it. Does Forza Horizon replicate that exactly? No. Does it come close, and give that "feeling" that I want? Absolutely! It's casual enough that I just plug in my wheel/pedals/shifter, and start the game. I don't have to fiddle with mods (I'm old, I used to love the tinkering with mods, but these days I just don't have the time or mental energy to do that). If there was some kind of out of the box sim that did that, I'd love it. But there isn't (to whoever might reply, I already know Assetto Corsa mods exist that do that thing; see previous sentence about fiddling with mods). So this scratches that itch for me.

As a hardcore sim racer, I haven't put FH6 down because it's brought all my friends together to race! None of my friends have sim setups, but now we can all race together. It's been so much fun.

ToCA Touring Cars on the PS1 was my origin story

THANK YOU. Forza Horizon is to us what Karting is to F1 drivers. We need it.

Are you going to participate in Questionable racing after Muye called you out at 6.45 in his latest video 😏

Honestly I've been loving FH6, especially the tuning. it's nice to take a break from grinding LMU or something and just have fun building and racing cars.

Forza Horizon 6 at its simplest form is a celebration of cars. And I love it

It makes racing, relaxing and fun, again. It's not about physics and FFB.... its about fun! Im loving it!

I feel that most of the times people forget that the point of videogames is just to enjoy and have fun, specially within the racing community, people making fun of others just beacuse they're enjoying Forza or any other sim-cade, arcade racing game and feeling "superior" beacuse they only play 'real hardcore racing sims'. Like, where did the fun go? What happen to just sit down, play a game so you can relax and enjoy your day?

I think the best way to describe Horizon 6 is that it's a driving game not a racing game. It feels like it encourages you to play the game your way a lot more than the other games in the series have. It's like you said, if you wanna fine tune your suspension and squeeze out hundredths on lap times you can, but if you wanna do 300mph down the highway in a Kei truck you can do that too. It's just fun, and the map they've created is super enjoyable to just cruise around in with your little Honda Civic you made.

The first racing game I got was Forza Horizons 4, after playing that my friend showed me F1 and we watched the 2021 season and I got hooked and ended up getting the F1 game and shortly after a Thrustmaster T80 wheel (no FFB). Then I ended up getting a logitech g29 and iracing christmas of 2021 and raced consistently until last year when I moved house for college and couldn't fit my sim rig. Forza was the gateway drug to motorsport. I ended up going to my local track as well, but I can't compete because I'm too tall, but I attended a few events as a spectator. I'm Irish so there's only one track and it's a bit away from me.

Forza got me into sim racing

FH6 has been great to play so far. If more games had the sorts of accessibility features that Turn 10 put into their games, I would be quite happy

and don't forget that the peak of 302k players is on Steam only, when Horizon is Microsoft game sold on MS Store and is on gamepass, so the overall number is even higher than that. I've already sunk 85 hours into it and I feel like I'm just getting started.