Forza Horizon 5: Is the Mexico map true to life?


The next instalment in the Forza Horizon series is on its way! Playground Games have included a number of real-life locations from Mexico in the game world. Let's take a look at how some of these landmarks compare to the real world.

El Arco de Cabo San Lucas

This famous seaside rock arch is a well known landmark of the Baja California peninsula of Mexico. This is the first shot we saw in the Forza Horizon 5 trailer.

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El Arco de Cabo San Lucas in Forza Horizon 5

The Playground Games team hired a boat to explore the area and take extensive photogrammetry data. Mike Brown says that the boat itself is floating around this area in-game! As a result it looks extremely life-like and very true to the real world location.

Ek' Balam

Ek' Balam is a Yucatec-Maya site. It was the capital of a kingdom and features well-preserved plaster detail on the tomb of the king Ukit Kan Lek Tokʼ.

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Ek' Balam as shown on the Forza Horizon 5 map

The images we've seen so far of this particular landmark show some license has been taken by the developers. We're not sorry to see fewer trees and so easier driving in this area! This is a likely location for the Playground Games and should be a fun spot for tandem dirt drifting.

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Ek' Balam as seen in gameplay footage

This also gives us some idea of the scale of the Forza Horizon 5 map. These ruins look pretty small on the map itself but are actually very substantial on the ground. The developers say it's a 50% increase in map size compared to Forza Horizon 4.

Teotihuacan

Teotihuacan is the location of the Pyramids of the Sun and Moon as well as the Avenue of the Dead. So far we haven't seen much footage of this particular location. That said, there's a lot we can gather from looking at it on the map.

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We expect the Avenue of the Dead will be one of the game's drag strips. We also hope to see a danger sign on one of the pyramids for epic launches. This is probably the area I'm most looking forward to exploring when Forza Horizon 5 is released in November.

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