Mike Brown (Forza Horizon's creative director) has left Playground Games

Dear arcade-style open-world driving games fans

Today, there are several news articles confirming this man who previously worked as a creative director for this video game franchise, has left Playground Games then he formed a new company called Maverick Games, which is currently up to 10 staff at the moment so I would like to see you guys share your thoughts of their future.

So what I know about the Forza Horizon franchise, it was created as a spiritual successor to Project Gotham Racing (Another game published by Microsoft Game Studio) because both games franchises focus on the fun factor by having more arcade driving feel than the Forza Motorsport and Gran Turismo series, plus also attracts different kinds of target audiences as well.

News article links:

• Forza Horizon 5 leads depart, found new Maverick Games dream team | Traxion
• Forza Horizon Creative Director Mike Brown Leaves Playground Games to Set Up New Studio – GTPlanet
• Forza Horizon veterans leave Playground Games to form new AAA studio (racinggames.gg)

Sidenote:

I still dislike Activision for shutting down Bizarre Creations (Project Gotham Racing's developer) as it resulted in Blur's sequel getting cancelled, even though I'm not a fan of vehicular combat games but Blur is the only racing game with power-ups that I really loved.

On the one hand, this is kind of what you want to see from any company. This lets the former execs who left pursue new ideas, while giving the Playground employees previously at the ceiling of their advancement a chance to move up. I think people would be pretty disappointed if Forza Horizon 6 was another iteration of FH4/FH5, and new leadership means new ideas (usually).

On the other hand, Playground is in the middle of working on Fable. It’s easy to wonder if that development is officially troubled now with the sheer number of high-profile departures.

Monkey's paw - you can have more great Forza games...

...but you'll never get another Fable.

I love Forza Horizon so I'm excited to see what this company does.

On the other hand Forza Horizon was getting a little stale so it'll be good to get a fresh vision for it.

I doubt this will affect Fable because as far as I know he wasn't working on it.

We'll see how is Forza Horizon 6 going to be like when it comes out in 2024 along with Ivory Tower's The Crew 3 (If it's announced), I'm still curious about what Fable reboot is going to be like.

I love Forza Horizon too, I remembered how I loved the first game when it came out during my late teenhood and I was only a controller pad user at that time.

I still personally prefer Forza Horizon 5 more than Need For Speed Unbound, because of its driving model/physics for open-world driving games standards, plus I've tested them both with the racing wheel peripheral so here is my experience:

Forza Horizon 5's racing wheel force feedback works pretty well and has good control response while Need For Speed Unbound lacks force feedback and is unresponsive.

I guess Criterion Games' driving model/physics director doesn't care about the racing wheel peripherals with force feedback while only optimising the controller pad.

Edit: Need For Speed series' driving model/physics needs to be updated and have the feel of the Original Xbox/PS2/Gamecube era (Hot Pursuit 2, Underground 1 & 2, Most Wanted 2005 and Carbon).