First off, Forza Horizon is the pinnacle of open-world racing. The environments, physics, sound design, and overall car culture representation are unmatched. However, there is a massive, untapped frontier that would elevate the festival to an entirely new level: Motorcycles.
Why Motorcycles Belong in Forza Horizon ??
Overlapping Fanbases: Car culture and motorcycle culture share a huge overlap. A large portion of the current Forza player base already loves motorcycles.
Untapped Market: Adding bikes would draw in a massive new demographic of dedicated motorcycle gamers who are currently starving for a premium, high-quality open-world experience of Forza’s caliber.
The Perfect Engine: Forza already has the best driving physics, suspension modeling, and engine sound design in the genre. Applying this proven technology to two wheels would instantly create the best-feeling motorcycle game on the market.
Gameplay & Feature Opportunities :
Ultimate Open-World Cruising: Experiencing the beautiful landscapes of Horizon from the back of a bike—weaving through traffic or hitting top speed on the highway—would be incredibly immersive.
New Event Types: This opens the door to specialized motorcycle racing, cross-country scrambler events on dirt bikes, and epic “Car vs. Bike” Showcase events.
Unmatched Customization: Forza is known for its tuning. Imagine applying the upgrade system and livery editor to motorcycles—changing exhausts, swapping tires, tuning the suspension, and creating custom paint jobs for the fuel tanks and fairings.
We know adding an entirely new vehicle class is a huge undertaking, so it doesn’t need to happen all at once.
Phased Rollout: Introduce a “Motorcycle Expansion” or feature update post-launch with a small, curated starter list of 5 to 10 iconic bikes (e.g., a superbike, a scrambler, a cruiser, and a naked bike).
Community-Driven Additions: Once the foundation is laid, the team can use the Festival Playlist to trickle in new bikes based on community voting and requests.
Horizon is all about the pure freedom of the open road, and for countless fans, that freedom is best felt on two wheels. Giving us motorcycles wouldn’t just be a new feature and it would fulfill a lifelong dream of leaning into the corners and chasing your beautiful sunsets from behind the handlebars. Please, let us ride.
I’d love bikes in Horizon. As a fan of both cars and bikes I can see the argument for focusing development on cars from car focused players, but the bit of me that loves bikes wants to see a Horizon analogue for motorbikes, and what better place than in Horizon itself? As long as events are cars OR bikes (outside of showcases like FH4’s rally vs motocross), then most problems disappear as the open world ghosts players anyway. I think it would be an incredible way to bring motorculture into the game more broadly.
Forza Horizon doesn’t have to be purely focused on cars — realistically it already isn’t. We’ve got everything from standard cars to buggies, trucks, and even go-kart style vehicles. It’s more accurate to say Horizon is built around “vehicle enthusiasts” as a whole.
Because of that, I think motorbikes would be a great addition — as long as they’re implemented properly and don’t take away from the existing car mechanics. I don’t really buy the argument that bikes would somehow ruin the current physics system.
Yes, they’d need their own physics model, and there are challenges around how they interact with cars and how crash physics would work. But if Playground approached it the same way they’ve handled cars — which are arguably the best in the industry for arcade racing — there’s no reason they couldn’t get it right.
Crash physics could be handled simply (similar to something like The Crew 2), where a heavy crash just resets the rider and bike. That keeps things clean and maintains the current rating of the game.
For online, it’s an easy solution — just separate events. Car-only, bike-only, or mixed depending on the event type.
End of the day, being able to switch between sports cars, bikes, rally cars and dirt bikes in the same world would add a lot more variety to the game. I think it would be unreal and I’d definitely be keen to see it.