Several hundred? Try a few thousand! 
They did the same thing with “Colorado”, “France” and “Italy”.
They don’t want it to take 3 days to cross the map (as cool as that may be). This is a Horizon game, not Elite: Dangerous (which, funny enough, has an expansion called “horizons” XD).
They did a fictional version of Colorado for Forza Horizon 1, and they did a condensed version Italy and France in Horizon 2.
Melbourne, Philip Island, Surfer Paradise,… All this names sound good to me! It would be really great to have the real-life race tracks present in the game, like in The Crew but laser-scanned… and T10 can use them in the future FM7… Why not running Bathurst in FH3? I dreamed of Monaco and the GP track as location in FH2, sad it was not the case…
More “bridges” between FM and FH, as two parts of one big game, would be smart. Why separate this two worlds? With Forza Motorsport, Forza Horizon, Project Gotham Racing and Rallysport Challenge, Microsoft has all the weapons to make THE BIG PLACE OF ALL RACING!
1 Like
I guess the French and Italians were thinking the same thing when they saw the FH2 map a couple of years back.
2 Likes
Geographically the Twelve Apostles being north of Byron Bay would be like if Forza Horizon 2 featured Warsaw Poland or Dublin Ireland in Southern France and Italy.
I’ve only seen a couple of screenshots of the city, and there was one shot with a monorail! The only city that has a monorail in Australia is Broadbeach on the Gold Coast (Surefers Paradise) in Queensland!
However, the Victorian Government are proposing to build a monorail network through Melbourne’s CBD in the near future.
Now I might sound bias because I’m from Sydney Australia, but it would’ve been spectacular if Turn 10 had added Sydney’s harbour waterfront around Circular Quay, the Rocks and the Opera House, where Sydney’s spectacular New Year’s Eve fireworks take centre stage in a beautiful harbour city! Imagine racing around Sydney’s waterfront at night with fireworks lighting up Sydney harbour.
1 Like
The city is Surfers Paradise. You can identify buildings like “Circle on Cavill” and “Q1” in the screenshots. However the Monorail in the screenshots is a few km South of Surfers Paradise in Broadbeach as you correctly pointed out. It runs between Broadbeach and Jupiter’s Casino.
Yeah, it’s very hard for me to imagine them setting the game in Australia and leaving the opera house out!
Hey at least it was in Need for Speed 2 back in 1997
You were almost right! Sydney was one of the racing circuits in Project Gotham 2, which came out in 2003!
You started racing down the harbour foreshore where the Hyatt Hotel is located opposite the Opera House in The Rocks, and you raced under the Harbour Bridge up to the Garrison Church in The Rocks and worked your way up to George Street near Wynyard then back down to the Rocks again.
I remember this version not only because I live in Sydney, but my wife and I were married at the Garrison Church in The Rocks and it was in the game.
This would look amazing if they had Circular Quay and The Rocks in Horizon 3. Better Still, how cool would it be if they had a circuit that started in The Rocks, and you drive past the new Crown Casino, then onto the Harbour Bridge on ramp, race across the Harbour Bridge to Milson’s Point, down pass Luna Park, and loop around back onto the Harbour Bridge, and race back over to the city side of the harbour.
Seems there are quite a few Aussie members here on the forums. I would never have guessed there were so many. (Aussie myself).
3 Likes
Maybe they’ll make a Melbourne or Sydney DLC like Storm Island. Unlikely though. Both of Australia’s major cities are far too large to be accurately depicted.
Gold Coast is a good candidate because it’s a relatively simple layout. Also it has an Indy race. As a former resident of the GC I’m interested to see how it turns out in the game.
Would love to be able to drive through the Melbourne CBD and then onto the Albert Park lake for a blast around the Formula 1 circuit.
1 Like
From a few leaks here and there, we can 100% confirm the following places on the in-game map. (CAPITALS are enlarged on the map, lower case is for those smaller areas on the map).
BYRON BAY
Coober Pedy
DRY RESERVOIR
Great Ocean Road
KIEWA VALLEY
Maroondah Dam
Maroondah Falls
Maroondah Reservoir
Morton Timber Mill
Pink Lakes
RAINFOREST
Redstone Airport
Redstone Gold Mine
SURFERS PARADISE
Silver Sands Shipwrecks
THE TWELVE APOSTLES
Westpoint Tower
YARRA VALLEY
However there is still a fair portion missing which I believe is still yet to be shown until the release in terms of the map. Would even be better if they added Mount Panorama (Iconic Australian Circuit) in the map as it is a road after all, not a closed racing circuit as some people forget (I live in Bathurst, where the track is located).
6 Likes
There appears to be a mountainous region also.
Great Alpine Road? Or maybe a fantasy Mt Kosciuszko
There are probably more regions north of the are shown on map too. That city by Surfer’s Paradise there is cut off randomly.
1 Like
Strategically cut off if you ask me… as its half the Gold Coast Street Circuit showing… A famous V8 Supercars Circuit (Australia Racing).
Old INDY layout roughly…
4 Likes
Another Aussie chiming in to say how excited I am to play this game even though it looks like they’ve cut and pasted a lot of our country lol but it still looks amazing!! I cannot wait to start taking photos of that beautiful scenery!!
3 Likes
Hope you enjoy it, and hope you forgive the creative liberties we needed to take in order to make a really fun map out of your vast and beautiful island nation (and a game we can actually ship in two years’ development time).
In the first Horizon, we added a dam and bridge very similar to what you see at Hoover Dam (which is on the border of Nevada and Arizona) to our map of Colorado, because we needed a spectacular dam, and that’s just about the most spectacular dam and bridge combo in the entire western US.
In the second Horizon, we took a lot of liberties squeezing southern France and northern Italy into a fun map, omitting some of the region’s most famous cities (Genoa or Monaco, for example). The city of Nice is a lot larger in real life obviously, but Playground captured the essence of it really well.
Surfers gives the Horizon 3 map what it needs in terms of diversity and new visuals/driving experience with modern tall skyscrapers, wide city streets, and a gorgeous coastal resort cityscape that’s actually not very large in real life. If we were to take on Sydney or Melbourne, that’s a whole different level of scope if you want to do it right at the level of graphic fidelity and fun road networks we strive for in Horizon.
For more context, movies and TV shows do this all the time. Bullitt has what is undoubtedly one of the greatest car chases of all time, but being a San Francisco bay area native I can assure you that chase takes huge liberties with San Francisco that defy logic like teleporting around to some of SF’s most scenic, but completely unconnected neighborhoods at every corner (even though they are many blocks away), or racing through the Marina district toward the Golden Gate Bridge and suddenly appearing 10 miles south in Daly City for the climactic end.
As much as that movie captured the essence of San Francisco, if not map accuracy, we hope Horizon 3 captures the essence of Australia.
2 Likes
Definitely you guys capture the essence, that map looks really fun to drive. I visited Australia in 2006 to do video in a drag racing event in Willowbank Raceway @ Queensland. What a coincidence the event was on Sept. 23, 2006, and FH3 release the same day 10 years later. There’s no better way to me to bring memories of Australia. I already pre-ordered Ultimate digital version, but the wait its killing me, can you spill some beans 
Keep up the good work, my favorite game ever.
1 Like