When watching the Horizon 6 teaser trailer, the on e part that stuck out to me the most was the panning shot of not only the memorabilia from the last 5 festivals, but also the license plates. Something that has always bothered me about Horizon 4 and 5 is for example in Mexico, you would never in your life see an Australian market HSV Maloo, yet Horizon 5 sells them the same as every other car, same with other vehicles. It’s especially noticeable with cars specific to the Australian and UK markets because it seems in 5, the developers would only add cars they had licenses to and didn’t attempt to consider the Mexican car scenes and car culture.
It’s a frustrating oversight but it can be fixed if you include those license plates from the trailer for each car. It can be as simple as giving us a choice in the license plate menu to choose the background for the plate, and including those revamped festival-issue license plates from Colorado up to Mexico. They look great and would help give an in-universe explanation for seeing a HSV Maloo or UK market Morris Minor in Japan because you could include the license plates from Australia and the UK back into Japan.
Lore wise, it can be used to explain that old festival competitors are allowed to re-register their old cars for competing in the new festival. It would explain having cars in Japan that use the Left Hand Drive models instead of the Japanese market models, like how we saw in Horizon 5 with several US and Mexican market cars for some reason being Right Hand Drive. It will also justify the current problem Forza has with each game starting you with loads of cars, and those mostly being the loyalty cars already from previous festivals.
Gameplay wise, it would be an awesome nod to the past festivals and games that made Horizon what it is today and a fun way to diversify and add layers of stories to your garage, giving cars a legacy at the festival just from the plate it’s issued. It wouldn’t be an impossible addition either, you have modeled and designed new license plates for all 6 festivals for the reveal trailer and those are huge improvements over the in game versions of those plates, and all license plates across the old games all use the 8 letter system for plates.
It would be a simple matter of porting those plates as backgrounds that can be swapped out, same as they do in Need for Speed Unbound and the original Crew game. All I would recommend if we have the feature to change plates is to give players the option to save text on the plates like we saw in the trailer. If I equip the Mexico plate it can say El-J3f3 or whatever text I choose for Mexico, then I swap it to my UK plate and it says 4s K3ira to make the feature more accessible for players.
Finally, specifically for the new Japanese setting, as authenticity is a huge point of your presentation, give us the ability to include hyphens and middots on our license plates so we can create realistic looking standard plates. Since Kei cars are being added, if there is enough of them I’d recommend including different Japanese backgrounds such as the standard white with green text license plates for normal class vehicles, and then black with yellow text plates for ‘light’ vehicles. It will add a layer of authenticity and customization to an already fun but now outdated feature.