The recent wave of previews for Forza Horizon 6 and Microsoft's release of a gameplay trailer shows off our first look at the open-world racer's move to Japan. Between the Microsoft-provided footage of the traditional flashing opening sequence and the three races available to early players, there's still plenty to discuss about the game's tech ahead of its 19th May release date.

The first thing we noticed about the game is running in a 30fps quality mode in all available footage, so we don't yet know how the 60fps performance mode will run. Historically, the series has offered both modes with an upscaled 4K output resolution, with the 30fps mode including ray tracing (RT) and the 60fps mode dropping RT and lowering settings to guarantee that higher frame-rate.

This time around, the initial drive video released by Microsoft shows ray-traced reflections, visible not only as self-reflections on the player car, but also on on environmental features - like a passing high-speed train. The technique is computationally expensive, but does help to better ground the cars in the world. This would seem appropriate for a console 30fps quality mode, but outside of the Microsoft footage, we didn't see any evidence of these effects in the preview footage apparently captured in a 30fps quality mode on what is believed to be Series X hardware,

As with earlier series entries, quintessential local sights and sounds are present and correct, though roads are noticeably wider than they are in real life to accommodate racing and drifting - a common technique also seen in prior Forza Horizon titles. Similarly, while the playable area remains huge, the game world is far from a one-to-one recreation of Japan; it's more of a distillation of the most famous areas into a more driveable simulacrum.

While that particular game design technique remains intact, Playground Games has taken criticism of the whirlwind pace of the last few entries on board, with FH6 sporting a more gradual progression system that sees you having enough time to bond with a car through driving, racing and customising, rather than immediately equipping you with a raft of hypercars that you can use throughout the game. Of course, players are still sure to discover the best early-game vehicles to take on the series' signature free-roam challenges.

While the preview footage begins in the countryside, urban areas are also shown off, and here the game's lighting tech is of interest. While the effect is beautiful, it's hard for the game to truly capture how crowded neon-lit city streets look in the real world without the benefit of ray-traced emissives, making proceedings a little too dim. Still, Forza Motorsport did have emissive RT, so it's possible that the PC version of the game will also use that tech to great effect.

Are you going to play Forza Horizon 6 at launch?

Overall, bar some lighting glitches we noted in some of the captured footage out there, the game looks relatively polished and ready about a month ahead of launch, at least in its quality mode on Series X. It'll be interesting to see what sacrifices the performance mode makes on Series X, and how the game will scale to the more resource-constrained Series S. There's also the question of handhelds, which have even less power and will need good optimisation to be truly playable on the go. And finally, the PC version of the game ought to offer the maximum fidelity and higher performance, and we're really curious about how just how effective its ray tracing features will be.