Forza Horizon 6 Car Meets Are Ghost Towns

Playground Games’ Forza Horizon 6 is a smash hit, but it’s not perfect, and Car Meets in particular are suffering from the fact that nobody is actually using them. Forza Horizon 6 released on Xbox Series and PC, which led to hundreds of thousands of players jumping right into its virtual rendition of Tokyo. With all these players, though, getting a full Car Meet going is still functionally impossible.

Forza Horizon 6 has been smashing records from day one of its advanced access release on May 15, only for it to get a second big injection of players on its full release, May 19. With excellent reviews and a host of features that players had been asking for since the franchise’s inception, like the obvious Tokyo setting, it’s no wonder that Horizon 6 is dominating the player count charts. At the same time, it’s equally apparent that Playground will need to find a way to revise some of the game’s features before they function the way they should.

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Forza Horizon 6 Car Meets Are Devoid of Players, Need a Rework

While the fact that Forza Horizon 6 has no pedestrian option was always going to be a problem for Car Meets, social micro-hubs where players check out the other drivers’ vehicles in detail, nobody could’ve foreseen that the feature’s biggest problem would be far more basic. Specifically, Car Meets have no matchmaking of their own, which means if none of the drivers active on a particular Forza Horizon 6 server have joined the specific Car Meet spot a player has visited, it’s going to be totally devoid of any activity. With at least three bespoke Car Meet spots strewn across the map, the odds of any significant number of players randomly deciding to join a specific one at a specific point in time are basically nonexistent. As a result, Car Meets are empty almost at all times.

The problem was brought up on Reddit just a few days before Forza Horizon 6 released, with players hoping that the full May 19 launch would bring more players out of the woodwork. Yet the problem was never a lack of players, but the fact that the game offers no opportunity to corral them all into a single Car Meet spot. On any given game server, players are strewn between customizable Forza Horizon 6 houses, three different Car Meet spots, and actual in-game activities such as races and mini-games. For Car Meets to work, they’d need to be substantially easier to queue up for and interact with.

Find all 10 pairs

The only case in which a Car Meet works as it should is when players have already joined a convoy and are actively interacting with others. This sort of defeats the purpose of a Car Meet, where everyone should have a chance to randomly discover new players and their spruced-up vehicles without actively going out of their way to do so. Thankfully, Forza Horizon 6‘s other novelties are better realized, with used Aftermarket Cars being a particularly appreciated addition.

Unless Playground Games intervenes, the only hope for Car Meets is that they may get more populated as players wrap up all the events and side-activities in Forza Horizon 6 and simply wait for long periods of time until others discover them at Daikoku, for example. This is unlikely to actually work, though, because Forza Horizon 6‘s seasonal events are only just getting started, and players will have plenty of stuff to keep them busy for months or even years on end.