Australia is loud. That’s the first thing you notice when you drop into the driver's seat in Forza Horizon 3. It’s not just the roar of a Lamborghini Centenario engine, though that V12 scream is enough to wake the neighbors three houses down. It’s the sound of the cockatoos screeching in the rainforest, the crashing surf at Byron Bay, and the gravel spitting against the wheel wells of a Holden Ute as you drift through the Outback.
Honestly, it’s weird to think this game is nearly a decade old.
Released in 2016 by Playground Games, this was the moment the franchise shifted from a "cool racing spin-off" to the undisputed king of open-world driving. It wasn't just a sequel. It was an overhaul. You weren't just a rookie trying to get a wristband anymore; you were the boss of the Horizon Festival. You picked the music. You expanded the sites. You decided where the next race went. That power trip worked. People loved it.
But there is a massive catch. If you didn't buy it years ago, getting your hands on a digital copy now is basically impossible. Because of licensing messiness with car brands and music labels, Microsoft delisted Forza Horizon 3 from the Xbox and PC stores back in September 2020. It just vanished. If you want it now, you’re hunting down dusty physical discs or praying a grey-market key code actually works.
It’s a tragedy, really.
The Map That Put Everything Else to Shame
Most racing games give you a city. Maybe a few country roads. Forza Horizon 3 gave us a condensed version of Australia that felt like four games in one. You had the high-rise glitz of Surfers Paradise, which felt like a neon-soaked dream at night. Then, ten minutes later, you were bouncing a Jeep over the red dunes of the Outback.
The diversity was the point.
Playground Games actually sent a team to Australia with a custom-built 12K HDR camera rig to film the sky for an entire summer. Every cloud formation, every sunset, every terrifying lightning storm you see in the game is real footage of the Australian sky. It sounds like marketing fluff, but you see it the second the sun starts to dip. The light hits the tarmac differently. It’s orange, heavy, and realistic in a way that even the newer sequels sometimes struggle to replicate.
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The "Goliath" race became a legend here. It's a massive lap around the entire continent's perimeter. It takes about ten to fifteen minutes depending on how fast your car is. Doing that race in a Ferrari FXX K at 250 mph while the sun rises over the ocean is still a peak gaming experience.
What most people get wrong about the "Boss" mechanic
A lot of critics at the time complained that being the "Boss" of the festival felt a bit hollow. They said it didn't change the gameplay much. They're wrong. What it actually did was remove the friction. In the older games, you were forced into races you hated just to progress. In Australia, if you didn't want to race hypercars, you didn't have to. You could just keep opening "Cross Country" events and spend your entire career in a Ford Raptor.
The "Blueprint" system was the real hero. You could change the weather, the time of day, and the eligible cars for every single event. It gave the community a way to make the game their own, which is probably why the servers stayed packed for years after the game was "dead."
The Hot Wheels Expansion Was Pure Chaos
We have to talk about the orange tracks.
Usually, when a "serious" racing sim does a crossover, it feels tacky. Look at some of the later DLCs in other franchises—they're just car packs with a few stickers. But the Hot Wheels expansion for Forza Horizon 3 was a fever dream. It added a literal chain of islands connected by giant, looping, plastic orange tracks suspended hundreds of feet in the air.
It changed the physics. You had to maintain speed to clear loops. There were boost pads that sent your Mustang flying at 270 mph into a giant mechanical dinosaur's mouth. It was ridiculous. It was also some of the most technical driving in the game because one wrong twitch sent you plummeting into the Pacific Ocean.
Then you had the Blizzard Mountain DLC. This was the first time we saw serious snow and ice in the Horizon series. It wasn't just a white texture on the ground; it was a physical obstacle. Your car would slide, the visibility would drop to zero in a whiteout, and you had to rely on your GPS and instinct. It made the game feel like a survival horror title but with rally cars.
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Why you can't find it on the Xbox Store anymore
Licensing is the "Final Boss" of the gaming industry. Think about everything in Forza Horizon 3. You have hundreds of cars from Ferrari, Toyota, Ford, and Lamborghini. You have a soundtrack featuring CHVRCHES, Miike Snow, and Run the Jewels.
Microsoft doesn't own those cars or those songs. They "rent" them for a few years.
Usually, these licenses last about four years. When 2020 rolled around, the clock ran out. Instead of renegotiating and paying millions more to keep an old game alive, Microsoft just pulled the plug. This is the dark side of digital gaming. If you own it, you can still download it. If you don't? You're out of luck.
This creates a weird situation where the physical discs for the Xbox One version are actually holding their value. While most sports and racing games end up in the $5 bargain bin, a clean copy of Forza Horizon 3 still fetches a decent price because it’s the only way for new players to experience the Australian map.
The Toyota Problem
If you play the game today, you'll notice something awesome: a huge roster of Toyota production cars. You can drive a Supra, a Celica, or a Land Cruiser.
This is actually a bit of a time capsule. Shortly after this game, Toyota pulled their production cars from almost all "street racing" games for a few years, claiming they didn't want to promote illegal racing (though they stayed in Gran Turismo). For a long time, Forza Horizon 3 was one of the last places you could actually customize a Mark IV Supra in a modern open-world setting. It makes the game feel like a relic of a different era in car culture.
Technical Performance: Does it hold up in 2026?
If you're playing on an Xbox Series X, the game doesn't have a dedicated "Next Gen" patch like Forza Horizon 4 or 5. It’s stuck at 30 frames per second on consoles.
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For some, that’s a dealbreaker.
On PC, however, it's a different story. If you can find a key, the PC version supports 4K resolution and unlocked frame rates. It looks stunning. Even with the 30fps cap on Xbox, the motion blur is handled so well that you stop noticing the frame rate after about five minutes of driving. The art direction carries it. The contrast between the lush green rainforests and the dusty, orange dust storms in the Outback is so sharp that your brain just accepts it.
The Auction House and the "Rare" Car Economy
One of the best (and most frustrating) parts of the game was the Auction House.
In Forza Horizon 3, some cars were "Horizon Edition" models. They came with built-in multipliers for XP or Credits. They were rare. They were expensive. The community created a legitimate economy around these cars. You had "Legendary Painters" who could list cars for 20 million credits because their designs were so popular.
It felt like a real car community. You'd spend hours hunting for a specific widebody kit or a rare Barn Find that someone had fully restored and tuned. It wasn't just about racing; it was about the culture of owning and showing off a machine that felt unique.
How to actually play it today
If you’re reading this and thinking, "Okay, I need to go to Australia," here is the reality check on how to get it done.
- Check the Discs: If you have an Xbox with a disc drive (Series X or Xbox One), go to eBay or a local used game shop. Look for the "Ultimate Edition" if you can, but remember that the DLC codes in the box are likely expired or already used. The base game is still worth it.
- The PC Key Hunt: This is risky. Sites like CDKeys or Eneba sometimes have leftover keys for the Windows 10/11 version. Be prepared to pay a premium. These keys are rare and the price usually reflects that.
- The "End of Life" Sale: If you happen to already own the game but never got the DLC, you're mostly stuck. Occasionally, Microsoft puts "Platinum Plus" bundles on sale right before a game is delisted, but for Horizon 3, that ship sailed years ago.
Actionable Steps for New Players
If you manage to snag a copy, don't just rush through the races.
- Focus on the Bucket Lists: These are specific challenges scattered around the map. One might have you jumping a hypercar over a forest, another has you drifting a beat-up ute through a construction site. They are the soul of the game.
- Build a "Drift Land" Car: The parking lots and roundabouts in Surfers Paradise are legendary in the Forza community for drifting. Build a Nissan Silvia with a drift tune and just spend an evening there.
- Listen to the Radio: Don't just mute the music. "Hospital Records" and "Epitaph Records" have curated soundtracks that perfectly match the vibe of the Australian coast.
Forza Horizon 3 represents a specific moment in time. It was the peak of the "festival" feeling before the series started to feel a bit too much like a live-service product. It was colorful, loud, and unapologetically fun. While Forza Horizon 5 has the bigger map and the better graphics, it lacks the specific, gritty charm of the Australian Outback and the sheer novelty of those Hot Wheels loops.
If you find a copy, don't let it go. It's a piece of gaming history that is slowly fading into the digital sunset.