Six instalments down the line, and you’d be forgiven for thinking that the Ride development team at Milestone would be able to create a new career mode with its eyes shut.
Not the case. In fact, development for Ride 6 – the latest in the nearly 11-year-old motorcycle gaming series – began before its predecessor’s August 2023 release date.
“The main ideas for the new game and the big elements, such as off-road and the real-world champions, needed some pre-production before the end of Ride 5,” explained Ride 6’s Game Director, Paolo Bertoni, to Traxion.
This was facilitated by the addition of Stefano Zanaboni as the title’s Lead Game Designer, who came across from the yearly MotoGP games while the fifth entry was being completed.
The Italian game creators do have individual teams per game, yet information, techniques and code are shared across other teams alongside a central technical hub.
Monster Energy Supercross, the previously mentioned MotoGP games and Ride entries, for example, use the same Unreal Engine 5 technology, with shared physics teams plus access to the main research and development group.
Once the foundation is in place, the individual features and characteristics can be layered on top.
A less linear career structure
For this latest chapter, where the past three have amassed more than six million unique players, the main fresh addition is Ride Fest – a catch-all brand for a more upbeat theme and an alteration of career event structure.
“One of the most important things we developed for Ride 6 was to leave the player to enjoy the career freely,” highlights Zanaboni to Traxion.
“You have a start point, and the last event is there, but otherwise [the player] will find their own path along the career.”
According to Milestone, there are 22 areas, or buckets, of themed events, 10 of which are for the real-world champions seen in the pre-release trailers – Guy Martin and Casey Stoner, plus eight others, are represented in-game with their own themed challenges.
Once you finish the first ‘theme’, you start unlocking these areas, and it’s herethat the freedom of choice opens up, according to Zanabonie:
“The player [can] just have fun and try to play the events they want to play, going deep into the areas they prefer or maybe leave the others they don’t.”
Ride Fest aims be a cohesive experience
It helps too that the 45-track and ~340-strong bike list is so expansive, from asphalt to drift, from scooters to baggers and superbikers.
Wrapping the events up in a excitable world is the festival, on the surface similar to the anthemic vibe seen in the first Motorstorm and a litany of Forza Horizon games, which Bertoni cedes were inspiration.
“Of course, it was an inspiration.
“But, we didn’t see Forza and say, ‘Okay, we want this’. Instead, we said, ‘We need to feel like the player is in a competition, we need to make the tracks more appealing, we’d like to add real-world champions and we also need to have an experience in the career game mode for people to enjoy with more freedom.
“So we decided we needed a competition, an organised competition, and Stefano [Zanaboni] suggested as being ‘Ride Fest’.
“Then decided that this competition is a festival with the 50 best riders in the world, 10 of whom are the real-world champions.
“So the Ride Fest was what we needed to keep everything together and to put the player into the main spot of the game, because we really want the player to feel like they are racing in a live environment with real people and real racing.”
Flattering comparisons
Once known by fans as ‘the Gran Turismo of bikes’, a result of its in-game licence tests, large roster of machines and currency mechanics, now there are the aforementioned Forza Horizon references too.
It’s something that the development team take in their stride.
“I like to hear that,” chuckles Bertoni.
“Both are great games, of course, and made by large AAA studios, so having our game compared to these games is really appreciated.
“Yet, riding a motorcycle is a completely different thing to me, as your body rides it. You live with the bike. Being on the motorcycle [as opposed to in a car], you smell the oil and the benzina, the gasoline.
“We’ve been to many motorbike racing events, and the public areas of MXGP and SBK are full of people who really love motorcycles and enjoy the racing, and we wanted to recreate that part of the competition.
“I think that Forza [Horizon] is much more on this side of the point of view and with Ride 6, we tried to switch from ‘Gran Turismo’ and more towards a ‘Forza Horizon’ perspective.”
Ride 6 is released for PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S on 12th February 2026, a busy month for racing games.