Xbox One owners now have their second exclusive racing game, Forza Horizon 2, which shipped to stores Sept. 30. It now appears that the showstopping exclusive has also stopped Xbox One consoles themselves. Many Xbox One owners are reporting Forza Horizon 2 freezing issues.
The Forza Horizon 2 bug seems to be limited to early adopters of the Xbox One October system update. Although that’s a small subset of Xbox One owners, watching Forza Horizon 2 freezing up would be disheartening for anyone.
According to forum posts and other complaints, the Forza Horizon 2 glitch causes the game to freeze completely in some instances. In others, the Forza Horizon 2 bug isn’t one of freezing, but of having the road becoming invisible.
In both cases, users have to perform a hard restart/reboot of the console. Doing so does not appear to cause the loss of any game-save data.
According to Microsoft support, the Forza Horizon 2 freezing issue is the result of “an issue with the October preview beta dashboard update that’s causing these freezing/lockups for some users. A fix is incoming soon.”
That would explain in part why not all gamers are experiencing the problem. The October dashboard update preview is only available to a select number of Xbox One owners.
The rumor is that the issue is specifically tied to the Xbox One’s accumulation and subsequent flushing of data in its system memory. Considering the size of the Forza Horizon 2 game world, the Xbox One has to stream, interpret, flush and then re-stream if necessary a whole mess of data. This becomes a bigger issue as gamers drive faster because the console has to manage data at a ridiculous pace.
Forza 2 freezing is the console’s way of saying “enough already!” and forcing the restart to flush memory. One workaround solution may be putting your Xbox One in Energy Saving Mode rather than Instant On, though it’s not been proven.