Horizon Forbidden West to Feature More Authentic NPCs

Horizon Forbidden West will be released on February 18, 2022–almost five years to the day that Horizon Zero Dawn hit the PlayStation 4 in 2017. During the past half-decade of development, Guerrilla Games has been steadily improving on every aspect of the hit title, and a new report is detailing what players can expect from the game’s characters and settlements. Although there were very few things to complain about when the original title dropped, players felt a bit disconnected from many of Zero Dawn‘s NPCs. It wasn’t that the characters were bad, not by any metric–it was that once a quest was done, many of them were gone. Forbidden West is aiming to change that, according to director Ben McCaw.

“We’ve upgraded our civilians and settlements since the last game with an improved crowd system, better animations, and much better audio, so everything should feel a little bit more authentic and lifelike. The big focus, though, that we wanted to change from the first game to the second, is that you just get to spend more time with key characters. That’s something we tried to do consistently throughout the game. Not just for characters that you meet along the main quest, but also certain side quest characters; they don’t just go away after one quest,” McCaw explained in an article published in Game Informer magazine. Players can also expect to see new facial animations and motion capture work in the game’s cinematics, pushing the processing power of the PlayStation 5.

While Aloy spends much of her time as an outcast in Horizon Zero Dawn, those days are long gone in Forbidden West. Without spoiling the story for those who have somehow missed one of the greatest titles ever made for the PlayStation 4, the game’s protagonist is sure to be a leader in the upcoming game. “Ultimately, it’s the connections with others that make the world worth saving in the first place,” McCaw states in regards to Aloy’s quest to end the blight.

Horizon Forbidden West is scheduled to release February 18, 2022, for PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5. Those purchasing the game might want to clear out some space first, as a report last week lists Forbidden West‘s file size as a whopping 96.4GB–without the day one patch.

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