With the upcoming release of Horizon: Forbidden West in only nine days, Guerrilla Games has shown off twenty-two seconds of the game running on a base PlayStation 4. Recently, the last generation versions of next generation releases have been in the news thanks to Dying Light 2 Stay Human, which turned out to be extremely poorly optimized on last generation systems.
The footage shows Aloy running past a shrine that has wild fauna all around it, with water and boars freely roaming the plains. You can also hear thunder in the distance, but beyond that there’s not a huge degree to be gleamed from this clip. It’s a good sign that they’re releasing footage of a last-generation version of the game, but it’s not enough to make a conclusion on the performance of the game.
There’s obviously a large degree of concern over how focusing on a cross-generational release will affect games like Horizon: Forbidden West and God Of War: Ragnarok. As is obvious from the clip, the game loses some of the detail and the draw distance of the next-generation versions of the game. It’s just a case of whether it holds back design elements of the game and how much it affects internal development of the game.
Horizon: Forbidden West is the sequel to the 2017 game Horizon: Zero Dawn. It was revealed during the Playstation 5 reveal event and since then we’ve been drip-fed information of the game until recently, in which PlayStation had a long gameplay showcase showing the improvements of the game upon the original and how Guerrilla Games is using the next generation technology to their advantage. Horizon: Forbidden West promises to be the first PlayStation exclusive of the year, so there’s a lot riding on this game to set the tone for the rest of the year.