It's hard not to recommend Horizon Zero Dawn to anyone looking for a game about exploration. Horizon Zero Dawn has a huge map that stretches far and wide across all sorts of corners of post-apocalyptic America, full of deadly machines and teeming wilderness for Aloy to explore, but no matter how much ground the player covers, there's almost always something else to do. That spirit is bound to carry over into Horizon Forbidden West. The upcoming sequel will take players into the infamous uncharted lands west of the first game's setting, as the title indicates. That means an all new map with all new places for players to hike, climb, and delve.
A new map is bound to carry new biomes and terrain, putting familiar exploration in a new light. Trailers for Horizon Forbidden West indicate Aloy might spend some time swimming as well, which would mean a whole new type of exploration. Of course, all that exploration means there's a lot of terrain to render. Thankfully, the PS5 comes well equipped to handle it. Sony's new console comes equipped with a solid state drive, or an SSD, which is notoriously perfect for loading things quickly and efficiently. Guerrilla Games is set up to have a lot more liberty with designing the Forbidden West in excruciating detail.
Horizon Forbidden West - Down to the Last Leaf
Examining the types of terrain that will be in the Forbidden West gives fans a good picture of how hard it'll be for a console to render everything at once. It's well known that Horizon Forbidden West has a heavily forested map, as the overgrown San Francisco indicates. Foliage and vegetation are notorious for being burdens on consoles and PCs to render; traditionally, game developers have had to come up with techniques to simulate thousands of leaves on a tree rather than actually detailing the leaves. With the power of the SSD, Guerrilla Games can sharpen the already graphically impressive world of Horizon even further by doubling down on the detail in greenery.
That's not the only type of terrain that the SSD will help with. The aforementioned aquatic exploration will really benefit from it too. If Aloy is diving into the waters along the Pacific Coast, the PS5's SSD will be extremely helpful in rendering schools of fish, underwater plants, water physics, sunken cities, and so on. Aquatic environments often demand a lot of diversity and detail in design to capture the feeling of swimming through a coral reef or a kelp forest. Horizon's developers can get some really sharp graphics and physics in place to entice players into this new dimension of navigating the wilderness as Aloy.
An Accessible Wilderness in Horizon Forbidden West
Beyond the terrain that will load faster and look better on an SSD, combat will be probably better off, as well as stealth. It'll probably be easier for the PS5 version of Horizon Forbidden West to load enemies, giving players more opportunity to strategize before battle and navigate around dangerous areas. Guerrilla might also be enticed to make ambitious random encounters in Forbidden West, since the SSD might mean the game loads much farther off areas than usual, giving AI more time to move on Aloy's position and making for speedy and surprising randomized events.
One hopes that Horizon's developer doesn't get too ambitious for the sake of PS4 players, though. Not every fan of the franchise is guaranteed to upgrade to the new console before the game comes out. It'd be a bad look if the PS4 version was vastly inferior in terms of graphics and load times, yet Guerilla Games would ideally find a way to optimize the game on the older console and deliver a sequel that stands up admirably next to Horizon Zero Dawn. For PS5 players, though, there's lots of benefits to reap. In order to best appreciate the developer's work, fans on PS5s are recommended to stop and smell the roses.
Horizon Forbidden West will release on PS4 and PS5 in late 2021.