Horizon Forbidden West Promises A PS4 Version With No Compromises

For PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 owners alike, Horizon Forbidden West is definitely one of the most anticipated games on the way. Today, the team at Guerilla Games gave us a rather extensive update on the game, explaining now only how Aloy will evolve as a character in Horizon Forbidden West, but going into some detail about how the game will leverage the PS5's upgraded hardware and what we can expect from the PlayStation 4 version of the game.

The fact that Horizon Forbidden West will launch simultaneously on PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 has been somewhat contentious among those who want to see Sony pour its resources into supporting the PlayStation 5, but according to a new write-up on the PlayStation Blog, Horizon Forbidden West will put the PlayStation 5 to work regardless.

"Each generation of consoles brings extra power that lets us add even denser polygons to our character models, so we can create finer details such as peach fuzz, smooth contouring, or finer texture details and accurate materials expression, to name a few," Guerilla lead character artist Bastien Ramisse said in that blog post today. "And not only do visual aspects benefit from the new PlayStation 5 hardware — we have also increased the number of skeletal joints to bring our deformations and facial expressions to a whole new level for more credible and immersive character performance."

The PlayStation 4 version obviously won't benefit from the improvements made with PS5 in mind, but Guerilla says it won't be some kind of lesser version of the game as a result. In fact, the studio says that the PS5's batch of enhancements "doesn't mean that the PlayStation 4 version will be compromised." In addition, Ramisse says that Guerilla is trying to "ensure that PlayStation 4 players get an equally immersive experience."

If you're looking forward to Horizon Forbidden West, it's worth reading through that entire article, because even though it's a long one, it dives into a lot of the design philosophy behind Aloy as a character. Horizon Forbidden West is out on PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 on February 18th, 2022, and it's then we'll see if players on both consoles are offered an equally immersive experience.