HORIZON FORBIDDEN WEST
Fresh from uncovering one mystery, Aloy is heading for parts unknown in Horizon Forbidden West – it’s sure to be one wild, wild adventure
Five good reasons why you should kit up and go west on Aloy’s next adventure.
Since its reveal at Sony’s Future Of Gaming showcase we’ve learned more about Horizon Forbidden West, enough to know this is going to be an old-fashioned system seller.
Set after the events of the first game, Aloy is venturing west into the unknown and mysterious region known in-game as Daunt. Many people from the Carja clan have tried to tame this wild region, and vanished without trace. It’s the Bermuda Triangle of Guerrilla Games’ robo-neolithic world, one filled with new creatures, vast environments, and lost tribes.
The teaser trailer released in June revealed a world of epic storms, Jurassic mechanised monsters, and new dangers. Game director Mathijs De
Jonge has since shared more details of what we can expect from Aloy’s next-gen debut…
BRAVE NEW WORLD
The game’s set between Utah and the Pacific Ocean, with San Francisco and Yosemite Valley confirmed to be locations we’ll be exploring. The famous Golden Gate Bridge has fallen into the ocean but its iconic red towers remain intact and overgrown, making the vista recognisable. A Horus-class Metal Devil lies at its base.
“With the additional power of the
PS5 we can make that world even more detailed, more vibrant, more immersive,” said Mathijs De Jonge in a recent PlayStation blog post.
We can see it in motion as Aloy climbs a sandy ridge to glimpse an army on the horizon; she wipes ancient dust from a Chinatown sign, and we realise a devastating earthquake has cracked, raised, and lowered vast areas of what was San Francisco.
“DOZENS OF NEW CREATURES HAVE BEEN CONFIRMED.”
GOING BELOW
A new world and watery locations breeds new wildlife, or, rather, mechanised life. We’ve seen some of these mechanimals in action, and they’re impressive beasts with more detail and fidelity than those in Aloy’s PS4 outing. Dozens of new creatures have been confirmed by De Jonge, and you need to scan and study them to discover their weaknesses. The massive Shellsnapper can be found in the shoreline and swamp regions. The crocodile-like Snapjaws, on the other hand, lurk around San Francisco’s famous but now submerged Ferry Building. Sunwings are seen gliding over California’s now-tropical biome – can Aloy tame and fly these pterodactyl-like machines?
FULL LOAD
Harnessing PS5’s new SSD, this new world will boot up in seconds, said De Jonge, with little to no loading times. “If you open up the map and fast travel from one end to the other, restarting from a checkpoint will be super-fast,” he said in a PlayStation blog post.
The map size is said to be similar to the original game’s, but De Jonge added the team are going wider and deeper for this sequel. This means we’ll be exploring the sunken ruins of San Francisco as well as swamps, and truly going beneath the surface of this western region.
STORM WARNING
Aloy’s new world is a place of vast and broad valleys, wide and dessicated deserts, and iconic human-made landmarks overgrown and reclaimed by nature. Will we discover how this area of the Horizon universe was affected by the nuclear bombs dropped in the last stages of Operation: Enduring Victory? It’s enticing to think we’ll be navigating craters full of machine parts left dormant since that war.
This landscape will present Aloy with new dangers to overcome and fresh mysteries to uncover. Supercell storms are causing incredible damage and changes to the world, with De Jonge teasing these are causing canyons and fields to flood. We see these swirling tornadoes on the horizon, red electrical energy sparking from within, the resulting ‘red blight’ infecting the land, choking wildlife and crops.
TRIBE TROUBLE
Horizon Zero Dawn’s lore was already pre-loaded with stories of the west, the unknown Daunt region, and its machineblood-drinking tribes in particular. We saw some of these new human communities in the Future Of Gaming trailer, and De Jonge revealed that some of these are peaceful and others much more dangerous.
One of the threatening tribes, shared De Jonge, has learned how to override and control the world’s robotic creatures, turning them into war machines. We’ve already seen the mammoth-like Tremor Tusk, a creature that can cause devastation in the wild, laden with armour and weapons to create an unstoppable elephantine killing machine. Is this Sylens’ doing? We last saw Aloy’s mysterious partner disappearing into the wilderness with the remnants of HADES, the AI gone rogue and cause of mankind’s destruction. Could he be training an army with the skills to control machines?