Horizon Forbidden West: Forbidden Shores, the upcoming DLC for the sequel to Horizon: Zero Dawn, is set to come out exclusively on PS5. And while this does mean that PS4 players won’t be able to experience Aloy’s journey across Los Angeles, it also opened up opportunities for developer Guerrilla Games to make a more detailed and vibrant expansion.

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A recent interview with Horizon Forbidden West’s game director, Mathijs de Jonge, revealed that the PS5’s hardware improvements over the last-gen console gave the developers more resources to work with in Forbidden Shores. In particular, it allowed one of the expansion’s settlements to run with more activity and allow a certain battle scene to feature more action.

Q: How have you taken advantage of PS5’s power to create Horizon Forbidden West: Burning Shores?

A: One of our key priorities with Horizon games is to add a ton of detail and richness to our environments. On Horizon Forbidden West, everything we added or increased was something we’d need to have a plan around how to optimize for PS4 as well. On Burning Shores, since we can just focus on PS5, we’ve been able to charge forward and we’re really excited about what we’ve been able to pull off in creating this stunning post-post-apocalyptic version of Los Angeles.

The cityscape ruins of LA and its surroundings are highly detailed and require a lot of processing power as well as fast streaming technology to run properly; especially when the player is flying over the lands and can see a lot at once. One of the settlements is situated in and around those detailed ruins, and we were able to squeeze a lot of activity in there.

Another notable one is a particular battle scene that requires a LOT of memory and processing power! To achieve this grand vision both technically and creatively, we definitely were thankful for the many advantages that the PS5 hardware brings.

Aside from the DLC itself, the PS5 version of the base game also sports certain improvements over the PS4 version, including better lighting, better framerate and resolution, and other features, such as Variable Refresh Rate.

Q: Horizon Forbidden West delivers fantastic visual effects, animations and immersive audio during combat encounters, especially when battling some of the larger machines. How have you taken advantage of PS5 to deliver these rich visual performances and what can we expect from Burning Shores?

A: Using the PS5’s processing power we can run certain simulations at higher speed creating more lifelike results and a better gameplay experience. On PS5, the Horizon Forbidden West base game runs at a higher resolution and at a higher framerate than on PS4, and assets are more detailed which makes the overall quality much better. There is also a special lighting setup for Aloy that we normally only display during cinematics, but is active on the PS5 at all times. On PS5 we can draw at higher detail much further into the distance, displaying the stunning vistas our players encounters all across the map. We also support 40Hz Mode and Variable Refresh Rate on capable TVs for even more fluid gameplay.

Horizon Forbidden West: Burning Shores is set to launch this April 19 on PS5.

Source: PlayStation Blog