Guerilla explains why Horizon Forbidden Shores is a PS5 exclusive

One of the biggest first-party PS5 titles to have been released so far is Horizon Forbidden West. Despite it being a major improvement over the first game in many aspects, the sequel to 2017’s open world action adventure title still came to PS4 as well as Sony’s latest system. That said, when the game’s Burning Shores expansion was announced it was revealed to be only coming to the PlayStation 5. The team at Guerilla Games have now explained why.

Taking to the PlayStation Blog, Gillen McAllister, the Senior Specialist for Content Communications at SIE, sat down with Forbidden West’s game director Mathijs de Jonge to discuss the reasons behind Burning Shore’s PS5 exclusivity, asking “How have you taken advantage of PS5’s power to create Horizon Forbidden West: Burning Shores?”

In response, the director claimed that “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” revealing that there “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.”

Going into slightly more depth, Mathijs de Jonge continued: “Using the PS5’s processing power we can run certain simulations at higher speed creating more lifelike results and a better gameplay experience”. This is of course on top of the improvements already introduced with the PS5 version of Forbidden West.

Back with the first Horizon game, Zero Dawn’s Frozen Wilds expansion brought with it a number of tech improvements including snow deformation – and that was still running on the original PS4. With Burning Shores coming exclusively to PS5, it will be interesting to see what the team at Guerilla Games have been able to accomplish when Horizon Forbidden West: Burning Shores releases on the 19th of April.

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KitGuru says: Have you played Forbidden West? What platform did you play it on? What PS5-specific improvements are you hoping to see with this DLC? Let us know down below.

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