Horizon Forbidden West Almost Cut An Entire Game Mechanic Due To PS4

Horizon Forbidden West almost didn’t have a major game mechanic due to developer Guerrilla Games’ ambition to support the game on both the PS4 and the PS5.

Studio director Jan-Bart van Beek said at the Develop Brighton conference this week that the game’s flying mechanic could have been cut, but ultimately the coders figured things out. According to GI.biz, Van Beek said one of the challenges with making the sequel was finding new ways to excite players, and one of the ways the team sought to do this was by adding underwater and aerial exploration.

The aerial part took a lot of work and it came down to the wire. Presumably due to the technical limitations of the PS4 relative to the PS5, the team considered simply dropping the flying mechanic from both editions of the game.

“Those were very, very challenging from a technical point of view. It was almost up until the last moment that we didn’t know whether we could support the flying on PlayStation 4. We were like, ‘Do we need to cut the whole feature of the game? That’s going to make such a mess but we got it to work. We sacrificed some coders to the gods,” he said with a laugh.

Forbidden West marked the first time that Guerrilla released a game on multiple platforms at the same time since it released its very first game, Shellshock: Nam ’67, in 2004.

PlayStation Studios boss Angie Smets said that for Horizon Forbidden West, “In the early part of the project, it was really hard to get the focus on the PS5 and push the quality bar there, and in the second half it was really hard to get the PS4 to catch up,” she said.

Technical director Michiel van der Leeuw said the team was very proud of the PS4 edition of Horizon Forbidden West, but also noted that people said the PS5 version was “so much better.” Given that, some people held out on buying the game until they could upgrade to the PS5, but that was a “problem,” the developer said, because the PS5 was hard to find for a good amount of time.

It all seemed to work out in the end, as the game sold more than 8 million copies. A Netflix TV series is now in the works, while Guerrilla works on a Horizon multiplayer game.