Guerrilla has always been a tech powerhouse, but we’re genuinely flabbergasted by this first official footage of Horizon Forbidden West running on a PS4 Pro. Sony has, irritatingly, opted to present it as a series of small GIF-like video clips on the PS Blog, but we've embedded one of them above. In short, though, they’re super impressive.
Here are some screenshots as well, again, captured on PS4 Pro:
Now, obviously the game will look better on a PS5 – that’s to be expected, of course – but if you’re yet to purchase a new-gen console then you can be content knowing that you’re going to be getting a visual feast on your creaking last-gen system. It does look seriously impressive, and is a true testament to all of the optimisation work that’s clearly gone into this.
The clips also showcase some new areas and enemies. We get a look at Plainsong, home to the Utaru tribe, which is nestled among giant satellite dishes. We also see a battle against both the Clamberjaw and Bristleback, two fearsome foes who will keep Aloy on her toes. Oh, and the game’s gone gold now by the way, so no more delays.
[source blog.playstation.com, via twitter.com]
Comments 61
Even? The last one was gorgeous too, why the doubt?
Nice to see the old warhorse can still kick arse! And no stupid glowing Aloy either (that's one next gen 'improvement' I can do without!)
Good to know, but I'm currently playing Horizon Zero Dawn on a PS4 slim and it still looks great. If Forbidden West stays at that level then I'll be happy.
dang ._. if it looks that good on PS4, we're in for a treat on PS5...I've had my copy preordered for months, getting the limited edition with the figurine and CAN'T WAIT. Between Horizon, getting R+C for Christmas and my stupidly long backlog going back to games from 1995, I may have to book some time off work...
Just imagine how Horizon 3 will look like without PS4 weighing it down!
I'm just curious about the difference in performance from PS4 to PS5
Looks gorgeous, but I'll still wait for a performance analysis before I pull the trigger.
Let's not kid ourselves, the PS4 is an ancient piece of hardware.
The gameplay looks amazing and I will happily enjoy it on PS4.
I want to see two comparisons:
1. PS4 vs PS4 Pro vs PS5 on Horizon Forbidden West
2. A comparison between HZD vs HFW on base PS4
I want to see the advancements on the old tech. They must be pushing it to the limits.
Well, as someone who's going to experience this on the PS4, I'm sure glad to see these. But as far as there are no gameplay differences, I'm all good.
Zero Dawn still looks pretty gorgeous on PS4. Feb 18th can come soon enough.
I mean, it's a PS4 game first. You'd think that would be a given.
Once devs aren’t limited to dealing with PS4 as well, games are going to look insane when made for PS5.
This looks great for PS4 players
I’m glad it’s going to look so good on PS4. My buddy is still rocking a PS4 Pro. So he will have a visual feast on his hands.
As for me, I’ll be enjoying it on PS5.
@Kienda
I’m sure the guys at Digital Foundry are literally licking their lips at the opportunity to do so. They’ll probably throw Zero Dawn PC in there for good measure.
@xyopic as a recent ps pro upgrader the leap to 4k is astounding even for slightly older games such as (Rise of the Tomb Raider for example). Had to clean it out and change the thermal paste and now its quiet as a mouse too.
Glad to hear this looks great on the Pro, I have no plans to upgrade yet.
My guess is Sony will redesign PS5 for the big PSVR2 launch to come.
I want a smaller unit with less tart, more USBs, and at least 1TB internal SSD.
Are we going to be able to turn that terrible PS5 hero lighting off?
The last clips of ps5 footage looked so bad, even major NPCs had it and it genuinely made the visuals looks worse and separated aloy and the npcs from the world in a very jarring and unrealistic way.
I still don't understand the idea design wise, behind adding an additional and unrealistic lighting source.
@Kienda PS4 may be reaching its limits but that's normally when the devs squeeze something amazing out of the hardware. Thinking back to the days of the Spectrum, C64 and Amiga, the latter games pulled some amazing stuff out of the hardware that wasn't thought possible.
@Starkei Not seen any reason to upgrade from a Pro yet (unless it gets too loud) and this game just goes to prove how much life the old stager has still got in it. Mine's quiet as anything and has a fast SSD in its internal drive slot.
Due to hideous green screen 'hero lighting', I'd dare to say that the old version looks a bit better in the screens we've seen so far - hope they offer an option to turn that off for PS5 owners.
Just proves great programming, optimization, can still get brilliant results on older tech. Also a testament to the engineering behind the PS4, still a superb system. I love my retro games, devs still making C64, Megadrive, Neo games after all these years. That's what makes these systems so great.
This game looks like it has twice the detail compared to the first one. Kinda surprised it's running on a PS4 at all.
I wish gameplay for the weaker model was shown for crossgen games as most people playing these games will be playing them on a PS4 Slim (or XB1S in the case of Xbox games).
Kinda curious to see what the drawbacks to the game are on base PS4. It's pretty darn old hardware at this point.
Well HZD on base PS4 looks better than most open worlds and even linear games so... it's about the DEV.
@sanderson72
I’m 50/50 on the hero lighting. I want to see what it looks like on my tv before I make judgement.
Regardless, PS5 is getting a 60fps mode. That’s how I’m going to play it. Replaying Zero Dawn with the patch was a mesmerizing experience at 60fps.
@Ralizah
The main weakness will be load times.
The Pro is a little more insulated since it uses SATA 3 and you can swap in a good SSD to take advantage of it.
SATA 2 (what base PS4’s use) is slow as sin, which is why SSD upgrades didn’t make a whole lot of sense for PS4 base or slim owners.
I’m suspecting the opening load on cold boot will probably be a minute and a half or so.
With Pro and a good SSD, that’s cut down to 45 seconds or less.
On PS5 (the version I’ll be playing), I’m expecting a fade to black. Less than a second or two.
I nnneeeeeeddd to play this now! BAH can't wait
Im still playing on my ps4 pro.and the games still looks amazing.god and horizon zero dawn complete edition is superb.glad horizon forbidden west looks cool on the ps4 .word up son
You had me at Robo-Raptor Mounts. Time to beat the first game finally.
@Grumblevolcano
From a visual standpoint it’ll look really, really good.
The only big things I see the PS4 Pro and PS5 getting visually are higher resolutions, greater vegetation density, and less aggressive LOD.
That last one will be the most noticeable for average gamers. Basically on PS4 Pro and PS5 you’ll be able to see higher resolution textures at greater ranges over base PS4.
But from what we’ve seen so far, the game is a visual masterpiece on all three platforms. The differences won’t be huge if we talking purely about graphical settings.
Of course it does it’s cross generation.
There is nothing that has come out of any studio across any platform that screams next generation and probably won’t be for at least a year.
Taking nothing away from HFW amazing game and developers.
But we won’t be at next generation engine demos we have seen for a while yet.
@xyopic I never said the PS4 Pro was trash, or incapable of running open world titles like H:FW. But let's face it, those old Jaguar cores, 8 gigs of RAM plus a slow HDD don't inspire confidence. However, I do trust Guerilla so I'm hoping that the game will run at a stable framerate.
@TheRedComet Load times go without saying. The original already had some pretty brutal load times.
The imagery looks significantly more detailed and dense than it did in HZD. I already kind of assumed HZD and GoW represented the peak of what the PS4 could run smoothly, so I'm genuinely curious what suffers in the base PS4 version.
Looks good! Still, why is it $10 extra on PS5!! Can anyone confirm that PS4 version can run at 60fps on PS5?!
looks great. but come one now, did the world forget about us poor ps4 owners? there are about 90m (base) ps4's in the wild and sony cannot be bothered to provide a few screenshots? talk about throwing your install base under the bus.
outside of higher resolution, framerates and fatster loading, i have a feeling the ps5 version will be almost identical to the ps4 pro. this game was built long before the ps5 specs were finalized and will not fully take advantage of the ps5 in any way, shape or form. we will need to wait for horizon forbidden east to see what the ps5 can do
@NB-DanTE Buy the PS4 version, it includes a free upgrade to next gen. Pretty much no reason to get the PS5 version, especially digitally.
@CptH0vvDy
I’m I to understand the PS5 version is £70 but you can by the PS4 version £60 and get a free upgrade to PS5 version.
Is this for digital and disc based versions.
Therefore why is the PS5 version not £60 the same price as the PS4 version.
Is this Sony being Silly again?
@Ralizah
Forbidden West is what will max out the PS4. This will be the system’s final hurrah from a technical standpoint. It won’t get any better than that.
The Pro still has some life left in it, but it’s hobbled by its Jaguar CPU. The GPU still has more to give, though.
For the PS5, we haven’t even scratched the surface yet. It’s the CPU that is such a huge improvement. It’s a quantum leap over the Jaguar. And that is what is going to be leveraged heavily in future games built solely for PS5.
It crazy how the ps4 version look better than most Xbox exclusives lol.
Even this article has negativity ,complaining about the video format Sony has chosen to use on their website 😂😂😂 could you not embed the video gifs in the article ? Or maybe change the format if it wasn't compatible with the site ?
But are they showing the PS4 version because they had to downgrade it? Is the PS5 version going to look the same? From the first PS5 trailer this looked like a stunning truly next gen game - but from the latest stuff it looks like last gen.
@Palleon
How does it not look next Gen? It’s gorgeous.
Zero Dawn is pretty old now and it’s still a stunner. This game looks even better, even on PS4.
@Dezzy70 That's correct. Applies to both disc and digital. Only reason to buy the PS5 disc version is for archival purchases, otherwise get 2 versions of the game for 10 bucks/quid less. 'Silly' is one way to put it; I'd call it shady and manipulative, myself, but I suppose we should be grateful there's a free upgrade path at all.
@CptH0vvDy
Thanks for the tip off anyway, was going digital PS5 so might as well go PS4 and free upgrade.
Yes some of Sony practices lately don’t seem great on their big loyal fan base. They do it all the time to their tv fan base. Hope it’s not catching on to the gaming side.
They lucky they make amazing games with brilliant studios else they would be in trouble this new generation.
I already multiplatform now on series x, mainly due to VRR, as I hate screen tear and games like farcry 6 on PS5 do screen tear a bit.
Also of course as well as the amazing Sony exclusives Xbox has released FH5 and Halo which I enjoy.
Me Switch is quiet at the minute but hope it picks up this year.
Well, it is a true PS4 game, not a true PS5 game.
@Dezzy70 No problem! Yes, Sony is very lucky to have such amazing in-house developers. Funny you mention that screen tearing in Far Cry 6. The game is great, love the whole series, but that issue has me forcing myself to finish it.
Ubi really needs to start optimizing their games better for console. Although, I was pleasantly surprised at how well Watch Dogs Legion performed, as lackluster as the game itself was to play.
Even on ps4 Pro is still looks more next gen than anything on xbox and is more technically impressive than say Returnal and ratchet and clank and that's huge considering it's an open world game which is more demanding on the hardware, February 18th can't come soon enough
Finally something worth turning on my PS5 for the first time in months. Been mostly enjoying my Switch OLED ( Mario Party, Shin Megami, Pokemon BD) and PC (FH5, Halo, AoE 4). The next few months is gonna be great for PS5 owners.
@CptH0vvDy
Yea Ubisoft could do better with optimisation on consoles especially farcry 6.
But come on Sony you haven’t even updated your top end OLEDS of 2021 with VRR, which will never happen now. Also your PS5. It’s crazy in 2022 they are still missing this feature after over one whole year.
It’s is piss poor to your loyal customers.
You may have sold me a PS5 but you lost me to LG C1 65”in the tv market and that is lot more money.
I honestly heard my old Pro fan echo through my living room looking at these screens.
I’ll hopefully enjoy it in peace on PS5 😂
This looks awesome but I wonder if PS5 version will be held back by the PS4 version limitations. Either way, I will be enjoying it.
@TheRedComet HZD had very few loading screens, IIRC just when you die, fast travel, or load a save. It used ambient occlusion and just-in-time loading to pull stuff into memory just before you reach it - partly this was achieved by limiting traversal speed (audiovisual tricks made you feel like you were going faster on some mounts, but if you time a journey brethren two points, it turns out you weren't), and by spreading everything out so there was enough distance between memory-intensive areas.
I'd expect the main difference to be in the levels of geometric detail on display, texture resolution, ambient NPCs with any complex behaviour/ level of AI, and draw distance.
Any considerable difference in load time would be evidence that the PS5 can handle more of all of the above, as the level design will provide the same time budget for seamlessly loading into memory on all consoles.
Hmmm. May need an SSD upgrade in my pro for this. The first one took absolutely ages to load and this will fare no better on an HDD I'm sure.
Still images mean very little these days and the original looked incredible in photo mode. And photo mode allowed for some stupendous screenshots, but we all know, that ain't what the game looked like in motion. Still, no doubt that it will be running smoothly at 30fps on the OG ps4 at sub 1080p resolution.
Honestly, it would matter very little to me if the visuals are slightly gibbed or resolution reduced, because HZD scratches my look-how-they-animated-EVERYTHING-sooo-well itch. I just love how everything moves in that game.
@Jayofmaya You won't regret it!
I've got the Crucial MX500 3D NAND SSD in mine and its benefits are two-fold:
1) it reduces load times significantly and
2) the Pro runs quieter and cooler as it's not spinning platters round and therefore generates less heat.
While you're at it, pop the Pro's lid off and clean the fan area (hoover any fluff, cotton-buds with cleaning alcohol for the blades if they're coated).
@Divergent95 Review embargo lifts on February 14th.
very good on PS4 😍😍😍
I seriously doubt my launch unit PS4 could live through this game...sadly I may have to wait until I have a PS5.
@WanderingBullet But probably for the PS5 version only. I do hope I'm wrong though...
@Divergent95 Hmm, hadn't thought about that...
I think they will, though. Surely they wouldn't do what CDPR did with Cyberpunk 2077?
@sanderson72 Great. Sounds almost... Crucial. -ba dum tsh-.
Will give it a clean, too. Dust is so annoying, I usually clear the fan ports once a month but I can imagine the inside probably could do with a clear out by now
@lolwhatno on PS5?
@Jayofmaya Ha, ha!
I think the Crucial ones are about £75 for a 1TB at the moment. I use the Pro's old HDD in a £7 external case thereby doubling my game library space.
With the SSD the Pro boots from switch-on cold to fully operational dashboard in about 20 seconds.
I tried Horizon Zero Dawn and to launch from the title screen to continue from where I last saved took about 15 seconds.
There are various YouTube videos about taking the lid off the Pro & Slim models - just ignore the horrid cracking noise as the lid detaches - it's most unnerving but it's fine!
@sanderson72 Thanks for the info! And for on boot up times. I already use an external 2gb hdd so not sure what I'll do with the pro hdd.
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