Horizon Forbidden West’s Flying Was Almost Cut Due to PS4 Limitations

Studio director of Guerrilla Games, Jan-Bart van Beek, revealed during a recent talk at Develop:Brighton that the PS4’s hardware could have led to the studio removing flying from Horizon Forbidden West. The talk focused on the biggest challenges faced by the studio in the game’s development, and especially how the multi-generation console release affected things.

“It was almost up until the last moment that we didn’t know whether we could support the flying on PlayStation 4,” said van Beek, according to GamesIndustry.biz. “We were like, ‘Do we need to cut the whole feature of the game? That’s going to make such a mess’.”

The studio was ultimately able to get Horizon Forbidden West‘s flying mechanics working on the PS4, however, leading to the game ultimately keeping the feature as it released on PS4 and PS5 back in 2022.

Angie Smets, current head of development strategy at PlayStation Studios and previously studio director at Guerrilla Games, said that the team initially focused on the PS5 version of the game, and then the second half of the development period was spent getting the PS4 version up to par.

“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 further elaborated on some of the challenges, especially when it came to raising the bar of quality on the game’s visuals on the PS5.

“We wanted it so that in every Horizon screenshot, you could see the difference,” the technical director explained. “So there was the clouds, the vegetation, the cloth, skin, and we had to look at all these elements and see what we could do because if you had a screenshot, you should always be able to tell which version it is.”

Guerrilla Games has worked quite a bit on supporting Horizon Forbidden West since its release, and the game has since gotten its Burning Shores DLC, which is available only for the PS5 version of the game.