Recently, Guerrilla Games teased fans with a morsel of talk around how Horizon Forbidden West’s big expansion, Burning Shores, takes advantage of the fact that it’s launching solely on Sony’s new-gen PlayStation 5. Now, we know a little more about just what it means for the game to be unshackled from its last-gen version and what new graphical features we can expect from it come April 19th.
In a new blog post from Guerrilla’s Senior Community Manager, Narae Lee, we learn about the studio’s approach to Forbidden West’s massively scaled-up environment which also saw players take to the skies for the first time, and how a desire to push that experience even more has informed some of the PS5-enabled improvements made to Burning Shores.
[presto_player id=143577]
VIDEO PRESENTED BY PLAYSTATION VR2. CLICK TO LEARN MORE.
One big example is clouds, which in Horizon Zero Dawn and Horizon Forbidden West were created primarily from 2D information to create the effect of 3D clouds. With Burning Shores, the studio set out to create a voxel-based cloud rendering system to create dense and dynamic cloud systems that looked convincing whether the player was on the ground or flying through them.
Boasting about cloud technology, at least the kind that concerns literal clouds, may seem a bit banal of a talking point for a big, exciting expansion but there’s genuinely some cool stuff going on here. You can read the full PlayStation Blog post to learn how Guerrilla tackled balancing the quality of the clouds and the effect at creating a convincing atmosphere with the game’s performance, and how a collaborative effort brough it all together to create the final effect.
The post also teases some new possibilities for flying in Burning Shores, with tunnels, caves and other surprises in store – all offering different experiences and discovery based on the time of day and atmosphere.
Horizon Forbidden West: Burning Shores launches on April 19th exclusively on PS5.
