New Horizon Forbidden West: Burning Shores screenshots were shared online today, providing a new look at the expansion’s gorgeous skyscapes.
The new screenshots, which were shared on the Official PlayStation Blog earlier today, reveal one of the reasons why the expansion is only releasing on PlayStation 5, as its clouds and skyscapes are powered by voxel technology. As this requires handling huge datasets, as confirmed by Narae Lee, Senior Community Manager at Guerilla Games, only the PlayStation 5 could handle them.
Today’s blog post goes over the process of creating the Horizon Forbidden West: Burning Shores’ complex skyscapes and how Guerilla Games went on to achieve the balance between performance and quality, coming up with a solution that reduced rendering time that would work with all display modes that also made everything look better and more realistic. Senior Principal Tech Programmer and graphics engineer James McLaren did the rest, helping the team to take advantage of the PlayStation 5’s capabilities and optimizing the code properly to achieve this balance further.
All of this hard work wasn’t made just for visual spectacle but to make the Horizon Forbidden West: Burning Shores experience more fun. Apparently, these skyscapes will be explorable as players will find tunnels, caves, and other surprises. Depending on the time of day, some of these locations may be harder or easier to discover.
All this sounds very promising, and thankfully it won’t be long before players will be able to go back to the world of Horizon Forbidden West, as the Burning Shores expansion will launch in less than a month, on April 19th. As already mentioned, it will only be available on PlayStation 5.
