Today Sony shared the disappointing news that God of War Ragnarok (or whatever the game ends up being called) won’t arrive until at least 2022, but at least we’re still getting Horizon Forbidden West this year! Sony and Guerrilla Games just showed a big chunk of gameplay, so it’s definitely coming this year, right? Well… not so fast. In a new interview, PlayStation boss Hermen Hulst talked upcoming release dates, and he didn’t sound terribly confident about a 2021 Horizon Forbidden West launch.
We have, currently, two very big, very narrative-driven games in development: Horizon Forbidden West and the next God of War. And for both of those, they’re frankly affected by access to performance capture and talent. For Horizon, we think we are on track to release this holiday season. But that isn’t quite certain yet, and we’re working as hard as we can to confirm that to you as soon as we can.
So, what’s the hold up? Well, as hinted previously, the pandemic was a big deterrent to something that’s become an increasingly important aspect of Sony’s games – motion capture.
Perhaps the biggest challenge has been when we need specialist locations, often physical locations. Primarily performance capture, audio work. We’ve come up with some really clever solutions to some of this, we built tiny recording studios in people’s houses.
But when you’re doing performance capture for a lot of cinematics, with multiple actors — that’s not so simple to solve. So you’ve got a choice. You could do it later in the schedule, which could cause you problems. Or you could risk the final quality by doing it in a different way. But I can tell you, we’re not going to risk the quality. We want to ship extremely high-quality games, finished games, and we have to do that obviously without pushing our teams to the breaking point.
Horizon Forbidden West is coming to PS4 and PS5. What do you think? Will Guerrilla manage to get the game out this year? Or is Sony’s 2021 lineup being moved wholesale to 2022?
