Ray Tracing support was briefly considered for the Horizon Forbidden West PC port but was dropped for several reasons, including the game’s scale.
Speaking in a new interview with Digital Foundry, Nixxes’ Michiel Roza and Guerilla Games’ Jeroen Krebbers commented on ray tracing support, saying that it was definitely considered but was ultimately dropped due to the scale of the game, the hours of cinematics, and the game’s already great looking visuals and strong direction, which Nixxes didn’t want to mess up.
One more reason why ray tracing wasn’t implemented in Horizon Forbidden West is the fact that a lot of the content is alpha-tested trees, which is hard to ray trace against, even for shadows. The scalability between the PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 5 meant the team had to focus on things that would work between them, and ray tracing wasn’t obliviously among them. Guerilla, however, really likes the tech, so ray tracing may be implemented in their future titles in some capacity.
Horizon Forbidden West is now available on PC, PlayStation 5, and PlayStation 4 worldwide. You can learn more about the game by checking out Alessio’s review.
Horizon Forbidden West is a worthy sequel to Zero Dawn in every way, proving that Guerrilla is no one-hit wonder when it comes to the action RPG genre. This huge and beautiful world has an incredible amount of things to do and most of them are really fun, thanks to improvements to combat and traversal. The game also features another great storyline that will get fans talking about the inevitable sequel.
