Little has been shown ofHorizon Forbidden West’s upcoming DLC expansion, Burning Shores, since itsrevealat the2022 Game awards, however, in a recentPlayStationblog post, Game Director Mathijs de Jonge did give us a bit of a tease as of what to expect, revealing that a certain battle scene wouldn’t run well on PlayStation 4.
As previously confirmed, Burning Shores will only be available onPlayStation 5, a likely disappointment for the decent chunk of gamers that enjoyed Forbidden West on the PS4. This blog post is seemingly an attempt to explainwhythe DLC won’t be available on the PS4, by speaking on what the PS5 will allow the devs to do.
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Most of it is the usual fare regarding the quickness of the SSD and the additional processing power, but there are some specifics that are worth mentioning. De Jonge explains that when developing Forbidden West, everything they added or increased had to be considered under the constraints of the PS4, and since they now only have to focus on the PS5, they can “charge forward” and pull new things off.
De Jonge first mentions that the LA ruins the player will be exploring are “highly detailed” and thus, the PS5’s SSD is necessary to load these details quickly, especially since the player will be able to fly around in their Sunwing without restriction. He also states that there will be a settlement among these ruins and that the PlayStation 5 allowed them to “squeeze a lot of activity in there.”
Finally, De Jonge reveals that a “particular battle scene” required “a LOT of memory and processing power,” so the team was thankful for the “many advantages that the PS5 hardware brings.”
The Burning Shores' only trailer, as seen above, teases a fight with a Horus Titan, a machine that’s been teased as a potential enemy since 2017’s Horizon Zero Dawn.
Though this is no confirmation, it would make sense that fighting an enemy of such an unprecedentedly large scale would be what requires so much memory and processing power. Burning Shores is still slated to release on April 19, so it’s probable that we’ll get a first look at gameplay soon.
