Horizon Forbidden West's Leaked Alpha Build Offers Rare Behind the Scenes Glimpse

Horizon Forbidden West's alpha build has leaked online. Horizon Forbidden West was one of the biggest games of 2022, even going as far as garnering some award nominations. It was unfortunately overshadowed by games like Elden Ring which released at the exact same time, but Horizon Forbidden West was still a solid sequel that players really enjoyed and helped create more value for the PS5. Although the game was on PS4 as well, many PS5 fans were hungry for a new exclusive game after games like God of War Ragnarok got delayed out of 2021. Horizon Forbidden West ultimately filled that void for first-party games in the first few months of 2022.

Now, those who are really into Horizon Forbidden West, the inner workings of games as a whole, and other rare behind the scenes looks at games are being treated to something rather unique. The alpha build of Horizon Forbidden West has leaked online, allowing fans to see what a game actually looks like when it's in its early stages. This build was seemingly given to play testers in 2020 to play and give feedback on during the game's development, but it's very rough. There's a cutscene that's just made up of storyboards, some voices are just text-to-speech voices, and the game isn't super shiny and pretty yet. However, that's what games look like at this point. It's expected that fans of this stuff are going to dig into these elements and probably find all kinds of interesting nuggets and some even believe this could be used to make an unofficial PC port, though it really remains to be seen if the fundamentals are there to make that happen.

A complete, non-public internal build of Horizon Forbidden West with complete debug enabled Decima engine build has leaked publicly. from GamingLeaksAndRumours

Although Sony is probably extremely unhappy about this being out there, it is fascinating. We don't really get transparent looks at how games are made or what they look like. Everything is always presented on a silver platter, which is how we ended up with people being surprised that Grand Theft Auto VI didn't look very pretty in its leaked gameplay earlier this year.

Do you wish we got more behind the scenes looks at games like this? Let me know in the comments or hit me up on Twitter @Cade_Onder.

[H/T Insider Gaming]