Horizon Forbidden West Director Reveals Reason Behind PS5 Exclusive DLC

The director behind PlayStation's Horizon Forbidden West has revealed why the game's upcoming DLC, The Burning Shores, will only be coming to PlayStation 5. Back when Forbidden West first launched in early 2022, the sequel to Horizon Zero Dawn was made available across both PS5 and PS4. As such, when developer Guerrilla Games announced that The Burning Shores would only come to PS5, those who experienced Horizon Forbidden West on PS4 were confused by the decision. Now, those at Guerrilla have shed more light on why this move was made in the first place. 

In a new interview on the PlayStation Blog, Horizon Forbidden West game director Mathijs de Jonge spoke candidly about why The Burning Shores would only be landing on PS5. In short, de Jonge expressed that the higher capabilities of the PS5 allowed Guerrilla to stretch their legs a bit more with the game's DLC. Rather than being limited by what the PS4 would allow for, those at Guerrilla were able to do new things with The Burning Shores that they couldn't do in the base game. 

"On Horizon Forbidden West, everything we added or increased was something we'd need to have a plan around how to optimize for PS4 as well," de Jonge said. "On Burning Shores, since we can just focus on PS5, we've been able to charge forward and we're really excited about what we've been able to pull off in creating this stunning post-post-apocalyptic version of Los Angeles."

"Using the PS5's processing power we can run certain simulations at higher speed creating more lifelike results and a better gameplay experience," he went on to say. "On PS5, the Horizon Forbidden West base game runs at a higher resolution and at a higher framerate than on PS4, and assets are more detailed which makes the overall quality much better. There is also a special lighting setup for Aloy that we normally only display during cinematics, but is active on the PS5 at all times. On PS5 we can draw at higher detail much further into the distance, displaying the stunning vistas our players encounters all across the map."

All in all, it sounds like The Burning Shores is going to showcase what Guerrilla is fully capable of when it comes to developing only for PS5 hardware. With this in mind, the DLC could represent our first look at what a future Horizon game developed solely for PS5 might look like. 

Horizon Forbidden West: The Burning Shores is set to launch next month on April 19th. And if you haven't played the base game for yourself yet, Forbidden West has recently been added to the extensive library of free games that are accessible to PlayStation Plus Extra and Premium subscribers.