Horizon: Forbidden West

[DisturbedSwan]

 

[Maf]

This looked great but it was hard to look at it and not immediately think of BotW

 

 

But they should take the right inspirations from it. Horizon 1 was following a open world set up of 2001 GTA3 with having a big map, and lots of sections cut off until you passed story missions in a linear progression. There’s nothing wrong with that, it’s not broke, really. But it feels very old and basic. Hopefully with this game they get a lot more expansive with it and enable real climbing (Which it looks like they doing)

 

Graphically it was amazing though. 

[Maryokutai]

Not at all. I expect this to be a holiday 2021 title at the earliest. Probably even further away.

[DisturbedSwan]

 

 

 

[Rikzilla]

Yeah but can you kill dogs and listen to their owners cry in anguish though?

[Maryokutai]

So this is cross-gen as well...?

https://www.pushsquare.com/news/2020/09/horizon_forbidden_west_is_coming_to_both_ps5_and_ps4

 

A bit disappointing. On the plus side, the 2021 release windows looks more believable now.

[mmmark]

What the savings you mean ?

[DisturbedSwan]

Really disappointed this is Cross-Gen. Hopefully it's not gimped too much by having to be playable on PS4 ?

[Maf]

Really disappointed overall to see how much 1st party stuff is cross gen. you expect it from 3rd party. That’s standard. But the fact that neither PS or Xbox are going out there and supporting their new hardware properly, it’s a big let down. 

[one-armed dwarf]

It makes it much easier to sit out the start of this gen, until at least GoWII comes out.

 

Horizon tho is exactly the kinda game that needs these new machines to do some cool shit. Or at least that's what I think.

[DANGERMAN]

Looking at the Spiderman video, there's a clear benefit there to the next gen beyond just resolution and framerate, it looked better than the first game, and there was the ray tracing on top of that. With the speed of the SSD, yes it's not going to be THE BEST use they could have made of it, but an SSD is still going to improve things. Asset streaming and obviously loading, ray tracing, plus the resolution bump, I'm not sure it being cross gen is that big a hindrance to Horizon 

[bellow]

But aren't you getting all those things despite it being cross gen?

 

I can't see where the 'disappointment' comes from. Not at this stage in the next gen, anyway.

[DANGERMAN]

Just now, bellow said:

But aren't you getting all those things despite it being cross gen?

 

I can't see where the 'disappointment' comes from. Not at this stage in the next gen, anyway.

yeah, that's my point, I don't think it's a huge problem

 

Same as you, this point in the gen we hardly ever get a real special game. It'd be nice to get a PS5 built from the ground up game, but I suspect Horizon is still going to feel pretty next gen when it comes out

[Maryokutai]

I'll be honest, my three favourite games from this generation are cross-gen as well (Alien Isolation, Life is Strange, Rise of the Tomb Raider). At the end of the day it doesn't really matter on which platform the games come out as long as they're good. And chances are that games being developed with tools and engines the developers are comfortable with have a better chance at turning out well than those where the wheels have yet to be invented.

 

It will, however, make sure that whatever new stuff next-gen technology makes possible is still far, far away. And I think that's why people are disappointed, particularly when Sony's PR was focused on the "we believe in generations" stuff and whatnot and simply doing the opposite of that. 

[one-armed dwarf]

This got mentioned on the bombcast and I went to go look for it, John Linneman's twitter is frequently very messy with his thoughts on stuff but there's some key stuff here on the decision to go multiplat with Horizon I found interesting. 

 

 

I'm likely not getting a PS5 so I'm not posting that as an anti-poor take or whatever, I just think it is disappointing if design is inhibited like this. It's why it's not the same thing as a PC version of a game having graphics sliders, cause those sliders are still rotating around what the limited capabilities of an Xbox One are and would be lifted up if the game was a PS5 or Series X title.

 

Also I found this interesting in light of the recent Crysis re-release, which actually has simpler and lower rate physics simulation than even the 2007 version of the game! That's largely because it was built with a limited 360 and PS3 processer in mind but it still shows that it's not just about visuals.

 

 

 

This is only a transition period anyway so it's not like the whole gen will be like that but it's the main reason I think I'll hold off on next gen for a while if it doesn't really seem to be a true upgrade at least at first.

 

 

I don't think I've ever updated to a new gen until at least a few years in. Thing is this gen finally shows systems with some fairly capable desktop tier processors in them so the promise for much more innovative titles is there once it gets leveraged. 

 

I guess on the bright side Horizon could have lots of high framerate options.

[Maf]

The limiting design aspect has always been my problem with Xbox’s cross gen strategy and now that cross gen is going to continue into Horizon 2 and be Sony’s strategy as well. Very disappointing.

 

From 3rd parties I understand. But from 1st parties, this is your platform you show me why I should get it.

 

I’m still getting both and legit excited to be plugging in new consoles in about a month but at the same time all this cross gen stuff is a big downer hanging over the whole event and I totally get why people would not buy one of these systems right now. 

 

At least what I’m hoping right now is Series X does 3rd party games to a really high level and the PS5 version of Spidey at least looks significantly better than the PS4 version. Because if it doesn’t it’s going to really sour PS5 launch for me and they’l be hard to trust ever again. I really think what they did was basically false advertising. 

[DisturbedSwan]

3 minutes ago, Maf said:

The limiting design aspect has always been my problem with Xbox’s cross gen strategy and now that cross gen is going to continue into Horizon 2 and be Sony’s strategy as well. Very disappointing.

 

I’m still getting both and legit excited to be plugging in new consoles in about a month but at the same time all this cross gen stuff is a big downer hanging over the whole event and I totally get why people would not buy one of these systems right now. 

 

At least what I’m hoping right now is Series X does 3rd party games to a really high level and the PS5 version of Spidey at least looks significantly better than the PS4 version. Because if it doesn’t it’s going to really sour PS5 launch for me and they’l be hard to trust ever again. I really think what they did was basically false advertising. 

 

On the face of it, yes it's disappointing and I don't like cross-gen anymore than you do. But, I will say, I think we have to wait to see Horizon 2 before we find out how gimped it is. Spidey MM to me looked miles better graphically than Halo Infinite and those are both cross-gen.

 

PS5 still has 3 PS5 exclusives at launch in Godfall, Destruction All-Stars and Demon's Souls, this is still more than the opposition can offer. 

 

It was a little disingenuous but I wouldn't go that far. It was a mistake for sure, but Spencer has also told a few fibs (Halo Infinite etc. won't be held back by Xbox One/Series S) so yeah, it's the time of the year for it. Doesn't make it right I know, but as long as the fibbing stops now it personally won't erode my trust. I do really hope GoW is PS5 only, insider ZHugeEx has hinted as much but that's the only indication we've got right now.

[bellow]

6 minutes ago, Maf said:

the PS5 version of Spidey at least looks significantly better than the PS4 version. Because if it doesn’t it’s going to really sour PS5 launch for me

I honestly think you might be setting yourself up for a fall there. It's going to be pushing it, depending on your definition of significant, to make that work for you.

 

I remember playing RDR2 not so long back, taking a leisurely horse ride thru one of the towns, and my kid came in and thought I was watching a movie. With good art direction I think we're already at saturation point.

 

It's in frame rate, stability, and AI that the next gen will find it's bearings. You've said yourself that you can't tell the difference between 2k and 4k.

[one-armed dwarf]

Beyond just presentation tho a lot of immersion can come from how you interact with the environment and how it reacts. The best stuff in RDR2 was the wildlife stuff but beyond that the world felt very scripted and static to me. You had those random events on the side of the road with robbers and stuff but that felt extremely fake imo.

 

The kind of thing I'm envisioning is the stuff we might have expected from the future of open world games when Far Cry 2 came out (not that that game is brilliant or anything but I remember it having some cool systems). One thing that disappointed me in TLOUII was throwing a molotov into a grassy area and it fizzling out and hitting nobody, I was expecting that there would be a big raging fire like when you light dry grass on fire in FC2. Games have retreated from this sort of thing and pursued visuals only it often feels like.

 

For me this is an even bigger thing than AI cause AI is a much harder problem to solve anyway. A lot of games with great AI are often linear and have fewer branching paths to coordinate and manage. But having the world react to the player's actions is something we could see more of. I mean BOTW even has it to a limited degree, imagine that stuff scaled way up.

 

This threatens to become a bit OT but the reason I post it here is I initially thought Horizon 2 would be the first big showcase for next gen open world. Now I'm guessing it could be Starfield or whatever Bethesda has cooking. It will come but it will be a while but it needs more than just new graphics cards to achieve this stuff.

[bellow]

Good points. I agree. But Maf is specifically talking about how the game will look. In that department I think be may be disappointed.