Horizon Forbidden West is the sequel to Horizon Zero Dawn. Here’s everything you need to know.
Horizon Forbidden West is the highly-anticipated new sequel to the award-winning Horizon Zero Dawn. We don’t have an official release date yet, but official word is that it’s coming to the PS5 and the PS4 at some point in 2021 – though a recent report claims it’s been pushed back to 2022. What we know about Horizon Forbidden West so far is that it continues Aloy’s story. We will see her in a post-apocalyptic western United States in an effort to find a way to stop a mysterious threat known as the Red Blight. The game will feature a large open world that players can explore filled with machines, gadgets and weapons to discover. We’ve now seen a fair chunk of gameplay for Horizon Forbidden West thanks to a recent State of Play from Sony. Across 14 minutes, we got glimpses of some of the new locations Aloy will be able to explore, including underwater, as well as some of the new tools and weapons she’ll be using on her adventure. It’s safe to say what we’ve seen so far is pretty visually impressive, though the game is still a work-in-progress without a solid official release date. If you want all the details about Horizon Forbidden West so far, read on. We’ve collected together the news and rumors below, including its estimated release date, trailer and more. While the Horizon Forbidden West release date was notably absent from the gameplay reveal, developer Guerrilla Games released a dev diary video in 2020 confirming that the Horizon Zero Dawn sequel will release in 2021. We now know it will also come to PS4, too – meaning you won’t have to upgrade to new hardware to play the game. Developer Guerrilla Games took to Twitter shortly after the May 2021 State of Play to address the absence of a confirmed release date for Horizon Forbidden West. While offering nothing concrete, Guerrilla reassured fans that “development is on track” and will have more updates “very soon.” Back in February, PlayStation boss Jim Ryan told GQ he felt “pretty good” that Horizon Forbidden West will still arrive in 2021. Fairly recent social media advertisements have also stated that Horizon Forbidden West will arrive in “late 2021” or “second half of 2021”, meaning it’s likely we won’t see the game until the tail end of this year. However, PlayStation Studios head Hermen Hulst has expressed a cautious approach to the release date in June, saying in a PlayStation Blog Post: “We think we are on track to release this holiday season. But that isn’t quite certain yet, and we’re working as hard as we can to confirm that to you as soon as we can.” In July, a Bloomberg report claimed that Sony has pushed back the Horizon Forbidden West release date to the first quarter of 2022 – though a reason for this hasn’t been given. Neither Sony nor Guerrilla Games have confirmed this delay. We got our latest look at Horizon Forbidden West during a May 2021 State of Play.14 minutes of gameplay were shown off, giving us a better idea of what we can expect from Aloy’s adventures out west. Watch it for yourself below: Sony and Guerrilla Games revealed the first Horizon Forbidden West trailer at the PS5 games reveal event on June 11, 2020. The trailer below provides a three-minute glimpse at the kinds of varied landscapes you’ll explore in the second game, and which machines you can expect to fight (mammoths and alligators, by the looks of it). We also get the sense that Horizon Forbidden West will be heavy on underwater gameplay, based on how much of a big deal the trailer makes of Aloy using her scuba gear at the 1:40 mark above, and the shots of underwater ruined cities. A direct sequel to Horizon Zero Dawn, Horizon Forbidden West takes place 6 months after the end of the first game and will see Aloy travel west from her homeland to a new frontier setting. The reason for Aloy’s journey is to seek out her allies and a solution to the Red Blight, a mysterious organism that’s destroying the natural world and she’ll meet new tribes and new machines along the way. Horizon Forbidden West will take players to locations like San Francisco, Yosemite and beyond, with narrative director Ben McCaw telling GamesRadar that “the vast, vast majority of the game takes place in the Forbidden West”. Game Director Mathijs de Jonge has told IGN that Horizon Forbidden West has a larger, more dense game world than Zero Dawn. According to de Jonge: “The map is a little bit bigger, but in general, we’ve really looked at increasing the density, and adding more content, making sure there’s a lot more to do for the player across the map, and then making that content also engaging by telling little micro-stories.
