Guerrilla Games has enjoyed one of the most successful launches of the last generation with its 2017 release Horizon Zero Dawn. Despite being a brand new IP, Horizon was able to cement itself as one of the tent pole releases for the PS4 and its protagonist Aloy one of PlayStation's premiere mascots. With 20 million copies sold across PS4 and PC, the developer is back at it once again with the highly-anticipated sequel Horizon Forbidden West, which looks to be building upon the excellent foundations established in the original to deliver a compelling experience that might very well be one of the best games of 2022.
This theme of improving over great beginnings continues in the technical department as well, with Horizon Forbidden West seemingly taking full advantage of both Sony's current-gen machine the PS5 as well as its previous-gen machine the PS4 Pro. To make the game run as smoothly as possible on the two machines which have vastly different compute horsepower, the studio's in-house Decima Engine has also seemingly received a ton of internal updates to its rendering pipeline to make the game both scale well across both platforms - all while delivering a markedly better experience on the lowest target platform.
To that effect, we present a complete technical analysis of Horizon Forbidden West and all of the improvements that it has over the original. Let's begin!