Horizon Forbidden West’s Dinosaurs Are Suitably Epic In New Footage

Guerrilla Games showed off more of Horizon Forbidden West — which criminally is not titled Horizon One Dawn or Horizon Zero Dusk — at The Game Awards tonight. Take a look:

In case you’ve been asleep since the first time dinosaurs walked the earth, Horizon Forbidden West is the much-anticipated sequel to Guerrilla’s tremendous 2017 PlayStation 4 hit, Horizon Zero Dawn. Open-world games are of course a dime a dozen, but Zero Dawn stood out thanks to its setting: a post-apocalyptic future in which the world is overrun by robot dinosaurs. You played as Aloy (voiced by the inimitable Ashly Burch), an outcast whose superpowers included being really good with a bow and also finding a prototype for Google Glass 3.0 when she was, like, seven years old.

Horizon Forbidden West picks up six months after the end of Zero Dawn. Whereas the first game was set largely in the American Rockies — the equivalent of modern-day Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and Montana — Forbidden West takes Aloy to the Pacific. Every early look so far has made clear that Forbidden West takes place in the remnants of San Francisco.

Sony initially announced Horizon Forbidden West at its 2020 not-E3 event. At this summer’s Gamescom Opening Night Live event, Guerrilla clarified that Horizon Forbidden West would come out on February 18, 2022, for PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5.

In September, Sony unveiled the byzantine pre-order options for Horizon Forbidden West. Somehow, despite there being nine (9!) whole editions, there was no apparent option for upgrading an existing PS4 version to a PS5 version. Anyone who bought the game on PS4 and wanted to play down the line on PS5 would either need to buy the A$125 PS5 version or play the graphically inferior PS4 version via backward compatibility.

Of course, it’s still tough as hell to get your hands on a PS5.

The backlash came fast and furious, spurring Sony to walk that policy back. Sony Interactive Entertainment president Jim Ryan said that anyone who buys Horizon Forbidden West on PS4 will be able to upgrade to the PS5 version for free, citing how the company “missed the mark.” But it’s the last such upgrade Sony will make available at no extra cost. For all future PS4-to-PS5 releases, the company will charge $US10 (A$14) for the cross-gen upgrade.