Horizon Forbidden West developer almost cut flying due to PS4 support
The Horizon Forbidden West team considered cutting flying from the game, because it wasn't sure the PlayStation 4 hardware could support it.
Chatting at Develop:Brighton earlier today, studio director Jan-Bart van Beek said Guerrilla faced technical challenges when developing the Zero Dawn sequel, as it was releasing across two generations of consoles.
«It was almost up until the last moment that we didn't know whether we could support the flying on PlayStation 4,» the developer said (thanks, GamesIndustry.biz). «We were like, 'Do we need to cut the whole feature of the game? That's going to make such a mess'.»
In the end, the team managed to get flying to work across both consoles, so Aloy was able to take to the skies on the back of a Sunwing on Forbidden West's release last year. It took some doing, however, with van Beek joking Guerilla «sacrificed some coders to the gods» to get the job done.
Head of development strategy for PlayStation Studios Angie Smets — who was previously Guerrilla's studio director — elaborated further on the challenges faced while developing the cross-generation release.
«In the early part of the project, it was really hard to get the focus on the PS5 and push the quality bar there, and in the second half it was really hard to get the PS4 to catch up,» she shared.
Guerilla's technical director Michiel van der Leeuw added that while the team «pushed the quality bar» on Forbidden West's PS4 version, it wanted the game to look «significantly better» on Sony's newest console.
«We wanted it so that in every Horizon screenshot, you could see the difference,» the technical director explained. «So there was the clouds, the vegetation, the cloth, skin, and we had to look at all these elements and
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