Sony proves to PS4 owners that they can play Horizon Forbidden West with a short clip

theverge.com:

Horizon Forbidden West comes out on February 18th, and while Sony has spent the bulk of its time showcasing the upcoming open-world title on the powerful next-gen hardware of the PlayStation 5, the game is also coming out for the older PlayStation 4 lines of consoles. To prove it, developer Guerrilla Games has shown off a — extremely brief — preview of the game running on a vanilla PlayStation 4 for the first time.

Since Horizon Forbidden West was first announced in June 2020, Guerrilla Games has almost exclusively shown footage of the Horizon Zero Dawn sequel on the PS5. A short blog post at the end of January showed off PS4 Pro clips, but base PS4 gameplay has been scarce until now (a scant nine days before release).

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The 22-second clip doesn’t give the best idea of how Forbidden West will actually run on Sony’s least-powerful console to get the game — nor is it a particularly graphically intensive sequence. But it’s nice to know that a console released in 2013 can run a AAA flagship title for its next-gen successor while still looking pretty great.

And with Horizon Forbidden West set to release soon, it’ll likely be just a matter of time until players can get a better look at how the game actually runs on older hardware. Either way, players are better off buying the PS4 edition of the game (which costs $10 less but still has a free PS5 upgrade after backlash from players).