The clouds in the Horizon Forbidden West DLC aren't just pretty, they're "explorable landscapes"

gamesradar.com:

A lot of work has been put into the clouds in Horizon Forbidden West: Burning Shores, so much so that technology has been in development since Horizon Zero Dawn. 

As revealed by Guerrilla community manager Narae Lee via the PlayStation Blog (opens in new tab), the artists working on the Horizon Forbidden West DLC have been dedicated to making the clouds in Aloy's world the best they can be for several years now. 

"In video games, clouds can help convey a mood," the post reads, "along with the abundance of green, clear waters and cragged cliffs, the clouds of Horizon punctuate the world with emotion. To achieve this, they had to be more than white wisps far above Aloy's head; they needed movement, variety, and definition."

The post gives a technical insight into how Guerrilla created the Burning Shores skyline and how they built upon what was already developed for Horizon Zero Dawn in 2017. According to the post, in 2015 principal FX artist Andrew Schneider partnered with principal tech programmer at Guerrilla Nathan Vos, and together the pair developed the volumetric cloud system that we're all familiar with in the original game. 

Fast forward to developing Horizon Forbidden West, and the pair needed to build upon the foundation they had established for the first game. "We looked to artists who were part of the luminism movement for inspiration, like 19th-century painter Albert Bierstadt," Schneider explains, "these painters had mastered the interplay between clouds and the land beneath, using light and detail to create space, producing truly dramatic landscape paintings."

"The cloud systems that we developed for Horizon Zero Dawn and Horizon Forbidden West were fast because they didn't store clouds as 3D objects, but