Stray! Final Fantasy XVI! That Resident Evil 4 make new! Sony’s big stand-of-play showcase outside of E3, which took place last night, was unexpectedly full. But amidst the fray, a core of under-the-radar news flew for a game that’s already out: Horizon forbidden west received a wave of frequently requested features, including a new game plus, in a surprise update.
Horizon forbidden westwhich was released for PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 in February, is the successor to Guerrilla Games Horizon Zero Dawn. Like its predecessor Forbidden West is an open-world game set in a post-apocalyptic version of America in 1,000 years, in which you fight against a whole bunch of giant robotic creatures. It received widespread acclaim at launch, although players have been reporting it for a slew of performance issues – nothing game-breaking, more just things like randomly shimmering graphical flourishes. (These have since been remedied.) But when it was over, it really was over.
Patch 1.14 adds a number of long-awaited features to the game. The big advantage, of course, is the new Game Plus mode, which allows you to replay the game with all the skills and gear you acquired on the first playthrough. There is also a new higher level of difficulty, Ultra Hard. I found that it can only be selected from the beginning of a new game – either New-Game Plus or New-Game Regular. I couldn’t change the difficulty of my primary save file to Ultra Hard. (Okay for me: horizonis hard enough in some places!)
There’s also the new option to reset your skills. On the Skills tab, click in any tree and click the Options button. That’s in addition to one of the biggest fan-requested features: Transmog, which allows you to keep equipped gear’s stats while swapping their appearance with something else in your inventory. On the Inventory tab, scroll down to Outfits and press Triangle over the one you want the main character Aloy to wear. You’ll then see a small eye icon on the item’s icon, indicating you’re carrying it – no hoops to jump through, or deal with strange currency systems.
In that last respect horizon follows in the footsteps of a recent development trend where massive open-world games don’t typically launch with this feature, but are instead added a few months after launch. Ubisoft’s Viking-themed RPG Assassin’s Creed Valhalla get a transmog feature four months after publication in November 2020. CDPRs Cyberpunk 2077first published in December 2020, quietly received a similar system Earlier this year, although it’s half-baked.
horizonThe patch also “fixed” some “issues” that may or may not need fixing, depending on your perspective. For example: Tallnecks – the roving Brachiosaurus-like robots that serve as waypoints to clear the fog of war from the map – will no longer appear to destroy nearby machines when activated. boo
