The Guerrilla Games team considered dropping flying cars in Horizon: Forbidden West due to PS4 hardware limitations, which proved to be a major hurdle to implement this game mechanic.
This was revealed by studio director Jan-Bart van Beek during a speech at Develop: Brighton, talking about the difficulties of developing Horizon: Forbidden West on two consoles of different generations. As we know, in the end the team succeeded.
Until almost the last moment, we didn’t know if we would be able to support the flight mechanic on PlayStation 4. We asked ourselves, “Should we completely remove this feature from the game? It would lead to disaster.” But in the end we did it: we sacrificed part of the code to the gods!
Angie Smets, Head of Development Strategy, spoke about the challenges of developing Horizon Forbidden West on two very different hardware consoles. In particular, the team had the ambitious goal of running the game flawlessly on PS4 while also making the PS5 version capable of showcasing all the console’s strengths.
In the first part of the project it was very difficult to focus on the PS5 and raise the bar for quality, and in the second half it was very difficult to get the PS4 to catch up with us.
“We wanted every Horizon screenshot to show the difference,” added Technical Director Michiel van de Leeuw, “clouds, vegetation, fabric, skin, and we had to look at all these elements and understand that we can do, because if you take a screenshot, you should always be able to tell which version it is.”
