Very few games this generation have wowed on the visual front as much as Horizon Forbidden West. Launched in February 2022, the open-world action adventure title was an absolute stunner on both PS4 and PS5.
2023’s Burning Shores expansion pushed the graphical envelope even further, as its PS5 exclusivity allowed it to harness the full potential of the current-gen machine. 2 years after launch, Forbidden West has been released on PC in a neat package that includes the DLC. However, Guerrilla’s recent comments suggest that work started on it far earlier than we could’ve thought.
Work On The PC Version Started In 2023… Or Did It?
Forbidden West‘s PC port was a team effort between Guerrilla Games and Nixxes Software, the latter of whom is a renowned porting studio that was acquired by Sony in 2021, in an effort to speed up their PC release pipeline.
Eurogamer recently interviewed key developers from both teams to talk about how Guerrilla and Nixxes worked together to bring Horizon Forbidden West to PC. When asked how long it took and how the teams got along, Nixxes principal lead programmer Patrick Den Bekker said:
We normally start a project a year before it is released, so that would be February or March last year.
Guerrilla lead tech programmer Jeroen Krebbers added, “We at Guerrilla internally have a PC version, which is not the same as shipping a PC game… we use that for our internal tooling and also for verifying that our rendering backend and all of our subsystems work on PC, to make sure that can run tooling and bakes and things like that without requiring a PlayStation for everything. And that’s usually the basis of starting a port, right?” He capped off his comment with:
So there’s a bunch of legwork that we do internally that is basically handed over to Nixxes, and they do the magic.
Krebbers’ revelation of an internal PC version of the game is interesting, even more so that it’s used for internal tooling and ensuring that it maintains compatibility with PC. This means that Guerrilla has introduced PC compatibility into their highly advanced Decima engine to make it easier for games built on it to be ported eventually. Death Stranding 2‘s PC port may not take too long.
Nixxes Added Lots Of Features To Horizon Forbidden West
The Nixxes developers further explained their porting process. Den Bekker spoke about the tricky bits of changing Guerrilla’s in-house PC version:
We started with the renderer, which is already there and mostly feature-complete. Then we work to make that into a shippable PC game, because it only runs on certain GPUs on the tooling side, it just makes assumptions. It’s also designed to do high-quality bakes, which doesn’t mean it performs well on every machine.
“They Cost How Much?”: The Last of Us Part 2 and Horizon: Forbidden West’s Budgets Were Astronomical
Principal optimization programmer Michiel Roza mentioned another important part of PC releases: graphics settings. The PS5 version has 30fps, 40fps, 60fps, and uncapped framerate modes (ranging between 1440p and 2160p), but doesn’t allow selection of granular graphics settings. “It also didn’t have any scalability options. So that’s something we added,” said Roza.
Finally, senior systems programmer Craig Leach stressed the addition of keyboard and mouse controls, explaining “Also, it only allowed you to use the keyboard and mouse for debug stuff, so we need to add keyboard and mouse controls in. And obviously you’ve got a lot more controllers available on PC.“
The interview is packed full of insight, but Guerrilla’s admittance of in-house PC versions is fascinating. They seem to have followed Naughty Dog’s lead in baking PC compatibility within their proprietary engine. Could this be one step closer to PlayStation first-party games releasing day one on PC? It’s too early to tell, but with the success of Helldivers 2, we wouldn’t rule it out.
Horizon Forbidden West: Complete Edition is out now on Steam.
