Horizon Forbidden West, which was initially released in 2022, is considered one of the most technically accomplished games to be ever produced for PS5. Two years after release, the game got a full release on PC along with the Complete Edition recently in March 2024. The Complete Edition is aimed at adding new features and scaling better across a wide range of CPU and GPU hardware.
The Nixxes team working behind the porting created this new edition of the game by closely collaborating with the original Horizon Forbidden West developers Guerrilla Games. Ahead of the release, the posting specialists spilled some behind-the-scenes secrets and struggles they faced.
The new PC port of Horizon Forbidden West could be lower than the PlayStation version
During an interview with Digital Foundry’s Alex Battaglia, the creators were asked about the UI and user experience options available as part of Forbidden West PC. Notably, the new PC port allows players to change the change graphics settings and watch those changes happen live in the game. They were asked if this required specific engine changes.
To this Patrick Den Bekker, principal lead programmer for Nixxes says,
“One of the bigger challenges is that the PS4 and PS5 versions, they have different data sets that are very optimised for that platform. On PC, we didn’t want to have separate downloads for separate configurations, because it also conflicts with the live toggling of these options. So we decided to pick the highest-quality version, PS5, and then scale that down in some ways that can even go below PS4. That was partially done to be able to do all of these live changes… but that does require some different challenges, you are solving things in a bit different way… but it came out quite nice!”
Michiel Roza, the principal optimization programmer, Nixxes, added how they are always on the look to do everything in real-time, including things that are not real-time. He gives the example of changing the texture quality, saying players won’t usually see that change in one frame because it generally takes some time to unload the textures.
What is different with the latest PC port?
During the same interaction, the team was also asked about some of the learnings they took from the original Horizon Zero Dawn port. Besides, they also revealed what they wanted to do better or differently this time around with the PC port.
The Lead Tech Programmer of Guerrilla, Jeroen Krebbers, responds to this saying for them it was scalability. He elaborates,
“On our side, preparing for scalability… on a console game, you don’t necessarily need all the options that you would require on a PC game. It’s more like a tailored experience, rather than a very customizable experience. So we did a lot of things to make sure that things could be turned on and off… also, in terms of performance, we obviously had to do a lot of work to get a cross-gen game out. That didn’t lead directly to PC scalability, but it informed and helped for sure. Also, just having more experience helped.”
Bekker admits that Nixxes came a bit late to the party of Horizon Zero Dawn on PC since they had just finished working on the final patches. Nonetheless, he shared that they did learn how to handle the PSO caches in the engine, and what approaches worked better than others. “For the most part, we didn’t diverge too much from what we normally do, but every game and engine has its specifics,” he adds.
Roza also adds that at Nixxes, they usually try to improve the shared libraries on every project that they work on. They then share those libraries with other projects, including those that are under active development. With Horizon Forbidden West Complete Edition, they followed a similar drill.
