deviated! Final Fantasy XVI! The remake of Resident Evil 4! Sony’s big non-E3 game showcase, held last night, was packed to the brim unexpectedly. But in the middle of the fight flew a news core below the radar for a game that has already been released: Horizon Forbidden West received a wave of much-requested features, including a new game, in a surprise update .
Horizon Forbidden West, released for PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 in February, is the sequel to Guerrilla Games in Horizon Zero Dawn. Like its predecessor, Forbidden West is an open world game set in a post-apocalyptic version of America, 1,000 years from now, where you fight a bunch of massive robotic creatures. At launch, he received great recognition, although the players marked him for a litany of performance issues: nothing that broke the game, more simply things like randomly shining graphic flowers. (They’ve been fixed ever since.) But once it’s over, it’s really over.
Patch 1.14 adds a lot of long-requested features to the game. The most important thing, of course, is the addition of this new game mode plus, which allows you to play the game again with all the skills and equipment obtained with your initial game. This is combined with a new higher difficulty level, Ultra Hard. I found that you can only select from the start of a new game, either a new game or a normal new game. I was unable to change the difficulty to Ultra Hard in my main save file. (Okay, Horizon is hard enough in some places!)
Screenshot: Sony / Kotaku
There is also the new option to reset your skills. From the “Skills” tab, click on any tree and press the Options button. This adds to one of the biggest features requested by fans: transfiguration, which allows you to keep statistics on your computer while you change its appearance to something else in your inventory. From the Inventory tab, scroll down to “Clothes” and press Triangle on what you want the main character to wear Aloy. Below you will see a small eye symbol on the item icon, which indicates that you are wearing it – there are no hoop hoops or strange coin systems to deal with.
In the latter sense, Horizon is following in the footsteps of a current development trend, where massive open world games are not normally released with this feature, but are added a few months after release. Ubisoft’s Viking-themed role-playing game Assassin’s Creed Valhalla received a transfiguration feature four months after its launch in November 2020. CDPR’s Cyberpunk 2077, first released in December 2020, received silently a similar system earlier this year, though halfway through.
The Horizon patch also “fixed” some “issues” that may or may not need to be fixed, depending on your perspective. For example: Tallnecks, brachiosaurus-like roaming robots that serve as points of interest for clearing the map’s war fog, seem to no longer destroy any nearby machines when activated. Boo.