Horizon Forbidden West features grappling hooks and wall jumps

Players will have a wealth of new options when it comes to fighting and traversal in Horizon Forbidden West. A PlayStation Blog post detailing new features coming to the game showed off some of protagonist Aloy’s choice new abilities, including the Breath of the Wild-esque Shieldwing, a grappling hook, and Valor Surge finishing attacks. Some of Horizon Forbidden West‘s traversal changes have already been mentioned by the game’s developers, including the Shieldwing, which players can use to glide vast distances, and free climbing. Further growing Aloy’s suite of new movement options is the Pullcaster, which players can use to zip Aloy over to targeted locations. Players can use these tools in a sequence, going from a grapple launch into a glide with the Pullcaster and Shieldwing. As for combat, players will have access to some powerful moves that can be used to quickly put down enemies, although they’ll have to charge them up first. Called Valor Surges, these special attacks are built up by successfully beating on enemies, charging a purple bar in the game’s head-up display. There are 12 variants of the attack, “with each of them representing and strengthening a specific approach to the game,” according to the blog post. Each variant can be charged up to three levels, with higher levels taking longer to charge but dealing more damage. Players will also be able to give their regular weapons a boost thanks to the game’s new workbench. Here, players can upgrade and strengthen weapons and outfits, unlocking new perks, mod slots, and more. Horizon Forbidden West was supposed to launch this year, but was delayed to 2022. It will now release on February 18 for the PlayStation 4 and PS5. Guerrilla Games has been working on the Horizon series for years, and it shows no signs of slowing down, which is bad news for fans of Killzone, its initial franchise. In a new interview, a Guerrilla developer said the studio was “done” with the hyper-dark shooter series when it pivoted to making Horizon Zero Dawn. “We were done with it as a team. As a studio, we needed to refresh the palette. It was, by choice, the opposite of Killzone,” art director Roy Postma told The Washington Post. We already learned a bit about the kinds of changes Guerrilla Games and Nixxes brought to Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered, but beyond noting how much more dialogue and mo-cap was recorded, there weren’t many specifics. A new PlayStation blog post has gone into more detail about the improvements, including how the teams worked to make the world feel more alive. Nixxes senior technical game designer Brian van Nunen wrote in the post that one of those ways was to add more NPCs in villages, cities, and outposts, which they were able to do because of the PlayStation 5’s more powerful specs. And not only will there be more of them but they’ll have more varied schedules and will move around in a more realistic manner. As we get closer to the release of Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered, it’s become more and more difficult to purchase the original Complete Edition of the game. This week, it’s starting to be delisted from digital PC storefronts. It was first removed from the Epic Games Store, as some ResetEra users reported earlier this week. While the store page is still live, the buy button has been grayed out and just reads “unavailable.” There also isn’t a link to purchase the remaster from this page, although you can find it through search and preorder it ahead of its October 31 release date.