Sucker Punch hasn’t announced what it’s working on, but has confirmed what it isn’t working on.Image: Sucker Punch Productions
Sony’s San Diego Studio is a multiplatform studio now that MLB The Show is available on Xbox and Nintendo platforms. So while it won’t be a PlayStation exclusive, expect an MLB The Show 23 later this year. God of War Ragnarök was one of the biggest games of last year, and was also one of the last big games in 2022, having only launched about two months ago. Sony Santa Monica also doesn’t seem to have plans to make DLC for Ragnarök, so it’s probable the team goes mostly silent in 2023.
Sucker Punch could be a wildcard in 2023, as it’s been about three years since Ghost of Tsushima, but the studio also seems to be working on a sequel to its open-world samurai game rather than a new IP or a sequel to its previous series Infamous and Sly Cooper. The gap between Infamous: Second Son and Ghost of Tsushima was about six years, but if the studio is iterating on old systems, we may hear about the new samurai sequel sooner rather than later. Finally, Valkyrie Entertainment was a more low-key acquisition for Sony, and the team has acted primarily as a support studio as recently as God of War Ragnarök. That being so, the team is likely helping out with other projects that launch in 2023.
Whew, I think that’s everything on the PlayStation radar so far. Has anything got your interest piqued, or are you hoping Sony will announce some more enticing projects in the coming year?
Stray! Final Fantasy XVI! The Resident Evil 4 remake! Sony’s big not-E3 State of Play showcase, held last night, was unexpectedly packed. But amid the fray flew a kernel of under-the-radar news for a game that’s already out: Horizon Forbidden West received a wave of much-requested features, including a new game plus, in a surprise update.
Horizon Forbidden West, released for PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 in February, is Guerrilla Games’ follow-up to 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, wherein you fight a whole bunch of massive robotic creatures. At launch, it received wide acclaim, though players flagged it for a litany of performance issues—nothing game-breaking, more just stuff like randomly shimmery graphical flourishes. (Those have since been fixed.) But once it was over, it was really over.
Patch 1.14 adds a bunch of long-requested features to the game. The big one, of course, is the addition of that new game plus mode, allowing you to replay the game with all of the skills and equipment earned through your initial playthrough. That’s paired alongside a new higher difficulty level, Ultra Hard. I found that it’s only selectable from the start of a new game—either new-game plus or new-game regular. I couldn’t change the difficulty to Ultra Hard on my primary save file. (Fine by me: Horizon’s already hard enough at certain spots!)
Screenshot: Sony / Kotaku
There’s also the new option to reset your skills. From the “Skills” tab, click into any tree and hit the Options button. That’s in addition to one of the biggest fan-requested features: transmog, allowing you to retain the stats of equipped gear while swapping its look to something else in your inventories. From the inventory tab, scroll down to “outfits” and press Triangle over the one you want main character Aloy to wear. You’ll then see a small eye symbol on the item’s icon, indicating that you’re wearing it—no hoops to jump through or weird currency systems to deal with.
G/O Media may get a commission
30-Day Free Trial
Homer Learn & Grow Program
Stimulate your kids’ minds Your little ones are glued to the screen, and that’s a reality we have to accept. But what if they could learn and grow while watching videos and playing games? Create a foundation for learning with this free trial.
In this last regard, Horizon follows in the footsteps of a current development trend, where massive open-world games typically don’t launch with this feature but see it added several months after launch. Ubisoft’s viking-themed RPG Assassin’s Creed Valhalla received a transmog feature four months after its November 2020 release. CDPR’s Cyberpunk 2077, first released in December 2020, quietly received a similar system earlier this year, though it’s half-baked.
Horizon’s patch also “fixed” some “issues” that may or may not have needed fixing, your perspective depending. For instance: Tallnecks—the roving brachiosaurus-like robots who serve as waypoints to clear fog of war from the map—will apparently no longer destroy any nearby machines upon activation. Boo.
It’s a good thing Horizon Forbidden Westhas a bottomless inventory. Developer Guerrilla Games recently sped up looting in its robot-busting adventure through the quiet addition of one simple feature: the option to disable pickup animations.
Horizon Forbidden West, first released in February on PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5, is the epitome of “textbook open-world game,” for all the good and ill that entails. In my review for the game, I called out its litany of minor inconveniences, explicitly drawing attention to the fact that you have to stop moving to pick up essential resources like ridgewood (for crafting arrows), fiberzest (for brewing potions) and one million berries (for instant healing).
Guerrilla appears to have rolled out the new feature during Horizon’s most recent update—yes, the very same one that made the game even less shimmery—but didn’t denote the change in the detailed patch notes. It’s unclear why. Representatives for Sony, Horizon Forbidden West’s publisher, did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication.
Still, following the update, you can clearly see the new feature. By turning off the pickup animation option, found under the general submenu, you’ll make it so Aloy doesn’t stop in her tracks when picking up minor items. It works for most of the detritus throughout Forbidden West’s forbidden west (the ridgewood, the fiberzest, and yes, the berries). But for rarer items or ones you need to search, the ones you need to hold Triangle to interact with, you still have to stop short.
Easy rule of thumb: Loot that you can shoot off of machines, like canisters and chillwater, can get picked up instantly, as can resources from plants. But anything you find in a chest or off a robot’s busted skeleton—machine cores, circulators, braided wires, glowblast, and so on—requires you to stop moving.
G/O Media may get a commission
Stay on top of your health with high and low heart rate, and irregular heart rhythm notifications. Track your daily activity on Apple Watch, and see your trends.
On the whole, disabling pickup animations is a minor tweak that doesn’t dramatically change Horizon Forbidden West. (After crunching the numbers, I’ve found it makes the game, approximately, 1.762 percent more convenient.) But for time-crunched players, every second counts. And it’s one of many quality-of-life features that made Sucker Punch’s Ghost of Tsushima—another slickly produced first-party game from the PlayStation oeuvre—such an easily digestible game. Open-world games are overwhelmingly unwieldy enough these days. Any little thing that makes them more whelmingly wieldy is welcome in my book.
That said, I understand why disabled pickup animations wouldn’t appeal to all players. For some, that you have to stop to pick up basic loot is a design choice that makes Horizon feel realistic, immerses you in its world, and forces you to be more deliberate with your actions. But that’s what rules about this quiet update: It’s lovely to have the option now. And some fans, at least, seem happy to take full advantage of it.
“I’m so glad they added a pickup animation…toggle, it saves so much time and doesn’t break exploration continuity or pace,” one player wrote in a semi-viral tweet. “Now I’ll hoard a million berries [cherry emoji].”
Developer Guerrilla Games has rolled out a massive patch for Horizon Forbidden West, purporting to fix more than a dozen quests, plus a litany of minor hiccups. It also aims to make the game less shimmery. Those who made it through the era of puddlegateunscathed should rejoice.
Horizon Forbidden West, released last month for PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5, is the sequel to the best open-world game of 2017. Like its predecessor, you, as a young woman named Aloy, explore a 31st-century post-apocalyptic America in search of an artificial intelligence program. Along the way, you use futuristic bows and arrows to hunt robots modeled after prehistoric beasts. It rules.
Since launch, players have taken umbrage with the game’s shimmering—essentially, that some objects, the fauna in particular, look as if you’re viewing them through the glass wall of an aquarium. Players say it’s more noticeable in Horizon’s performance mode, which runs the game at a constant 60fps frame rate at the expense of visual fidelity. To the untrained eye, it can be hard to spot this sort of thing, especially when you’re running for your life from a fire-breathing mecha bear. But it’s there, as evidenced by this exceptionally thorough rundown from the folks at HDTV Test, which makes use of tech like waveform analysis to highlight some of the game’s more esoteric visual issues. The whole video is well worth a watch, but the segment on shimmering starts at around 1:45:
Today’s patch isn’t the only time Guerrilla has addressed Horizon’s notable shimmering issues. Mere hours after the game launched, the developer pushed out a hotfix to address it. Apparently, the improvements weren’t sufficient, as noted in fan videos over the past month. It’s unclear if the studio considers the shimmering issue fixed for good with this latest patch, and that’ll certainly be dependent on fan feedback. Representatives for Sony, Horizon Forbidden West’s publisher, did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication.
Beyond the shimmering, today’s update fixes issues with more than a dozen bugged quests. I spent the majority of my time with Forbidden West pre-release, before the day-one patch rolled out—and fixed a ton of logged bugs—so it’s not quite fair for me to gripe about any bugs, even the game-breaking ones. But here’s Kotaku’s John Walker on “Kappa Cauldron,” one of the missions addressed in today’s update, which he played just two days before the patch would have saved him considerable heartache and frustration:
While fighting the final boss of the Kappa Cauldron, an especially enormous and tricky battle, I confess I done goofed and got killed. It should have reloaded me at the door to the final chamber. Instead, it loaded me just outside the fabric of reality. And then did the same on all the cauldron’s previous autosaves. It was kind of fun, swimming around in the netherworld, before plunging to my death, but there was no way back in, and an hour’s progress was lost.
Screenshot: Sony / Kotaku
But perhaps the most amusing line item is that Guerrilla has apparently reduced the time spent in loading screens. In a game that already has an option to slow such screens down because they go by so quickly (at least on PS5). Priorities!
Horizon Forbidden West is almost out, and it basically picks up exactly where the previous game left off. The opening hours will pelt you with strange names, supposedly familiar faces, and a helpful but extremely brief recap of the events of Horizon Zero Dawn. If you’re planning on jumping into the new game or you’re just wondering why, for example, robot dinosaurs roam its vast and beautiful world, here is a crash course in everything you need to know.
Horizon Zero Dawn was a big game steeped in sci-fi jargon, exposition, and background lore. Much of this worldbuilding was also relegated to audio logs and collectibles, as well as the game’s post-launch expansion, The Frozen Wilds, making it easy to miss. Even if you played the game back when it was released in 2017, I promise you you are going to want a refresher. And if you skipped Horizon Zero Dawn entirely, well, you might want to go back and fix that, but if not, the below rundown should have you covered.
Spoiler Warning: If it wasn’t already obvious, this post will be full of spoilers for Horizon Zero Dawn and The Frozen Wilds.
Image: Guerrilla Games / Sony
Where is Horizon Zero Dawn set?
The game takes place in the American midwest in the 31st century. People live a feudalistic existence among warring tribes while giant robots that look like prehistoric beasts patrol the land. Now let’s unpack why.
The heady concept behind Guerrilla Games’ open-world sci-fi series is that in the year 2048 a tech bro named Ted Faro created militaristic machines that could self-replicate and consume biomass for fuel. With the planet facing refugee crises and civil unrest due to global warming, the machines were used to put down protests and protect those in power.
This line of robots, called Chariot, supplants every major army in the world, and then, obviously, glitches big time (for mysterious reasons, of course), threatening to wipe out all life on the planet in an endless cycle of resource exploitation and reproduction. This menace becomes popularly known as the Faro Plague.
At this point the scientist Elizabet Sobeck, Faro’s former business partner who split after she realized he was more interested in military contracts than fixing the environment, comes up with a solution called *ominous pause* Project Zero Dawn.
Image: Guerrilla Games / Sony
What was Project Zero Dawn?
Instead of trying to save humanity, Sobeck decides to preserve it through a complex series of AI programs called GAIA. This friendly computer will 1) eventually hack into the robots and shut them down, 2) terraform the planet and restore nature and 3) repopulate the earth with clones once everything is ready.
GAIA has nine, count them nine, subordinate functions. One of these, MINERVA, was in charge of hacking into and eventually disabling the Chariot drones. Another was HEPHAESTUS which would create brand new machines modeled after nature to help fix the planet and take care of the new humans. (Why do so many of these new machines look like dinosaurs? No reason really other than Guerrilla Games thought it would be cool). A third was APOLLO, in charge of storing humanity’s collective knowledge and teaching it to the new humans. Finally there was HADES which was responsible for killing everything on the planet and starting the process over from scratch if things went sideways.
Before Project Zero Dawn can be completed, Sobeck sacrifices herself to buy the team working on it extra time. Faro goes haywire himself and destroys APOLLO because he thinks the new humans will somehow be less flawed if they remain ignorant of their past. He also kills the rest of the scientists once Project Zero Dawn is complete.
Image: Guerrilla Games / Sony
What went wrong with Project Zero Dawn?
If things had worked out there would not be a Horizon Zero Dawn, let alone an entire series, but by the early 31st century it seemed like everything had gone according to plan. That is, until a mysterious signal was beamed into GAIA granting each of its subordinate AIs sentience, including HADES. GAIA blows up the Project Zero Dawn facility to slow HADES down but it infects GAIA with a virus to free itself and the other subordinate AIs. In response, GAIA uses one of the remaining Project Zero Dawn incubation facilities to create a clone of Sobeck and leaves it on the doorstep of the Nora tribe (An incredible Hail Mary for a super computer capable of running an entire planet). The clone grows up to be Aloy, Horizon’s central hero.
To destroy everything, HADES begins corrupting the world’s caretaker robots with the ultimate goal of rebooting the dormant Chariot machines from the Faro Plague. HADES also enlists the help of a mysterious wanderer named Sylens who’s thirsty for knowledge from the past and convinces a splinter group from the Carja tribe called the Eclipse to worship it like a cult. Aloy ultimately thwarts all of their plans in a final showdown with HADES. Instead of HADES being destroyed, however, it’s captured by Sylens with the intent to learn more about humanity’s history and who or what caused HADES and the other AI to go haywire in the first place.
Image: Guerrilla Games / Sony
Who are all these people?
Horizon is home to a sprawling cast and complex network of competing political factions. Here’s a quick list of the ones we haven’t touched on so far:
Main factions:
Sun Carja – One of Horizon’s main military powers residing in the city of Meridian below one of MINERVA’s transmission towers. Responsible for the Red Raid atrocities during the rule of King Jiran.
Shadow Carja – Group that broke off during the Carja Civil War when Jiran’s son, Avad, enlisted the help of the Oseram to overthrow his father and prevent further religious sacrifices aimed at “healing” corrupted machines.
Nora – Hunter-gatherer society with strong taboos and a general dislike for old-world technology and outsiders. Aloy is raised among them but not accepted by them.
Oseram – Loose confederation of tinkerers and metalworkers who mine ruins for resources and technology.
Banuk – Hunters and shamans who prefer to remain isolated from the other clans and live in the harsh cold lands to the north.
Tenakth – Clan of raiders who acquire the ability to override and take control of certain machines.
Utaru – Distant tribe which controls a vast portion of fertile land in the “Forbidden West” but whose harvests are succumbing to a growing red blight.
Eclipse – Mysterious warring cult that serves HADES and tries to destabilize the other main clans and kill Aloy but are mostly wiped out by the end of Horizon Zero Dawn.
Other important characters:
Erend – Head of the Sun Carja Vanguard after his sister is killed, Erend carries a big hammer and has trouble talking about his feelings. He’d do anything for Aloy but I don’t think she’d return the favor.
Varl – Son of Nora War-Chief Sona who grew up alongside Aloy, his sister was killed by the Eclipse and he’s since become a close friend of Aloy, aiding her whenever she’ll accept it.
Rost – A Nora warrior who went on a quest of vengeance after his family was killed, Rost becomes an outcast and is tasked with raising Aloy and later sacrificing his life to save hers during an attack by the Eclipse.
Helis – A follower of Jiran who killed many during the Red Raids, Helis became leader of the Eclipse after the Carja Civil War and became the main vessel for HADES’ plan until Aloy eventually put him down.
Travis Tate – An irreverent hacker who worked with Faro and Sobeck on Project Zero Dawn, Tate was in charge of the HADES AI and was killed along with the other scientists when Faro betrayed them.
Demeter – AI in charge of restoring earth’s plant life.
Artemis – AI in charge of restoring earth’s animals.
Poseidon – AI in charge of purifying the oceans.
Aether – AI in charge of the weather.
Eleuthia – AI in charge of growing and taking care of humans.
Hephaestus – AI in charge of producing more robots.
Image: Guerrilla Games / Sony
What Happened In Horizon Zero Dawn?
TL;DR: As a young girl Aloy falls into an ancient facility where she finds a small earbud-looking thing called a Focus that lets her bluetooth her way through most problems. Her efforts to earn acceptance into the Nora Clan where she was raised are cut short when an attack by the HADES-backed Eclipse led by Helis kills her surrogate father Rost and many others. She decides to track down her origins, discover what’s corrupting the world’s machines, and get revenge against the Eclipse.
A mysterious man named Sylens links up with her and promises her answers in return for her help. Together they piece together the history of the Faro Plague and Project Zero Dawn by exploring old ruins. Aloy eventually learns that the Eclipse are trying to restore the old machines that wiped out life to begin with, and that she’s a clone, and that Sylens has been a double agent for HADES the whole time. Aloy prevents this, and in the Frozen Wilds DLC heads north to stop a facility called Thunder’s Drum from creating corrupted machines.
It turns out the facility is being remotely controlled by the rogue HEPHAESTUS AI. Once Aloy liberates the facility, she learns from the AI CYAN that’s in charge of preventing the super volcano below Yellowstone National Park from erupting that the Faro Plague apocalypse was originally set in motion by global warming.
Where does that leave Aloy and Sylens?
While Aloy succeeds in preventing a second apocalypse in Horizon Zero Dawn, huge questions remain. What was the glitch that caused the Faro Chariot machines to go rogue in the first place? Who sent the signal that caused GAIA’s subordinate AIs to become self-aware and start causing trouble? And what’s Sylens’ goal in all of this?
Sylens aided HADES in the formation of the Eclipse and exploited Aloy on a number of occasions, but Horizon Zero Dawn also hints at his intentions being much more complicated than greed or curiosity. Faro’s decision to destroy APOLLO and deprive future generations of knowledge is a special sticking point for him, especially since he’s seen its violent consequences firsthand with the Red Raids and Carja Civil War.
As far as Aloy is concerned, the main threat from HADES is over, but GAIA’s other rogue AIs are still loose and causing chaos and, as the setup to Horizon Forbidden West reveals, a new blight is taking over the land. How will she MacGyver her way out of this one? We’ll find out soon enough.