Horizon Forbidden West has immediate fast-travel on PlayStation 5

Guerrilla's new sci-fantasy sequel Horizon Forbidden West will be the first major first-party open-world exclusive to stress the PS5's SSD.

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The PS5's 12-channel PCIe 4.0 SSD is revolutionary for pretty much every game. But open-world games like Horizon Forbidden West stand to tremendously benefit from the new custom storage tech. Thanks to the ultra-fast 5.5GB/sec transfer speeds, powerful compression tech, and ultra-tight OS optimizations, Guerrilla says its new Horizon sequel will have virtually no loading sequences as you play.

This includes everything from booting up the game to reloading a checkpoint, and most importantly, fast travel. The PS5 can simply blast textures, assets, and data to the CPU, GPU, and RAM memory pool at such a rapid pace that loading is pretty much obliterated. But it's not just about speed. The SSD also removes seek times altogether, and removes the need for duplicated assets. The PS5 is also incredibly efficient thanks to the massive synergy between the SoC, storage, RAM, and OS toolsets.

Here's what Guerrilla Games said about Horizon Forbidden West running on the next-gen PlayStation 5:

"The title Forbidden West actually refers to a new frontier that stretches from Utah all the way to the Pacific in the West," game director Mathijs de Jonge said in a new game update.

"Ever since the first game, we really wanted to make a world that is so beautiful that you just want to be there. And with the additional power of the PlayStation 5, we can make that world even more detailed, more vibrant, and more immersive."

"With the PS5's SSD, there will be virtually no loading screens. So in an open world game like Horizon Forbidden West everything will be super fast, including opening up the map and fast travel from one end to the other or restarting from a checkpoint.

"When you boot up the game, you're right there, right in the action."

New Horizon Forbidden West details

• Iconic landmarks show up in the game including San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge
• Aloy can swim underwater and explore sunken ruins
• Robot monsters also swim underwater
• New shellsnapper turtles, snapmaws (alligators), sunwings (robot pterodactyls), and new mammoth-like tremor tusks
• Dozens of new machines in the game
• Lots of new tribes, one enemy tribe has domesticated machines
• New dangerous weather like supercell storms that flood the world
• Red blight has infected the land

Horizon Forbidden West will release sometime in 2021 on PlayStation 5.

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