Guerrilla Games has revealed that it had to revamp Horizon Forbidden West PlayStation 5 version’s loading screen tips because the game loads too quickly, thanks to the console’s SSD. Folks over at Engadget spoke to game director Mathijs de Jonge and technical director Michiel van der Leeuw, who discussed how they overcame the challenge of making Horizon Forbidden West an equally satisfying experience on the PS4.
How Horizon Forbidden West PS5 tips were revamped
“In Horizon Zero Dawn, we called it fast travel, but it could take maybe a minute to actually load,” de Jonge said. “With the PS5, it’s maybe four or five seconds, it loads so quickly that players can’t even read the hints. We had to add a very simple feature where it hangs on the loading screen for enough time so you can actually read at least one hint while it loads.” If you don’t care about loading screen tips, you can turn the feature off via the settings menu. As spotted by IGN, the option you need to look for is ‘Stand By Screen Mode’ and voila! No need to mash X. As for why Guerrilla Games bothered to revamp loading screen tips, apparently the developer noticed when playtesting Horizon Forbidden West that players were relying on them.
Elsewhere, Guerrilla Games sang the SSD’s praises, arguing that it has been a life-saver for developers. “You don’t realize how easily games are bottlenecked,” van de Leeuw told Engadget. “If you run a PC game on a very fast SSD, it doesn’t automatically load in like seven seconds. There’s so much work we had to do.” Most outlets including ours played Horizon Forbidden West on the PS5, but from what we’ve read about the PS4 version, Guerrilla Games seems to have done a fine job with the hardware.
In other news, Sony has rolled out a PS4 system update to fix Cyberpunk 2077 disc issues, and cyberpunk game ANNO: Mutationem will release in March.
