Horizon Forbidden West will have climbing like in Assassin’s Creed games

We recently saw a demonstration of gameplay from Horizon Forbidden West, but the creators of that game point out that we didn’t see the news they prepared for us. For example, we saw a climbing system, but no one noticed that it was significantly different from the one in Horizon Zero Dawn. Aloy climbs faster, and her Focus marks her where she can climb. However, the game itself will have a free climbing system around the environment, similar to the last games in the Assassin’s Creed series.

This means that Aloy will continuously climb around the environment while the player holds the key for the direction of movement, i.e. climbing. In the last game, the climbing worked so that Aloy grabbed the prominent parts of the surroundings, jumping up to them. Admittedly, don’t expect “parkour” in the style of Assassin’s Creed because there will be no jumping on rooftops in Horizon Forbidden West. Whenever you come to a settlement, there is no jumping, climbing, or fighting. But outside the resort, you can climb anywhere. Or so the game developers say.

The developers also revealed that the Forbidden West map is a tad bigger than Zero Dawn's world, but that was not their goal. Instead of the vastness of the territory itself, they aimed to fill it with more different biomes and contents, i.e. micro-stories as they call them. It reminds us of events like in RDR 2 and AC: Valhalla.

A significant part of the world will be the underwater one, and we haven't seen real gameplay there yet. Guerrilla Games states that the fight against the enemy in the water will be related to outwitting, ie that it will be performed as a "game of cat and mouse". Aloy will have to hide from larger opponents and will use currents to move underwater to escape faster from predators.

As we could see in the demonstration, the fight against human opponents will take on the practices of fighting robots. Now, human enemies will also have shields that will first need to be removed to make them more vulnerable, and we will be able to analyze these parts of the armor with the help of Focus (they will become different colors).

Judging by information from an interview with Guerrilla Games, Horizon Forbidden West will have a mode to run at 60 frames per second. It is not yet 100% confirmed information - it is possible that something was lost in the translation, but it is very likely. Anyway - what we saw last week went at 30 fps.

Yesterday, Sony also said that Horizon Forbidden West is still in the plans for the fall of 2021, but that nothing is 100% certain yet, so it is easily possible to switch it to the beginning of next year.