Video game sequels always tend to up the ante in major ways moving from the original to the latest iteration. Fans have seen it with games like Assassin's Creed 2, or more recently The Last of Us 2, and next year it'll be Horizon: Forbidden West as well. Just from the trailer alone, the game gives off the impression that the scale and scope of Forbidden West clearly outmatches Horizon: Zero Dawn's world in a big way.
What's more interesting comes from the most recent developer commentary on the reveal trailer provided by the game director Mathijs de Jonge. There's a particular section of this behind the scenes commentary where the director states the open world of Horizon: Forbidden West extends between Utah and the West Coast. Obviously not to scale, but that's still a huge amount of distance to encapsulate even in a horizontal straight line. Horizon's sequel could have a huge map in comparison to the first game, seemingly based on these words alone, but there's even more to it than that.
Horizon: Zero Dawn's Size
Granted Horizon: Zero Dawn was not a small game by any means. Despite only taking place in a microscopic version of the regions between Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming, the game still covered around 40ish square miles and several unique regions. For comparison, Breath of the Wild was around 20ish square miles large, and The Witcher 3 is around 50 square miles large. While the gameplay often borrowed from other open world contemporaries that inspired it, Horizon: Zero Dawn's setting and worldbuilding was uniquely all its own. Post-post-apocalyptic America, along with these curious animalistic machines roaming the world, was an interesting premise rarely done on as huge a scale as Horizon: Zero Dawn was able to accomplish.
Zero Dawn's size was absolutely on par with its competitors, but for the sequel to be potentially more massive than the first game could be even more impressive. This may set it apart from other early next-gen games, especially considering what was shown during the announcement trailer, and Jonge's comments may hint towards how huge the map in Forbidden West may be.
Emphasizing Scale in the Trailer
While the game director's comments on their own would've just seemed encouraging, taking them into context with the announcement trailer gives them more meaning. Based on the forests, swamps, deserts, mountains, oceans, plains, and various other biomes Aloy explores in the trailer, Horizon: Forbidden West could seriously be much larger than its predecessor. That's not even counting the various different and unique machines occupying the West Coast area as well. From what can be gathered from the trailer, Aloy seems to explore locations in the Bay Area/San Francisco, mountain ranges in Utah, deserts in Nevada, and tons of other areas in between, both above and below sea level. Saying that's a lot of ground to cover would just be an understatement, and that's based on the trailer alone.
Also judging on the bits of story and in-game footage shown off in the trailer, it seems Aloy's new journey will justify the map size just as well. She's able to free-climb mountains Breath of the Wild style, dive underwater for longer periods of time with a breathing apparatus, and once again, utilize mounts to traverse large swaths of land quickly. Aloy's new (presumed) globe trotting capabilities could infer that she'll be exploring all manner of regions across the West Coast to complete her mission, something fans may genuinely enjoy.
The Regions of Horizon: Forbidden West
Based on the trailer alone, there's a few main regions we can gather from Horizon: Forbidden West's announcement trailer: A coastal/tropical Bay Area among the ruins of underwater San Francisco, a desert in the Las Vegas/Nevada area, mountain ranges and peaks in the Utah region, the Redwood forests in northern California, and several obscure places in between. Already that's four distinctive biomes likely coming to the world of Horizon: Forbidden West, spanning hundreds of miles across the far western United States. That's not even counting areas nearby like the Grand Canyon in northwest Arizona, or like Los Angeles and Hollywood in SoCal.
That doesn't necessarily mean that all of these locations will be playable at the get-go for Horizon: Forbidden West. Under the assumption that this announcement trailer covers the majority of the game's locales, Aloy will likely stick to a narrow region between Utah and San Francisco throughout the game's story. Certain parts of the story could potentially reach these other extraneous areas eventually, assuming its relevant to Aloy's endgoal of ending this new "red blight" plaguing the former American West Coast.
Of course, there's still plenty more to be revealed for Horizon: Forbidden West in the coming months. With a release window of 2021 confirming its not a launch title, fans will certainly get more news leading up to the release next year. That being said, Forbidden West is shaping up to be a huge title for PS5, both figuratively and literally.
Horizon: Forbidden West will launch in 2021 for PS5.
