Horizon Forbidden West is considered by many to be a massive improvement over the original. It overhauls the combat system by adding several new skills and abilities, and the side-missions are significantly more engaging than the quests in Horizon Zero Dawn.
Guerrilla Games released update 1.09 for Horizon Forbidden West last week, which fixed several bugged quests and addressed various other issues. It also reduced loading times, which were already ridiculously fast on PS5, and made improvements related to the shimmering and sharpening issues faced by some players. However, the lengthy patch notes did not highlight a massive quality-of-life feature that was added in update 1.09.
Horizon Forbidden West players can now turn off animations for picking up resources. This can be achieved by turning off the Pickup Animations setting under the General tab, and Aloy will instantly pick up environmental resources like rocks, plants, and wood with it turned off. It also works when Aloy is riding a machine or exploring the game’s many underwater sections. As the description states, it’s not applicable for loot that requires players to hold the button prompt, so it will not work while looting machines.
This toggle may not seem like a big deal, but it makes a massive difference to the overall flow of Horizon Forbidden West as players are picking up resources all the time. Since Aloy constantly stopped to pick up the resource every time users pressed the designated button, it probably discouraged users from gathering resources in some cases. It now works exactly like in Elden Ring and Ghost of Tsushima, which also allowed users to almost instantly collect loot with barely any animations.
Horizon Forbidden West has several other user-friendly features hidden in its settings menu. Players can make it so that climbable surfaces are marked at all times, and they can also enable Easy Loot, which completely ignores the drop rate of machine parts. Other features, such as creating jobs that map and track resources required for upgrading equipment, carry over from Horizon Zero Dawn.
Despite its strengths, Horizon Forbidden West launched with a few annoyances. For example, the fast travel system requires players to either buy or craft travel packs. Granted, these packs are incredibly cheap, but removing them from the game would have made fast travel more convenient.
Horizon Forbidden West is available now on PS4 and PS5.
