Sony's latest PlayStation State of Play has just wrapped up, bringing a plethora of new game reveals, updates on previously announced titles, and a few little surprises. One such surprise occurred just after Horizon: Call of the Mountain received its first gameplay trailer, and a rather impressive one at that. Just after the PSVR2 exclusive was done wowing audiences, Guerrilla Games' Narrative Director took the floor to announce a brand-new update for Horizon Forbidden West.
Unlike previous patches for the game, this Horizon Forbidden West update is massive, adding in a whole new mode, a new difficulty setting, and more, on top of fixing a range of technical issues. What's more impressive, is that this update is available right now. For those who need a reason to jump back into Aloy's second adventure, this is it.
Everything in Horizon Forbidden West's New Update
The biggest addition coming with this free update by far is its New Game+ mode. Any players that have finished Horizon Forbidden West's main story can now hop straight back in, and start the adventure all over again. As is standard for any modern New Game+ mode, players will start their adventure with all of their gear, weapons, and skills intact, making the start of the game feel particularly fresh.
This New Game+ mode also adds some new weapons, dyes and face paints, all of which are exclusive to this mode. For players who need more of an incentive to journey to the Forbidden West again from scratch, Guerrilla Games has also added a new set of Trophies to the game, with objectives specific to the New Game+ mode. For those who want to retain bragging rights over having the Platinum in Horizon Forbidden West, they'll need to have another go round.
While the difficulty does increase in New Game+ mode, it likely won't be too dramatic. However, for those who are looking for an extreme challenge, Guerrilla Games has got it covered once more. Also included in this update is a new Ultra Hard difficulty setting, which can be applied to both the standard story playthrough and the New Game+ run.
On top of this, Guerrilla has added a few quality of life improvements, two of which fans have wanted for quite some time. The first of which is the ability to reset Aloy's skills from the menu, which eliminates the worry of investing points in the wrong area. The second quality of life improvement is that players can now use a transmog feature to apply a new look to Aloy's armor set. Players should be able to take a variety of different cosmetic looks from other armor pieces, and apply them to just about any armor set, ensuring that Aloy also has the best stats, with a look that the player also likes.
To finish it all off, this massive Horizon Forbidden West update also fixes a slew of technical issues and bugs. Some of the highlights include some performance fixes that improve the game's visual fidelity, and fix a variety of crashes causes. Main quests, side quests, and world activities have also been tweaked from a technical perspective, including some fast travel issues and various progression-halting bugs. A few new accessibility options have also been added to the game, including adding the "Pry Open" action to the Hold/Toggle setting. All in all, this Horizon Forbidden West update is quite an impressive one, and may just be the thing some players needed to return to the Wilds.
Horizon Forbidden West is available now on PS4 and PS5.
