Game News Horizon Forbidden West: The ultra-fast SSD the PS5 deliberately slowed down by the developers
Horizon Forbbiden West is the latest nugget of PlayStation 5. Beautiful to die for and with an absolutely gigantic open world, it offers an unparalleled playground for the intrepid Aloy. With extremely rich content (main quest, side missions, black boxes to find, personal services, crucibles, etc.), the youngest in the PlayStation galaxy is turning many heads and almost making the first episode look like a ” disorganized “. And the latest revelations from the developers are very useful for understanding the process of creating this extraordinary adventure.
In the history of video games, it usually happened that the developers were confronted with important concessions because of a limited technique. At the time of 8-bit consoles, during the 1980s, creators had to compete in imagination so that the cartridge of their game managed to contain all the elements.
Among the tricks found by the programmers, there was in particular the flipping of sprites. To avoid making an animation to the right and left, the interested parties simply turned the character over. In the same way, if Mario has a cap, a mustache and even overalls, it is above all for technical reasons. The cap and mustache avoid the depiction and animation of hair and a mouth, while the overalls make it easy to separate the head from the body. But there is also the opposite…
An SSD SO FAST THAT ITS PROCESS HAS BEEN SLOWED DOWN
For Sonic the Hedgehogthe Japanese developer Yuji Naka had developed an algorithm so powerful that the animation, during the prototyping phase, was even faster than in the final game! Clearly, the game was so fast that the testers suffered from seasickness while watching the hedgehog pass. In response, the animation was slowed down while maintaining some speed. This was true decades ago, but today we learn that the developers ofHorizon : Forbidden Westfaced the same problem!
The PlayStation’s SSD is renowned for its extreme speed and the developers at Guerilla Games have noticed this. The machine’s hard drive was loading information so fast that the speed was intentionally slowed down so that players had time to read the tooltips appearing on the screen. In an exchange with Engadget, the game’s director, Mathjis de Jonge, has revealed that his team has added a feature for the image to freeze for a short time on the loading screen so that players can read the tips. If this had not been included, it would have been impossible for players to take advantage of this information.
This may seem surprising, especially since many players skip this advice, but this is not the first time that a PlayStation game has been the subject of this type of concession. Ghost of Tsushima, at the time of its release on PlayStation 4, did the same. This shows that we are not at the end of our surprises and that the PlayStation 5 SSD has not yet revealed all its secrets.
By Ayden_Journalist jeuxvideo.com
MP