The developer behind the PC version of Guerrilla Games’ action adventure game, Horizon Forbidden West, have addressed the absence of ray tracing.
During an interview with Digital Foundry, Michiel Roza, principal optimization programmer at Nixxes, and Jeroen Krebbers, lead tech programmer at Guerrilla Games, were asked whether ray tracing was considered for the PC port of Horizon Forbidden West, as it was previously done so by the porting studio for the PC version of Shadow of the Tomb Raider. In his response, Roza mentioned that the technology was indeed considered.
Roza explained that, in the case of Shadow of the Tomb Raider, the team at Nixxes had to do an entire lighting pass to get ray traced shadows to work. With the PC version of Horizon Forbidden West, however, the hours of cinematics and the game’s scope led to the decision to not include ray tracing features. He mentioned that the game’s visuals exhibit a strong direction, and the team at Nixxes didn’t want to “mess” with it.
Meanwhile, Guerrilla Games’ Krebbers mentioned that a lot of the game’s content is alpha-tested trees. There are settlements and some hard surfaces, but most of it is difficult to ray trace against, even in the case of shadows. He said that there is around 100 square kilometres of content, and the porting team would need to go through the whole game to rework certain aspects to make it work. The lead tech programmer added that having the scalability between PS4 and PS5 meant that the development team at Guerrilla Games wanted to focus on aspects that would work across both consoles, and that resulted in the exclusion of ray tracing features. However, he mentioned that the development team really likes the technology, and hinted that further developments in this regard will happen for future projects.
