The big Horizon Forbidden West PC tech interview with Nixxes and Guerrilla Games
How one of PS5's most advanced games made its way across to PC.
2022's Horizon Forbidden West is one of the most technically accomplished games produced for PS5, and today it gets a full release on PC with the Complete Edition that aims to add in new features and scale gracefully across a wide range of CPU and GPU hardware.
Porting specialists Nixxes created this new edition of the game with original Horizon Forbidden West developers Guerrilla Games, and key members of both teams spoke to Digital Foundry's Alex Battaglia ahead of the game's PC release.
From Nixxes, this interview includes Patrick Den Bekker (principal lead programmer), Craig Leach (senior systems programmer), Michiel Roza (principal optimisation programmer) and Julian Huijbregts (community manager). Guerrilla is represented by Jeroen Krebbers (lead tech programmer), Jeremy Laumon (principal tech programmer) and Misja Baas (senior art director). As usual, the text has been edited for length and clarity.
When did work start on Horizon Forbidden West for PC, and what was the working relationship like between Nixxes and Guerrilla?
Patrick Den Bekker - Nixxes: We normally start a project a year before it is released, so that would be February or March last year.
Jeroen Krebbers - Guerrilla: We at Guerrilla internally have a PC version, which is not the same as shipping a PC game... we use that for our internal tooling and also for verifying that our rendering backend and all of our subsystems work on PC, to make sure that can run tooling and bakes and things like that without requiring a PlayStation for everything. And that's usually the basis of starting a port, right? So there's a bunch of legwork that we do internally that is basically handed over to Nixxes, and they do the magic.
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