Speaking with Digital Foundry, Michiel Roza, principal optimization programmer at Nixxes Software, reveals that ray tracing was “considered” for Horizon Forbidden West on PC. However, adding it to the game would be no simple task, with a process that’s fraught with difficulties.
“For this project, with the hours of cinematics and the scope… we decided that the game already looks really good, there’s a strong direction here and we really didn’t want to mess with it,” Roza explains. Nixxes are to be commended for wanting to respect artistic intent, given how easily ray tracing can spoil a game’s visuals if it’s improperly implemented, as demonstrated by early-stage
RTX Remix mods.
Making matters worse, adding ray tracing to Horizon Forbidden West creates massive technical challenges according to Jeroen Krebbers, lead tech programmer at Guerilla Games. They explain that most of Forbidden West “is really hard to ray trace against, even for shadows”, owing to the properties of much of the game’s materials, such as trees.
Combine this with an estimated “100 square kilometers of content” according to Krebbers, and it’s hard not to be intimidated by the scope of the work that would be required to add ray tracing to the game.