Horizon gets a lot of shit for being cross-gen but out of all the announced games, even next gen titles I honestly don't see a lot of games being able to match the level of fidelity and animations it has anytime soon. Maybe im wrong, and I hope I am but theres no studio I feel like is on the level right now, and UE5 is far from having its first big game out.
Holy shit I've got to return to this game soon. You're right though OP; considering the sheer scale of the game, it has no right to look as visually impressive as it does. And that's also considering the fact that this is a cross-gen release of all things.
I would say GOW Ragnarok and Plague Tale: Requiem are maybe somewhere on par with it, but they both come with caveats. They both have different visual styles of intent for starters; I would say Ragnarok's use of scenic color has more "pop" and uniformity than HFW, but there isn't as much micro-details in the whole of things (main character models are comparable though).
Requiem has a much different aesthetic than either Ragnarok or HFW, and I would say in terms of some environment details and lighting it compares favorably with them. However, character models aren't quite as detailed and the character animations are noticeably behind both games. It also has by far the smallest scope out of the three; to put it another way, imagine how absolutely insane a game like HFW could look if it were a narrow-design, linear non open-world experience. I think you would not be able to distinguish between the game and real-life by that point.
People are hyping up UE5 and for good reasons, but IMHO the sleeper engine of this generation is going to be Decima. Just look at the results it's already given us, with a cross-gen release, again it has to be stressed. GG's next game on the engine, which should be current-gen only, is going to melt eyeballs (and also be very fun to play). I would love to see other Sony studios like SSM and Naughty Dog adopt at least parts of Decima into their engine pipeline, but I think in general you have a really strong quartet of GG, SSM, ND and Insomniac as the big in-house teams that will be pushing visual fidelity this generation, and I mean that in terms of games that have the right balance of technical
AND artistic design elements to make something truly special.
Because again, HFW is "just" a cross-gen game, but even on base PS4, it looks and run beautifully. Most people would not believe you could have games like HFW, Ragnarok, or TLOU2 running on a PS4 unless you showed them outright proof of it. I think games like Cyberpunk, RDR2 etc. look amazing as well and are among the most visually intensive games out there right now, but that's mainly only when they're running on souped-up PC rigs and everything's cranked up to max settings. Those games running at equivalent specs to say a PS4 or PS5, don't look close to the other games I just mentioned on a base PS4.
I can kind of say similar with Plague Tale: Requiem. The game looks quite great on a Series X and PS5, but if I'm being honest, it also just kind of looks like a TLOU2 with a higher-res texture pack, slightly better lighting and stiffer character models with less impressive animations. The fact it's stuck at 30 FPS on the consoles just rubs that in even more. Also and this is more a subjective thing but I prefer the way TLOU2 handles motion blur and post-processing effects over Plague Tale: Requiem, at least considering both games in their 30 FPS incarnations.
