Horizon Forbidden West multiplayer leaks with cartoony art style-Michael Beckwith-Entertainment – Metro

Horizon Forbidden West – this is not what the multiplayer game looks like (pic: Sony)

Roughly 12 minutes of footage from an alleged alpha build of the Horizon Forbidden West multiplayer spin-off has leaked online.

Although there was chatter of Guerrilla Games’ Horizon series getting a multiplayer spin-off as early as 2019, the studio itself only announced one was in development last month.

Described as an ‘online project,’ all Guerrilla has said about it so far is that it will feature new characters, a ‘unique stylised look,’ and allow friends to explore Horizon’s post-apocalyptic world together.

While the game is likely still years away from release, footage from an alleged 2020 build leaked over the weekend, giving fans an idea of how the final product may look.

Ironically, the 12-minute video doesn’t feature any actual multiplayer or co-op gameplay, with just a single player exploring their surroundings.

The most striking detail, however, is the art style. While the environments still look fairly realistic, the character design is notably more cartoony than Horizon Zero Dawn and its sequel.

The player character also switches through several different designs throughout the video, suggesting players will be able to customise their character’s appearance.

Whether you can create multiple characters at once and freely swap between them is unclear, but that’s probably just for the purposes of testing the game.

Horizon Forbidden West – we can imagine the cartoony visuals being quite polarising (pic: Sony)

The footage does come from an alpha build, that’s at least a couple years out of date, so there’s no telling if the final release will look anything like this footage.

It otherwise still resembles a Horizon game, right down to the menus and the character’s movement, plus the robot dinosaurs.

We can’t share the footage ourselves, for legal reasons, but it was posted to the official Horizon subreddit by user BirdonWheels. They added that the alpha contained a ‘join-PC’ and ‘join-PlayStation 4’ option, which could mean the final game will see a cross-platform release on consoles and PC.

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However, any potential PlayStation 4 version may never come out since Sony has said it intends to phase out PlayStation 4 games in favour of mobile and PC.

It’s also possible that this will serve as one of Sony’s many live service games, that the company wants out by 2026, which could in turn increase the chances of it being cross-gen.

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