Walls between PC and console continue to crumble as Horizon Forbidden West announces March release date

Aloy fights a robotic dinosaur in Horizon Forbidden West.

(Image credit: Guerilla)

Time was, the walls between console and PC games were hard and fast. PC had its strategy games and CRPGs, PlayStation had its Japanese bangers, Nintendo had Mario and Zelda, and Xbox had Blinx: The Time Sweeper (all the other companies were very jealous).

But these days, not counting Nintendo, everything is everywhere. And everything is about to be more everywhere than ever now that Horizon Forbidden West has committed to a solid launch date for its inevitable PC release. It'll arrive on our shores on March 21, says port studio Nixxes.

Forbidden West is the sequel to Horizon Zero Dawn—which hit PC back in 2020—and continues Aloy's adventures in the robodino-riddled post-apocalypse. It was well-regarded when it came out on PlayStation, with reviewers praising it for its visuals, story, and combat.

The version that's set for release in March is the Complete Edition, which comes with all sorts of bonuses, add-ons, doodads and gewgaws. The most notable of those add-ons is the Burning Shores expansion, which bolts a whole new area onto the game and a new storyline to go with it.

Nixxes is promising a bunch of PC-specific technical goodies for this version of the game, too. We're talking unlocked framerates, DLSS 3 (alongside AMD FSR and Intel XeSS), DLAA for those of you who can handle it, and DirectStorage for PS5-style ultra fast load times. It'll even support up to 48:9 resolutions and triple-monitor setups for anyone who happens to be playing on the Las Vegas Sphere.

Sounds good to me, and I don't doubt that PC will end up being the best place to play Forbidden West once it finally hits (barring some Last of Us-style porting disaster). Zero Dawn was a little buggy when it released, but those bugs have pretty much been ironed out now, leaving a competent and very pretty open-world action adventure in their wake. With any luck, Forbidden West will skip the bugs part entirely.

You can find Horizon Forbidden West over on Steam and the Epic Games Store.

One of Josh's first memories is of playing Quake 2 on the family computer when he was much too young to be doing that, and he's been irreparably game-brained ever since. His writing has been featured in Vice, Fanbyte, and the Financial Times. He'll play pretty much anything, and has written far too much on everything from visual novels to Assassin's Creed. His most profound loves are for CRPGs, immersive sims, and any game whose ambition outstrips its budget. He thinks you're all far too mean about Deus Ex: Invisible War.