Sony has more than 25 first-party PlayStation 5 games in development, and nearly half of them are new intellectual property, according to a recent report from Wired. “There’s an incredible amount of variety originating from different regions. Big, small, different genres,” Hermen Hulst, PlayStation head of Worldwide Studios, told Wired in reference to the PS5 games currently in development.
This is in line with what Sony Interactive Entertainment President and CEO Jim Ryan said last month when confirming the PS5 will have more exclusives than ever before.
“We have been quietly but steadily investing in high-quality games for PlayStation, and we will make sure that the PS5 generation will have more dedicated software than ever before,” Ryan told Nikkei (as translated by VGC).
The Wired post also delves into the development of Horizon Forbidden West, a game that is reportedly due out in 2021. Forbidden West is the forthcoming sequel to Horizon Zero Dawn, which first launched in 2017 from Guerrilla Games.
Angie Smets, the studio director at Guerrilla, spoke about the PS5 DualSense features specific to Forbidden West.
“If you want to take a stealth approach to a combat situation and you dive into long grass,” Smets says, “you can feel those long grass leaves,” in reference to the DualSense’s haptic feedback support. Forbidden West will still launch for PS4, but if players want to experience haptic feedback, they’ll need to play on PS5.
Sony hasn’t provided an official update on the development of Forbidden West in some time, so if it is launching this year as Wired claims, we’ll likely get some sort of blowout showcase soon, perhaps in the form of a State of Play. Interestingly, the Wired post did not make mention of the upcoming God of War sequel, which was originally slated for a 2021 launch window.
Regardless of these two titles, Sony clearly has major plans for the future of the PS5, so there will be lots to look forward to.
