A playable and almost complete build of PlayStation’s Horizon Forbidden West has leaked online, over one month before the game releases to the public.
Images of what appears to be the PS4 version of the Guerilla Games-developed title began hitting the web earlier this week and have since been hit by copyright strikes by PlayStation. VideoGamesChronicle (VGC) also corroborates that the leaked build is indeed legitimate.
It’s unclear how this may have happened, but VGC reports that outside of some missing art assets, the leaked build contains the “entire core content” of the game. Therefore, those looking forward to Forbidden West may want to tread lightly online for spoilers, perhaps even by muting Twitter keywords related to the game. Forbidden West is one of the two major confirmed first-party PlayStation games for the year alongside Sony Santa Monica’s God of War: Ragnarok.
This isn’t the first time a major PlayStation game has suffered a leak. In 2020, significant story beats from Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us Part II had leaked months before the game ended up releasing. One of the developer’s earlier games, Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End, also leaked a couple of weeks early in 2016.
The Last of Us leak was reportedly due to a hacker exploiting a vulnerability that granted access to a server, while Uncharted 4 leaks surfaced early due to physical copies of the game getting stolen in the U.K. It’s unclear whether something similar to either situation may have happened with Horizon Forbidden West.
Horizon Forbidden West is set to release on PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 on February 18th. Little has been revealed about the game’s plot, but we do know the game follows huntress Aloy as she journeys to a mysterious frontier to find the source of a deadly plague. Some of Forbidden West‘s new gameplay features include explorable underwater areas, enhanced melee combat and a Breath of the Wild-esque ‘Shieldwing’ hang glider.
Image credit: PlayStation
Source: VGC
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