'Horizon Forbidden West' Length Revealed, And It's Another Big One

Has anyone else kicked off the year with a backlog that they can’t possibly hope to dismantle? I know I certainly did, and I’m going to be knees deep in Legends: Arceus by the end of the day, too. Sorry, that’s not what this is about, I’m just excited.

Anyway, if you’re in the same boat, there’s no doubt that you’d want nothing more than another chunky game to get through. Because you definitely don’t have enough of those already that you’ve never finished, do you? You can scroll away, but you can’t hide from the truth, reader. 

Horizon Forbidden West is set to launch on 18 February - check out the trailer below.

Well, according to German site GamePro, players ready to jump into Horizon Forbidden West are going to be getting quite busy when it launches next month. In an interview with the game’s director, Mathijs de Jonge, it was revealed that Forbidden West will run for around the same amount of time, if not a bit longer than its predecessor, Zero Dawn.

The website has been translated via Google, so you’ll have to forgive any mistakes, but it’s claimed that “the overall scope of Forbidden West should be slightly larger”, with completionists in particular set to be busy for longer than they would be in the previous game. It’s not currently known by how much, though.

For reference, according to HowLongToBeat, the main story in the base edition of Zero Dawn (so, without The Frozen Wilds expansion), takes around 22 and a half hours to beat, which admittedly isn’t colossal, but completionists are expected to log around 60 and a half hours, which is undeniably meaty. 

Of course, this pales in comparison to the 100% completion time of Dying Light 2, which claims to come in at around 500 hours. I have only the utmost admiration (and slight fear) for anyone who looks at that number and thinks “yeah, that’s manageable”. Regardless, Horizon Forbidden West releases super soon, on 18 February, so there’s not long to wait now.