You Need to Finish Horizon: Forbidden West Before You Can Start the DLC

For those of you excited to head back into Horizon: Forbidden West for its DLC expansion Burning Shores this week, there’s something important you should know.

You need to have finished the main Horizon: Forbidden West campaign before you can kick off the DLC quest line. You can’t just jump into it mid-stream because, narratively, it picks up right where the main campaign left off. Expansions in other RPGs, like The Witcher 3‘s Blood & Wine expansion just as an example, are often canonically set post-campaign but allow the player to start them at any time, provided they’ve hit the right level. This is not one of those situations. The Burning Shores campaign is gated until you’ve completed the campaign, up to and including the mission titled “Singularity”.

If you haven’t completed the campaign yet, and there are probably more than a few of you that haven’t, the good news is that the road to completing the campaign isn’t all that long. Provided you stick to the golden path like glue, Horizon: Forbidden West can be knocked over in around 30 hours or so. The trouble with speedrunning the campaign, of course, is that it means all the side quests will be piss-easy by the time you go back to do them, but that’s the sacrifice you’ll have to make if you want to kick on to the DLC.

The other thing you should probably know about the Horizon: Forbidden West DLC is that it is a PS5 exclusive. Sorry, PS4 players, but it seems you’re going to miss out on this one. Why Sony elected to ditch the PS4 for this expansion is a bit of a mystery — the base game ran just fine on the older hardware — but it does feel like a sign of the times. The PS5 is more readily available than at any other time in its life to date, and Sony seems ready to move forward.

Horizon: Forbidden West – Burning Shores launches on April 19 for PS5. If you’d like to refresh your memory of the base game, you can read our review right over here.