Horizon Forbidden West players have discovered a hidden area in the game’s world that might tease the location for future DLC. However, it is also a possibility that the found region may simply have been cut from the game.
A brief clip shared by Redditor lost48 shows a distant, unreachable zone in Forbidden West, which can be found in the eastern area of the map. As you can see, there’s a tall mountain with some kind of ruined fortress at the top. When using photo mode to zoom in, the player sees a pretty detailed environment and even several interactive climbing ledges meant for Aloy to reach the top of the hill.
The region was never used in Forbidden West, as players simply cannot reach this zone without leaving the play area of the map. Fans were quick to assume that this is a potential DLC region not yet fully implemented in the base game. From the looks of it, there might be a large part of the canyon available for players to explore behind the hidden passage through the ruined fort. Of course, there’s also a possibility that the mountain fortress was removed from the game for various reasons, which often happens during development.
The previous installment, Horizon Zero Dawn, received a big story expansion called The Frozen Wilds just eight months after the original’s launch. This DLC brings Aloy to The Cut — a snowy region on the border of Banuk territory, accessible via a mountain pass. Perhaps the Forbidden West players will get a similar opportunity to further explore the Grand Canyon in a few months, but this is just speculation at this point. The devs could also possibly introduce a completely new region in future updates, we do not yet know.
Aside from the potential Forbidden West story expansion, Guerrilla has already revealed its not-so-surprising plans to return to the world of Horizon at least one more time. Creative director Mathijs de Jonge explained that the Forbidden West’s ending is "setting up some things for the next game" in the series, but further details are under wraps.