Horizon Forbidden West Arenas Guide

Horizon Forbidden West is an action role-playing game from Guerilla Games. It's the long-awaited sequel to 2017's Horizon Zero Dawn. Six months after the ending of Zero Dawn, the world is in trouble again. Aloy must venture out into the Forbidden West to find out how to stop the red plague that is destroying the land. Along the way, she will face numerous threats from both humans and machines.

However, if attempting to save a seemingly doomed world becomes too stressful, there are plenty of optional side-quests and challenges for you to do. Everything we know so far about the challenges within the Forbidden West comes from a PlayStation Blog Post and the official Challenges Trailer.

In this guide, we explain everything we know so far about Arenas, including what they are, and where you can potentially find them.

What Are Arenas?

As seen in the Challenges Trailer, arenas are special areas where Aloy can prove her worth by battling dangerous machines. In the trailer, she can be seen battling a Slitherfang (possibly one of the biggest machines in the game) inside the arena. Also, the arena that we were given a glimpse of in that trailer seemed to be quite small and contained very few places to hide. This may mean that you'll need to use all of your skills to beat the machine without being killed.

• Refresh your memory: Read our Horizon Zero Dawn Story Recap.

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Where Can You Find Arenas?

There has been no official announcement on where you can specifically find Arenas in the Forbidden West. However, there are two possible places you might find them when you take into account where you find Melee Pits and Hunting Grounds.

The first place you might be able to find an Arena is within a large settlement. It makes sense for an Arena like that to be in a large settlement due to the sheer size of the machines that the arena itself needs to contain. Also, in the trailer, there are a lot of spectators watching the battle take place. Again, this may mean the Arenas are in densely populated settlements.

Another place you might find Arenas are at standalone locations across the Forbidden West. If each Arena has specific requirements (such as which weapons you're allowed to use), then it may follow a similar structure to Hunting Grounds. They had their own locations across the map in Zero Dawn, so it's plausible that another big activity like the Arenas will have individual locations.

It's important to remember that this is speculation and nothing official has been revealed yet. We will update this page once we learn more.

There will be no shortage of things to do in Horizon Forbidden West. Check out our machines guide to learn about the new and returning machines that you'll face in the wilds. You'll need strong weapons to defend yourself with too. Take a look at our guide that details all of the new weapons and ammunition types that we know about so far.