Horizon Zero Dawn is a pleasure to play to 100% completion, each step of the best way. How did Guerrilla obtain this exceptional feat?
Horizon Zero Dawn is likely one of the few open world sport to respect the participant’s time and power.
As touched on in our Horizon Zero Dawn review, aspect content material is rigorously laid out round hubs to scale back backtracking; elective quests take you on excursions of environments you would possibly in any other case miss; and if you do step off the overwhelmed path, it’s often rewarding ultimately – narratively or mechanically or each.
“Either we’re going to spend another couple of months and really try to get this up here, or we’ll just cut it. We don’t want something to be in there that’s mediocre.”
This makes Horizon Zero Dawn a refreshing antidote to open world fatigue, and in response to senior producer Joel Eschler, Guerrilla Games made a acutely aware effort to keep away from checklist-style gameplay.
“It’s definitely something we were aware of,” he informed me at a Horizon Zero Dawn pre-launch occasion in Sydney final week.
“When we were building our feature set for Horizon and we got to the point where we agreed we are going to polish this and we’re going to commit to this staying in the game, we wanted everything to be up to a certain quality level. We wanted everything to be really good.”
Eschler made a collection of gestures indicating a number of ranges of content material. “We didn’t want to have this: amazing, really good, crappy,” he mentioned, waving a hand properly beneath the opposite ranges.
“If we were working on something and it wasn’t working, we didn’t like it internally or it was going to be too expensive to make right or the playtests were saying that it wasn’t working, then we looked at it really hard and decided, okay, either we’re going to spend another couple of months and really try to get this up here, or we’ll just cut it. We don’t want something to be in there that’s mediocre.”
Even so, Horizon Zero Dawn makes clear distinctions between important and aspect content material – and that’s one of many causes Eschler believes it really works so properly.
“We have our varying tiers of quests. We have our main Aloy progression story which is our big main path that everyone who finishes the game will see. We have teams dedicated to that,” he mentioned.
“And then we have other teams dedicated to the side activities like the Hunting Grounds, which are tests of skills. And they were really, really heavily designed between quest designers, artists, the designers that built the robots, to highlight the skills of the robots and to give you the chance to become really, really expert at hunting them.”
“We have teams dedicated to the side activities, and they were really, really heavily designed between quest designers, artists and the designers that built the robots.”
This specific aspect quest chain stands out in Horizon Zero Dawn as proving much more attention-grabbing than the standard timed twitch-reflex exams open worlds throw in for actually hardcore gamers; the Hunting Grounds supply extra tactical challenges that work as superior tutorials for mastering the fight sandbox.
Also of observe are the Cauldrons, which Eschler described as “pure gameplay” exams of each fight and traversal in addition to an opportunity to know extra concerning the origins of the machines. Other open world content material contains bandit camp take overs, a modest assortment of viewpoints and collectibles – however Horizon Zero Dawn additionally options conventional narrative-driven aspect quests.
“Then we have other quests, which are kind of side quests and lower in tier than the main story, but we really tried to make these more personal by telling individual stories of people who live in the world,” Eschler mentioned.
“We spent a lot of time doing the world building and building up the lore, so we could have these side stories that don’t necessarily impact the big overarching narrative, but still impactful to these individuals. We wanted it to feel like a real, living world.”
These are additionally noteworthy, presenting an array of vibrant characters that make Horizon Zero Dawn particularly memorable. Eschler’s feedback about making the tales match right into a “real, living world” aren’t simply PR waffling, both: Guerrilla has labored arduous to make good on this promise.
In one significantly noteworthy instance, I elected to observe an NPC on the finish of a quest to see whether or not they reverted to a generic face within the crowd, as in so many video games – and as an alternative found a everlasting change of their behaviour and a few distinctive ambient dialogue. Since the hunt has accomplished and there’s no goal to seek out out what occurs subsequent, most gamers received’t even see this scene, however its existence makes the hunt really feel significant and consequential.
This kind of factor is feasible as a result of Guerrilla divided its forces on Horizon Zero Dawn, Eschler mentioned.
“We have these multiple teams that are focused on making [one] particular part of it as awesome as possible rather than spreading the team thin spending time here and there and there,” he mentioned.
Horizon Zero Dawn releases February 28 within the US and March 1 in Europe, completely for PS4.
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