'Horizon Zero Dawn': Creators Reveal Game Preview Through Video Series
The creator of "Killzone," Amsterdam-based game developer Guerilla Games, is set to release a new open world action game named "Horizon Zero Dawn" within this month.
To build up some hype, the creators released three new videos titled "From Corridors to Mountains," "Growing Guerilla" and "Creating a PlayStation Icon" to provide players a glimpse of the upcoming "intense combat" game. In the first video, managing director Hermen Hulst described it as Guerilla Games' "most ambitious project."
Game director Mathijs De Jonge explained how they adapted the location-specific hit system from "Killzone" into "Horizon Zero Dawn's" gameplay. The director said that they developed weak spots in the upcoming game wherein players should be able to destroy their enemies by exploiting such.
"That's one of the things that we've adopted for Horizon, when building the combat with the machines," De Jonge said. "We've tried to expand it further, because these machines are way more complicated than the Helghast," he added.
In the "Growing Guerilla" video, the world of "Horizon Zero Dawn" is described by narrative director John Gonzales as an open world that is full of a "lush verdant nature" which simulatenously has robotic-like dinosaurs roaming around, and with human beings that are still living in a primitive state.
At this point, all the elements of "Horizon Zero Dawn" doesn't make sense yet, and it is actually one of the mysteries kept for the upcoming game. The creators, however, aim to enrich gameplay by promising that a coherent storyline is interwoven among all the game's elements and environment.
The last video titled "Creating a PlayStation Icon," however, has lead quest designer David Ford explaining how they cut up these chunks of stories to create an interconnected game storyline.
Ford says that Gonzales and his team had already written an overarching narrative for the game when he first came on board. However, he found that it was written as a story and not as a series of quests that can be best adapted for the game.
"So the quest team had the opportunity to work with the writers to break that story apart into smaller chunks, figure out where the gameplay would be, where the cutscenes would be, how it would all fit together," Ford explains in the last video.
In other news, "Horizon Zero Dawn" Thunderjaw Collector's Edition, which includes an exclusive world map, lithographs and premium packaging among others, has reportedly sold out in Australia in just one week after its announcement.
"Horizon Zero Dawn" is slated for a Feb. 28 release date for PlayStation 4 only.
