Horizon Zero Dawn: Behind The Scenes

Guerrilla Games shared a bunch of amazing behind-the-scenes footage, that helps you to understand the development of their next adventure.

Horizon Zero Dawn is a huge project everyone’s been waiting for a couple of years already. However, we still have very little knowledge of how this whole game came into existence. Fortunately for curious souls like us, Guerrilla Games and Sony shared some videos, which kind of show how this game was built.

Guerrilla Games is famous for its shooters. Although Killzone never actually managed to beat halo and become a blockbuster series, it did a good job of showing what a PlayStation system can do. Killzone Shadow Fall is still one of the best looking games on PS4 today. For Horizon Zero Dawn the studio had to change its entire approach, creating a title that would take the audiences into a brave new open world.

The game’s original pitch happened back in 2010, however, the development started much later. The entire company had to completely change its approach to game production, they had to start building their games differently. That’s why DECIMA engine had to be rebuilt. Not entirely of course.

Guerrilla started with a great foundation. Shadow Fall game tech was great. It could cope with open areas and rich and detailed worlds, show some wonderful post-processing. Previously the team relied on scripting tools, but with open-world, they proved to be outdated. That’s why they had to develop a lot of proprietary game development tools, which allowed to build the game at a much higher pace. Killzone had other influences on Horizon Zero Dawn as well. The gameplay of the original series (shooting in particular) helped to shape the future combat of HZD.

Horizon also had a lot of challenges in the story and game design department. It is an RPG, so the company desperately needed some qualified quest builders. Guerrilla actually hired John Gonzalez (former Obsidian), David Ford (created content for The Elder Scrolls Online), Dennis Zoetebier (designed a part of the ‘The Bloody Baron’ quest in The Witcher Wild Hunt). It’s a real quest-building dream team.

Another challenge was the design of the powerful lead – Aloy. The character went through many iterations before the team settled on the figure you see in-game.

Anyway, watch these videos. They are awesome, although they are very markety. Still, don’t think there’s anyone not willing to buy this game.

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