CurrencyChase
Banned
Pre-ordered
Horizon Zero Dawn | PS4/PC | Out Now
- Thread starter Kamikaze Revy
- Start date
Looks incredible(visually) but I fear this may be a 3rd person far cry but prettier. I'm not letting it's exclusivity label hype me up
Brief Keef
Superstar
trippin pre ordered
Grand Conde
Superstar
The enemies, combat and world are far superior to Far Cry breh.
Horizon Zero Dawn – the feminist action game we've been waiting for
Guerrilla Games’ have created a brave, independent, multi-dimensional heroine to lead this highly satisfying mission
Sam Loveridge
Tuesday 31 January 2017 05.00 ESTLast modified on Wednesday 1 February 2017 03.39 EST
Of all the ways Horizon: Zero Dawn could have begun, we certainly weren’t expecting a Lion King tribute. This is, after all, a far-future, post-apocalyptic adventure set in a brutal world populated by monstrous robots – hardly Disney material. But sure enough, the game opens with Aloy, the flame-haired warrior who has become a fixture of Sony’s PlayStation 4 marketing, as a baby, carried on the back of her mentor, Rost. When he reaches the edge of a cliff, he holds the child aloft to the Goddess, screaming her name into the abyss.
He doesn’t then break into The Circle of Life, but it’s clear Aloy isn’t just any old futuristic warrior. Last month developer Guerrilla games held a preview event for the game, providing hands-on time with its opening hour. And it’s clear what the team is envisaging is actually a very modern heroine; a Lara Croft designed for the 21st century, meant to inspire gamers not only with her strength, complexity and ferocity, but with her femininity. However, for what feels like the first time in years, we’ve got a female lead who isn’t sexualised at all.
Horizon Zero dawn takes place 1000 years after an apocalyptic event almost wipes out humanity in the mid-21st century. The civilisation we know is long gone, and all that’s left are the ruins of our advanced technological society – or what the current inhabitants call the Metal World. “There are really profound buried secrets out there, and the story is going to lead you towards them,” says lead writer, John Gonzalez. “I don’t think they’re going to be what you’re expecting.”
The only hint of the high-tech world left behind are the giant robotic creatures that roam the lands, forcing humanity to exist in scattered tribes. Aloy’s group is known as the Nora and it’s a matriarchal tribe where parenthood, particularly motherhood, is sacred. In this society, having no mother is practically a sin, and unfortunately for Aloy, it’s something she’s been marked with since birth.
As she grows into a child, she fights for a legitimate position in the tribe, trying to play with the other Nora children. But as the people make her outcast status clear, she flees the group and is dropped – literally – into the Metal World far earlier than expected. It’s here, deep in the ruins, where Aloy stumbles across the remnants of our civilisation, dozens of ashen corpses huddled together in what appear to be bomb shelters.
There’s a moment here where the concept of the game clicks into place. Aloy discovers what can only be described as a wearable smartphone from the future, which eventually becomes one of the many aspects that sets her apart from the other characters of Horizon. With some trepidation, she fixes it on her ear and is presented with a holographic video recording of a man wishing his son a remote happy birthday. Aloy mimics his words, clearly feeling an urgent need to be part of a family. It’s a very moving and emotionally complicated moment.
Later you watch her experiment with the newfound tech, scrolling through screens that mean nothing to her, but that players themselves will recognise as settings menus and volume controls. It’s just one of many touching human moments that litter the game.
From here, Aloy is focused on finding out where she comes from and according to Rost there’s only one way to do that: be found worthy in a special Nora event called The Proving. But to win that, she’s going to be spending the next few years learning how to hunt and survive against the robotic beasts. Cue an epic training montage that takes you from child to the young woman who’s more than fit to be Horizon’s heroine.
“Somehow, she just jumped out of the concept art,” explains Guerilla Gamesmanaging director, Herman Hulst. “She was already there when we set out this story, this world. We wanted a fierce hunter in there and she kind of just appeared. We then spent six years crafting her and making her what she is today.”
“It’s really important that we didn’t look for a woman and that turned out to be Aloy. We had Aloy and one of her very many attributes is that she is a woman. She’s also an outcast and a very fierce person. She’s brave and independent, but why I like her so much is that she’s also kind-hearted and she has every right to be really upset with the tribe, yet she still has it in her nature to be kind to them, to help them out.”
During our demo, we played the opening three missions, a couple of side quests and a point later in the game to see some different kind of robots. From this snapshot, though, it’s clear Horizon Zero Dawn is launching at the perfect time in our own history, with a heroine to match the prevailing mood. Lara Croft emerged as a highly sexualised entity into the era of lads’ mags and Page Three pin-ups, her feminism buried beneath swathes of marketing focused on her other assets. Aloy arrives into a culture where Everyday Sexism and online bigotry are being called out and tackled, where gender and mental health issues are being framed and discussed.
Horizon Zero Dawn manages to hint at all this. In the opening 15 minutes, there’s an LGBT reference that caught us pleasantly off-guard, while an early side quest has Aloy dealing with a man who has mental health problems and you’ll have to decide what happens to him and the way you handle the situation.
“I would say that it’s important that a game is relevant and there are many aspects of Horizon [that are relevant], not just the identity part of it in that it’s a young person, who’s independent and resourceful,” says Hulst. “There are big themes in there. It’s not a story we’re telling in this game but we’re touching on the autonomy of warfare, there are drone fights and there’s a moral aspect of whether we want machines to make autonomous decisions on whether to kill or not.”
The complexities of our heroine and her narrative are signalled early on in the game with dialogue options and flashpoint decisions. It’s up to you how Aloy reacts in certain situations, with these decisions rippling out to events later in the game. Should you check up on Rost’s well-being before The Proving? When Aloy is a child, should she throw a rock back at a young Nora boy? It’s not quite the level of cause and effect you’d see in Mass Effect or a Telltale adventure, but Guerrilla assures us that these moments will have consequences to the point that characters live or die by your choices – and we’re certainly given the impression that we have some control over the kind of heroine Aloy becomes.
This emphasis on play choice is reflected in the game structure too. Horizon Zero Dawn straddles the action and role-playing game (RPG) genres, with hit counters, skill trees and some customisation, but it’s more about working out how to tackle the various robots using fairly primitive weaponry. Aloy can use her smart device to scan both the environment and her enemies, picking out weak points on their bodies and learning how to use the correct weapons or ammo.
But whatever arrows you’ve got in your bow or whichever robots you’re facing, it’s quickly apparent that humans are the weaker species here. The robots can kill Aloy incredibly quickly, so one wrong move and you’ll find yourself repeatedly staring at the loading screen. Stealth is key, using the long grasses to watch and wait and following patrol paths with Aloy’s special tech. Get spotted by a Watcher, or any of the bigger, more formidable creatures you’ll meet later in the game, and you could be facing death in minutes.
With the creatures, tribes and the mix of main missions and side quests, Horizon Zero Dawn feels like a strange blend of Far Cry Primal and The Witcher 3, especially with the promise that the game will have you traversing various eco-types and encountering different symbiotic robot relationships. The one-eyed Watcher droids, for example, act like shepherds, keeping tabs on herds of Grazers, and there are other similar interactions to discover. In this way, the game becomes a sort of interactive take on a David Attenborough documentary series – something the development team say they were greatly inspired by. “What I like about David Attenborough is that it’s not just natural beauty, it’s about how dramatised it is,” says Hulst. “You look at Planet Earth and the saturation in the colours and the extreme slow-mos – it’s way over the top.”
Robots are a satisfying blend of mechanical and animal, with metal plates covering muscle-like flanks, and physical appearances simulating creatures like buffalos and giraffes. They are as intelligent and unpredictable as wild creatures. “I’ve never played a game that has an open-world where I feel totally alone in the middle of this incredibly dangerous environment,” explains Gonzalez. “It’s really interesting in kind of a tactical way.”
This an open world game with a difference, though, eschewing the familiar tactic of overpopulating the map with features and challenges in favour of wide open spaces full of natural beauty and its inhabitants. It feels like the idea is about discovering the character’s role in the world, as it is about shooting stuff. In this respect, Horizon is a game with a serious agenda, this is a character with questions and experiences that many players will relate to – despite the futuristic setting.
“Sometimes people ask about her being a ‘strong female character’ and it seems like female characters always have to be strong,” says Hulst. “Well, she happens to be quite fierce but she’s not always strong, sometimes she gets defeated, but she’s strong enough to fight back. She’s not a one-dimensional super human, she’s Aloy.”
We left the Horizon demo with a lot of questions. Who are Aloy’s parents? What happened to the Metal World? Who were the masked enemies from the story trailer? But it feels like we have the right heroine to lead us to the answers.
Horizon Zero Dawn – the feminist action game we've been waiting for
Guerrilla Games’ have created a brave, independent, multi-dimensional heroine to lead this highly satisfying mission
Sam Loveridge
Tuesday 31 January 2017 05.00 ESTLast modified on Wednesday 1 February 2017 03.39 EST
Of all the ways Horizon: Zero Dawn could have begun, we certainly weren’t expecting a Lion King tribute. This is, after all, a far-future, post-apocalyptic adventure set in a brutal world populated by monstrous robots – hardly Disney material. But sure enough, the game opens with Aloy, the flame-haired warrior who has become a fixture of Sony’s PlayStation 4 marketing, as a baby, carried on the back of her mentor, Rost. When he reaches the edge of a cliff, he holds the child aloft to the Goddess, screaming her name into the abyss.
He doesn’t then break into The Circle of Life, but it’s clear Aloy isn’t just any old futuristic warrior. Last month developer Guerrilla games held a preview event for the game, providing hands-on time with its opening hour. And it’s clear what the team is envisaging is actually a very modern heroine; a Lara Croft designed for the 21st century, meant to inspire gamers not only with her strength, complexity and ferocity, but with her femininity. However, for what feels like the first time in years, we’ve got a female lead who isn’t sexualised at all.
Horizon Zero dawn takes place 1000 years after an apocalyptic event almost wipes out humanity in the mid-21st century. The civilisation we know is long gone, and all that’s left are the ruins of our advanced technological society – or what the current inhabitants call the Metal World. “There are really profound buried secrets out there, and the story is going to lead you towards them,” says lead writer, John Gonzalez. “I don’t think they’re going to be what you’re expecting.”
The only hint of the high-tech world left behind are the giant robotic creatures that roam the lands, forcing humanity to exist in scattered tribes. Aloy’s group is known as the Nora and it’s a matriarchal tribe where parenthood, particularly motherhood, is sacred. In this society, having no mother is practically a sin, and unfortunately for Aloy, it’s something she’s been marked with since birth.
As she grows into a child, she fights for a legitimate position in the tribe, trying to play with the other Nora children. But as the people make her outcast status clear, she flees the group and is dropped – literally – into the Metal World far earlier than expected. It’s here, deep in the ruins, where Aloy stumbles across the remnants of our civilisation, dozens of ashen corpses huddled together in what appear to be bomb shelters.
There’s a moment here where the concept of the game clicks into place. Aloy discovers what can only be described as a wearable smartphone from the future, which eventually becomes one of the many aspects that sets her apart from the other characters of Horizon. With some trepidation, she fixes it on her ear and is presented with a holographic video recording of a man wishing his son a remote happy birthday. Aloy mimics his words, clearly feeling an urgent need to be part of a family. It’s a very moving and emotionally complicated moment.
Later you watch her experiment with the newfound tech, scrolling through screens that mean nothing to her, but that players themselves will recognise as settings menus and volume controls. It’s just one of many touching human moments that litter the game.
From here, Aloy is focused on finding out where she comes from and according to Rost there’s only one way to do that: be found worthy in a special Nora event called The Proving. But to win that, she’s going to be spending the next few years learning how to hunt and survive against the robotic beasts. Cue an epic training montage that takes you from child to the young woman who’s more than fit to be Horizon’s heroine.
“Somehow, she just jumped out of the concept art,” explains Guerilla Gamesmanaging director, Herman Hulst. “She was already there when we set out this story, this world. We wanted a fierce hunter in there and she kind of just appeared. We then spent six years crafting her and making her what she is today.”
“It’s really important that we didn’t look for a woman and that turned out to be Aloy. We had Aloy and one of her very many attributes is that she is a woman. She’s also an outcast and a very fierce person. She’s brave and independent, but why I like her so much is that she’s also kind-hearted and she has every right to be really upset with the tribe, yet she still has it in her nature to be kind to them, to help them out.”
During our demo, we played the opening three missions, a couple of side quests and a point later in the game to see some different kind of robots. From this snapshot, though, it’s clear Horizon Zero Dawn is launching at the perfect time in our own history, with a heroine to match the prevailing mood. Lara Croft emerged as a highly sexualised entity into the era of lads’ mags and Page Three pin-ups, her feminism buried beneath swathes of marketing focused on her other assets. Aloy arrives into a culture where Everyday Sexism and online bigotry are being called out and tackled, where gender and mental health issues are being framed and discussed.
Horizon Zero Dawn manages to hint at all this. In the opening 15 minutes, there’s an LGBT reference that caught us pleasantly off-guard, while an early side quest has Aloy dealing with a man who has mental health problems and you’ll have to decide what happens to him and the way you handle the situation.
“I would say that it’s important that a game is relevant and there are many aspects of Horizon [that are relevant], not just the identity part of it in that it’s a young person, who’s independent and resourceful,” says Hulst. “There are big themes in there. It’s not a story we’re telling in this game but we’re touching on the autonomy of warfare, there are drone fights and there’s a moral aspect of whether we want machines to make autonomous decisions on whether to kill or not.”
The complexities of our heroine and her narrative are signalled early on in the game with dialogue options and flashpoint decisions. It’s up to you how Aloy reacts in certain situations, with these decisions rippling out to events later in the game. Should you check up on Rost’s well-being before The Proving? When Aloy is a child, should she throw a rock back at a young Nora boy? It’s not quite the level of cause and effect you’d see in Mass Effect or a Telltale adventure, but Guerrilla assures us that these moments will have consequences to the point that characters live or die by your choices – and we’re certainly given the impression that we have some control over the kind of heroine Aloy becomes.
This emphasis on play choice is reflected in the game structure too. Horizon Zero Dawn straddles the action and role-playing game (RPG) genres, with hit counters, skill trees and some customisation, but it’s more about working out how to tackle the various robots using fairly primitive weaponry. Aloy can use her smart device to scan both the environment and her enemies, picking out weak points on their bodies and learning how to use the correct weapons or ammo.
But whatever arrows you’ve got in your bow or whichever robots you’re facing, it’s quickly apparent that humans are the weaker species here. The robots can kill Aloy incredibly quickly, so one wrong move and you’ll find yourself repeatedly staring at the loading screen. Stealth is key, using the long grasses to watch and wait and following patrol paths with Aloy’s special tech. Get spotted by a Watcher, or any of the bigger, more formidable creatures you’ll meet later in the game, and you could be facing death in minutes.
With the creatures, tribes and the mix of main missions and side quests, Horizon Zero Dawn feels like a strange blend of Far Cry Primal and The Witcher 3, especially with the promise that the game will have you traversing various eco-types and encountering different symbiotic robot relationships. The one-eyed Watcher droids, for example, act like shepherds, keeping tabs on herds of Grazers, and there are other similar interactions to discover. In this way, the game becomes a sort of interactive take on a David Attenborough documentary series – something the development team say they were greatly inspired by. “What I like about David Attenborough is that it’s not just natural beauty, it’s about how dramatised it is,” says Hulst. “You look at Planet Earth and the saturation in the colours and the extreme slow-mos – it’s way over the top.”
Robots are a satisfying blend of mechanical and animal, with metal plates covering muscle-like flanks, and physical appearances simulating creatures like buffalos and giraffes. They are as intelligent and unpredictable as wild creatures. “I’ve never played a game that has an open-world where I feel totally alone in the middle of this incredibly dangerous environment,” explains Gonzalez. “It’s really interesting in kind of a tactical way.”
This an open world game with a difference, though, eschewing the familiar tactic of overpopulating the map with features and challenges in favour of wide open spaces full of natural beauty and its inhabitants. It feels like the idea is about discovering the character’s role in the world, as it is about shooting stuff. In this respect, Horizon is a game with a serious agenda, this is a character with questions and experiences that many players will relate to – despite the futuristic setting.
“Sometimes people ask about her being a ‘strong female character’ and it seems like female characters always have to be strong,” says Hulst. “Well, she happens to be quite fierce but she’s not always strong, sometimes she gets defeated, but she’s strong enough to fight back. She’s not a one-dimensional super human, she’s Aloy.”
We left the Horizon demo with a lot of questions. Who are Aloy’s parents? What happened to the Metal World? Who were the masked enemies from the story trailer? But it feels like we have the right heroine to lead us to the answers.
Horizon Zero Dawn – the feminist action game we've been waiting for
Creating a New World - Hands-On with Guerrilla Games' Horizon Zero Dawn
We recently visited Guerilla Games' Amsterdam-based studios to go hands-on with a near-complete version of Horizon Zero Dawn and fought robot dinosaurs. Read on for our full experience and thoughts...
I’ve often thought about developer pigeonholes. You know, studios and teams shoehorned into a particular genre or style of game, and if those working through these confines for years on end, wouldn’t just explode out of the creative blocks if given half a chance to just change the scenery. Plenty of studios come to mind, like Treyarch at Activision, who I think would create something pretty special if the reigns came loose from Call of Duty. Or a developer like Nintendo’s Retro Studios who’ve been handed Nintendo licenses to only partially reimagine (post-brilliant Metroid Prime series, mind), rather than being let loose to work entirely on their own IP with their own direction.
We’ve seen some of this freedom re-emerging among Triple-A ranks. Rare, who’d seemingly been demoted to Kinect games for Xbox 360 and Xbox One, has recently unveiled Sea of Thieves, and in talking to the studio, the sheer concept that development of this promising title is as loose and vast as the pirates and seas, respectively, presented in the game, is refreshing. It looks and feels like the Rare of old, with the windows open, rather than being hidden from public view as was their MO while under Nintendo’s reign.
On the other side of the aisle, another developer metamorphosis has taken place within Guerrilla Games’ four walls. The Sony-owned Killzone developer surprised the gaming world two E3s ago when they revealed Horizon Zero Dawn -- a game that is arguably the antithesis to everything we’d ever seen them bring to the table with the dark, dank and linear Killzone franchise -- not to take anything away from that game; visually it has always served as a flagship title towards what Sony’s hardware is capable of, and while some people may have played down the series’ story beats and sometimes wooden characters, like a lot of other hardcore shooters out there, it has/had an equally hardcore audience, but for the studio, it was clearly simply time to change.
“We're a very different team now, and there were times where we didn't think we would pull it [Horizon Zero Dawn] off,” reveals Guerrilla boss Herman Hulst as he addresses us ahead of our extensive hands-on with the near complete version of the game-gone-gold out at their Amsterdam-based studios.
If you’ve been following the game at all, you’ll know the elevator pitch is ‘open-world action-RPG set in an overgrown, lush post-apocalyptic future where an ecology of dynamic animal-like robots share the world with socially and technologically devolved humans, and other animals’. It’s a mouthful, and must have been a longer elevator ride than most, but what’s impressive about any such undertaking is understanding the switch from a linear story about a specific set of characters fighting a common enemy -- where the developers controlled the beats and scripting -- to an entirely realised world with rules set outside of the player-narrative. This is a hard concept to grasp, especially because in modern open-world games, ecology is as much a pillar of the game’s world as the open-world itself is. And to have crafted an entirely new ecosystem to coexist alongside one we -- as players -- will already easily understand, and have it nestle there seamlessly, while leaving us with nothing but questions, is to be applauded.
But to put a point on what I took away from my time with the game, and developers, is this is less The Witcher-esque, and far more Far Cry in its delivery. We were served with the usual company lines relating to ‘nothing influenced us, but ourselves’, however, it’s abundantly clear early on that this is a heavy action-adventure game with some RPG rules set in an open-world whose dynamic, emergent play is driven by player curiosity, rather than any series of sneaky design systems set to make you think you’ve stumbled upon something unique and new to you.
Please don’t take that last statement as detriment though. Horizon Zero Dawn has a number of design heroes that stem from a core principle built around world-building and player-engagement. For one, combat is probably as on par as the robot ecology as anything else in the game, in its key deliveries. While I mentioned The Witcher earlier, its combat actually really has nothing on this. Horizon Zero Dawn is a John Woo action movie come to life in a world we don’t wholly understand, but it works. Similarly to Far Cry, you can fill out an ability tree with varying levels of stylish attacks designed to ignite the player senses and help sell this over-the-top world. Oh, and what a world, I might add.
It’s as lush as they come, and stands as yet another console benchmark for the tech wonders at Guerrilla Games. Everything has a purpose, and the way it stacks, works and reacts to player interaction is immediately exciting and deeply enticing. I definitely didn’t have enough time to see the true depth of it all, but what I did play, and see, made me want to dig as deep as I could. What’s interesting is that the team has created a human future, some 40-plus years from now, only to then make it the game’s past 1000 years later. So it’s not like they just decided on a game with lush greens and robot dinosaurs, they’ve worked tirelessly to craft an entirely new and unique game-universe that has all the potential in the world to transcend the interactive space in favour of becoming the PS4’s flagship transmedia property.
In my hands-on I played through the game’s opening, which starts with the game’s protagonist, Aloy, as a baby in the caring hands of Rost, an Outcast who has been tasked with caring for her. She has no known mother, and as such is also an outcast of sorts herself, with this tribal society being one of dominant matriarchy.
“We took a really serious approach to imagining the culture that appears in the world,” explains narrative director John Gonzales. “We tried as much as possible to approach it as an anthropological puzzle, to think through the environments that these people were living in and the materials that were available to them and how that would shape everything from their fashion to the beliefs that they might have.”
We move into her life soon after as a small six or seven-year old child. Little Aloy is very cute, sporting one of the most animated uncanny valley faces I’ve ever seen, replete with adolescent freckles to help accentuate both her youth, and her fiery red hair. You’ll play as the youthful Aloy in an important part of how she comes to be the firebrand she eventually is, and it's during this section of play you get your first glimpse at the “old world”. More importantly, it’s here Aloy comes into possession of her ‘Focus Device’ which looks like a remnant of Star Trek technology. With this device she can see a holographic overlay that highlights machinery she can interact with, and also allows her to collect data entries from the long-gone old world inhabitants. Even in this early section of the game, the past is a dark mystery, and one you definitely want to know more about.
Once you go through a training montage as the grown-up Aloy in her lead-up to take on what’s called the ‘Proving’, the game opens up pretty quickly. Structurally, it still feels a lot like Far Cry with a series of fetch-quests scattered around the village in which you live. There’s also a handful of lower-level robots scattered around this relatively safe zone. I found taking on the Watchers -- raptor-like guardians of herds of wildebeest-like robots -- pretty easy. You have a number of tools at your disposal, and as you progress through the game you’ll earn new weapons and be able to upgrade them. Your base weapon, however, is your bow and you can see that Guerrilla worked tirelessly on making sure combat with the bow, first and foremost, worked properly. It’s arguably the best delivered game in terms of combat with that specific weapon, with not much else coming close. And once you unlock the Hunter Reflexes ability (which is available very early), you’ll be taking down enemies with absolute style.
You’ll eventually earn the right to leave the locked-up confines of the village for your quest to progress proper, which involves unlocking the mystery of this hazy future and why these robots have evolved the way they have. And while I didn’t play much beyond the game’s starting point (I got sidetracked by one of the its myriad challenge dungeons known as Cauldrons, but we can’t talk much more about these other than to say: they exist), once you emerge from the starting area, both the challenge factor, and that always-awesome sensation of open-world intimidation kick in, and your journey for understanding -- and character growth -- begin.
It’s difficult to convey, at this stage, how the whole thing is going to play out. Many of us were expecting a game closer to The Witcher than Far Cry with Horizon Zero Dawn, but even the Far Cry parallels might wind up being fleeting. What I can say without issue is that, as a game-world, Horizon Zero Dawn is as complete and as inviting as they come. Combat and robots are the absolute heroes here, and I’m hoping the open-world component offers up dynamic, emergent play, but even if it doesn’t and we wind up with a more linear narrative wrapped in large open spaces, being able to engage in that amazing combat with equally amazing robotic enemies is still a winning formula. And as previously mentioned, this world is ripe for the picking as far as expanded story content and transmedia is concerned, so it’s highly likely this first installment isn’t the last.
We’ll have more from our hands-on preview event, including words from the devs and a special developer tour of Guerrilla’s facilities soon, but for now, if you haven’t picked up a PS4 yet, this is highly recommended as the game to do so for. If you do have one, well, it’s a no-brainer: robot animals and dinosaurs, a great lead, awesome combat and an unbelievably fully-realised game-world that is as lush as it is gorgeous. It’s a win on every level.
Creating a New World - Hands-On with Guerrilla Games' Horizon Zero Dawn - AusGamers.com
Brief Keef
Superstar
coulda swore i said this game was like fry cry a couple pages agoCreating a New World - Hands-On with Guerrilla Games' Horizon Zero Dawn
We recently visited Guerilla Games' Amsterdam-based studios to go hands-on with a near-complete version of Horizon Zero Dawn and fought robot dinosaurs. Read on for our full experience and thoughts...
I’ve often thought about developer pigeonholes. You know, studios and teams shoehorned into a particular genre or style of game, and if those working through these confines for years on end, wouldn’t just explode out of the creative blocks if given half a chance to just change the scenery. Plenty of studios come to mind, like Treyarch at Activision, who I think would create something pretty special if the reigns came loose from Call of Duty. Or a developer like Nintendo’s Retro Studios who’ve been handed Nintendo licenses to only partially reimagine (post-brilliant Metroid Prime series, mind), rather than being let loose to work entirely on their own IP with their own direction.
We’ve seen some of this freedom re-emerging among Triple-A ranks. Rare, who’d seemingly been demoted to Kinect games for Xbox 360 and Xbox One, has recently unveiled Sea of Thieves, and in talking to the studio, the sheer concept that development of this promising title is as loose and vast as the pirates and seas, respectively, presented in the game, is refreshing. It looks and feels like the Rare of old, with the windows open, rather than being hidden from public view as was their MO while under Nintendo’s reign.
On the other side of the aisle, another developer metamorphosis has taken place within Guerrilla Games’ four walls. The Sony-owned Killzone developer surprised the gaming world two E3s ago when they revealed Horizon Zero Dawn -- a game that is arguably the antithesis to everything we’d ever seen them bring to the table with the dark, dank and linear Killzone franchise -- not to take anything away from that game; visually it has always served as a flagship title towards what Sony’s hardware is capable of, and while some people may have played down the series’ story beats and sometimes wooden characters, like a lot of other hardcore shooters out there, it has/had an equally hardcore audience, but for the studio, it was clearly simply time to change.
“We're a very different team now, and there were times where we didn't think we would pull it [Horizon Zero Dawn] off,” reveals Guerrilla boss Herman Hulst as he addresses us ahead of our extensive hands-on with the near complete version of the game-gone-gold out at their Amsterdam-based studios.
If you’ve been following the game at all, you’ll know the elevator pitch is ‘open-world action-RPG set in an overgrown, lush post-apocalyptic future where an ecology of dynamic animal-like robots share the world with socially and technologically devolved humans, and other animals’. It’s a mouthful, and must have been a longer elevator ride than most, but what’s impressive about any such undertaking is understanding the switch from a linear story about a specific set of characters fighting a common enemy -- where the developers controlled the beats and scripting -- to an entirely realised world with rules set outside of the player-narrative. This is a hard concept to grasp, especially because in modern open-world games, ecology is as much a pillar of the game’s world as the open-world itself is. And to have crafted an entirely new ecosystem to coexist alongside one we -- as players -- will already easily understand, and have it nestle there seamlessly, while leaving us with nothing but questions, is to be applauded.
But to put a point on what I took away from my time with the game, and developers, is this is less The Witcher-esque, and far more Far Cry in its delivery. We were served with the usual company lines relating to ‘nothing influenced us, but ourselves’, however, it’s abundantly clear early on that this is a heavy action-adventure game with some RPG rules set in an open-world whose dynamic, emergent play is driven by player curiosity, rather than any series of sneaky design systems set to make you think you’ve stumbled upon something unique and new to you.
Please don’t take that last statement as detriment though. Horizon Zero Dawn has a number of design heroes that stem from a core principle built around world-building and player-engagement. For one, combat is probably as on par as the robot ecology as anything else in the game, in its key deliveries. While I mentioned The Witcher earlier, its combat actually really has nothing on this. Horizon Zero Dawn is a John Woo action movie come to life in a world we don’t wholly understand, but it works. Similarly to Far Cry, you can fill out an ability tree with varying levels of stylish attacks designed to ignite the player senses and help sell this over-the-top world. Oh, and what a world, I might add.
It’s as lush as they come, and stands as yet another console benchmark for the tech wonders at Guerrilla Games. Everything has a purpose, and the way it stacks, works and reacts to player interaction is immediately exciting and deeply enticing. I definitely didn’t have enough time to see the true depth of it all, but what I did play, and see, made me want to dig as deep as I could. What’s interesting is that the team has created a human future, some 40-plus years from now, only to then make it the game’s past 1000 years later. So it’s not like they just decided on a game with lush greens and robot dinosaurs, they’ve worked tirelessly to craft an entirely new and unique game-universe that has all the potential in the world to transcend the interactive space in favour of becoming the PS4’s flagship transmedia property.
In my hands-on I played through the game’s opening, which starts with the game’s protagonist, Aloy, as a baby in the caring hands of Rost, an Outcast who has been tasked with caring for her. She has no known mother, and as such is also an outcast of sorts herself, with this tribal society being one of dominant matriarchy.
“We took a really serious approach to imagining the culture that appears in the world,” explains narrative director John Gonzales. “We tried as much as possible to approach it as an anthropological puzzle, to think through the environments that these people were living in and the materials that were available to them and how that would shape everything from their fashion to the beliefs that they might have.”
We move into her life soon after as a small six or seven-year old child. Little Aloy is very cute, sporting one of the most animated uncanny valley faces I’ve ever seen, replete with adolescent freckles to help accentuate both her youth, and her fiery red hair. You’ll play as the youthful Aloy in an important part of how she comes to be the firebrand she eventually is, and it's during this section of play you get your first glimpse at the “old world”. More importantly, it’s here Aloy comes into possession of her ‘Focus Device’ which looks like a remnant of Star Trek technology. With this device she can see a holographic overlay that highlights machinery she can interact with, and also allows her to collect data entries from the long-gone old world inhabitants. Even in this early section of the game, the past is a dark mystery, and one you definitely want to know more about.
Once you go through a training montage as the grown-up Aloy in her lead-up to take on what’s called the ‘Proving’, the game opens up pretty quickly. Structurally, it still feels a lot like Far Cry with a series of fetch-quests scattered around the village in which you live. There’s also a handful of lower-level robots scattered around this relatively safe zone. I found taking on the Watchers -- raptor-like guardians of herds of wildebeest-like robots -- pretty easy. You have a number of tools at your disposal, and as you progress through the game you’ll earn new weapons and be able to upgrade them. Your base weapon, however, is your bow and you can see that Guerrilla worked tirelessly on making sure combat with the bow, first and foremost, worked properly. It’s arguably the best delivered game in terms of combat with that specific weapon, with not much else coming close. And once you unlock the Hunter Reflexes ability (which is available very early), you’ll be taking down enemies with absolute style.
You’ll eventually earn the right to leave the locked-up confines of the village for your quest to progress proper, which involves unlocking the mystery of this hazy future and why these robots have evolved the way they have. And while I didn’t play much beyond the game’s starting point (I got sidetracked by one of the its myriad challenge dungeons known as Cauldrons, but we can’t talk much more about these other than to say: they exist), once you emerge from the starting area, both the challenge factor, and that always-awesome sensation of open-world intimidation kick in, and your journey for understanding -- and character growth -- begin.
It’s difficult to convey, at this stage, how the whole thing is going to play out. Many of us were expecting a game closer to The Witcher than Far Cry with Horizon Zero Dawn, but even the Far Cry parallels might wind up being fleeting. What I can say without issue is that, as a game-world, Horizon Zero Dawn is as complete and as inviting as they come. Combat and robots are the absolute heroes here, and I’m hoping the open-world component offers up dynamic, emergent play, but even if it doesn’t and we wind up with a more linear narrative wrapped in large open spaces, being able to engage in that amazing combat with equally amazing robotic enemies is still a winning formula. And as previously mentioned, this world is ripe for the picking as far as expanded story content and transmedia is concerned, so it’s highly likely this first installment isn’t the last.
We’ll have more from our hands-on preview event, including words from the devs and a special developer tour of Guerrilla’s facilities soon, but for now, if you haven’t picked up a PS4 yet, this is highly recommended as the game to do so for. If you do have one, well, it’s a no-brainer: robot animals and dinosaurs, a great lead, awesome combat and an unbelievably fully-realised game-world that is as lush as it is gorgeous. It’s a win on every level.
Creating a New World - Hands-On with Guerrilla Games' Horizon Zero Dawn - AusGamers.com
666 ReVeNGe 666
TROLL IS LIFE
21 days 
First day cop
More excited about this than Mass Effect
Zelda, HZD and ME all within one month
First day cop
More excited about this than Mass Effect
Zelda, HZD and ME all within one month
Vintage Eclectic
Lord of the Sky
Copping this and Nioh the same day. This will give me time to get caught up on everything else.
I'm really interested in the story though. Seems like they put a lot of insight into the decisions/storyline and incorporating with certain present topics.
I'm really interested in the story though. Seems like they put a lot of insight into the decisions/storyline and incorporating with certain present topics.
666 ReVeNGe 666
TROLL IS LIFE
So much Piff dropping
Hopefully I can beat this before Zelda comes out. I doubt it.
I just saw a cut scene of this game and it looks weird.
The people look realistic but unnatural at the same time. like they don't move like real people would. especially the eyes.
I just saw a cut scene of this game and it looks weird.
The people look realistic but unnatural at the same time. like they don't move like real people would. especially the eyes.
Brief Keef
Superstar
u got 3 days to do that breh i doubt u gonna
When's the embargo on reviews?
Brief Keef
Superstar
22nd prob