The first few hours of Horizon Zero Dawn, a game that has been consistently one of the most anticipated since its unveiling in 2015, seemed to me too interesting, too colourful and too full of love and mystery and excitement to have come from Guerrilla Games.
There's no denying the studio's long-standing talent, but since 2004 it had only ever produced the bloody, brooding Killzone shooter series. From the outside it seemed like quite a stretch from Killzone to a vibrant, beautiful, open-world role-playing game.
More Videos
Horizon Zero Dawn trailer: The Machines
1000 years after the fall of our civilization, man is no longer the dominate species. The Machines are.
Joel Eschler, an Australian who joined the Netherlands-based Guerrilla as a senior producer early last year, acknowledges this shift in a diplomatic kind of way.
"I think, for people who are familiar with Guerrilla, they'll be really impressed with the narrative that we built, and the writing and the quests that are in the game", Eschler says.
![Joel Eschler, senior producer at Guerrilla Games, at the <i>Horizon Zero Dawn</i> media event in Sydney.](/web/20170224011745im_/http://www.canberratimes.com.au/content/dam/images/g/u/h/r/z/q/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.guhjsr.png/1487649329109.jpg)
"I think something that is really going to blow people away is when they really understand the full scope of the world that we've built".
Regardless of the company that made it, Horizon has been one of the most anticipated games for the past two years for two immediately apparent reasons: it's one of the most graphically and technologically impressive games ever seen, and it has a premise that sets imaginations racing immediately.
The game involves primitive people and a world dominated by nature, but it isn't set in the past. It's 1000 years in the future, long after an apocalyptic event has destroyed us modern humans and our culture. The only things we left behind are a race of animal-like robotic machines, which now dominate the Earth, and occasional ruins in the form of underground bunkers and the carcasses of skyscrapers.
"We like to call [the setting] post-post-apocalyptic", Eschler says.
![Aloy is already being hailed by some as a future PlayStation icon.](/web/20170224011745im_/http://www.canberratimes.com.au/content/dam/images/g/u/h/r/z/u/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.guhjsr.png/1487649329109.png)
"For the humans who are still surviving, it's no longer history for them. It's not nostalgic for them to see a building. It's kind of more a mystery".
To us, the player, these leftover structures look like the ruins of Calakmul might appear to an ancient Mayan if he could see them in 2017 — overgrown and decayed, recognisable but utterly misunderstood by the contemporary people — and they're thrilling to explore through the eyes of the adventurous protagonist, Aloy.
![Aloy's view of the world is informed by her father figure and fellow outcast Rost.](/web/20170224011745im_/http://www.canberratimes.com.au/content/dam/images/g/u/h/r/z/z/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.guhjsr.png/1487649329109.png)
"We really built Aloy as a strong character that's trying to discover who she is, what her place in the world is", says Eschler.
Raised as an outcast for reasons not known to her, Aloy learns to live by hunting machines for resources, but soon discovers the wider world is far more complex than the technology-fearing tribe she lives near would have her believe.
![Aloy, as a child, finds the ancient data device she calls her Focus.](/web/20170224011745im_/http://www.canberratimes.com.au/content/dam/images/g/u/h/r/z/s/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.guhjsr.png/1487649329109.jpg)
"As she tries to understand [the world], you're trying to understand it as well, and we hope that people will have that same sense of discovery, amplified by Aloy's drive to understand where the machines came from, what these underground locations of the old world — what these ruins — actually mean", Eschler says.
Early on in the game Aloy, as a child, stumbles upon an ancient ruin and finds a tiny computer stuck to the temple of a long-dead ancient human, and she attaches it to her own head.Â
![Aloy prepares to jump to a longneck robot, which can provide geographical data.](/web/20170224011745im_/http://www.canberratimes.com.au/content/dam/images/g/u/h/r/z/x/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.guhjsr.png/1487649329109.jpg)
To us in 2017, it's clearly recognisable as a futuristic personal assistant type device, which provides information to the user via augmented reality. To Aloy, it shows the code and truth behind the robotic beings, and gives her insight not known to the other tribespeople.Â
Eerily, the device also lets Aloy experience aspects of the long-lost world including audio, written and holographic logs that shed light on the final days and years of our civilisation.
![The world of <i>Horizon Zero Dawn</i> is vast and varied.](/web/20170224011745im_/http://www.canberratimes.com.au/content/dam/images/g/u/h/r/z/y/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.guhjsr.png/1487649329109.jpg)
I feel a kind of alarm as Aloy begins to experience her natural, beautiful world with the data-filled augmented vision more reminiscent of current technology. Part of me wishes I could explore the forests and snow-capped mountains without it, but more than that it's clearly dangerous for Aloy to reintroduce a part of the culture that presumably led to an apocalyptic event. Plenty of stories have linked modern humanity's drive for progress with a world-ending cataclysm, but Horizon presents it from quite a different perspective.
"When [the game] first started development there was a really big effort to build the background more, for the world and all the different tribes that occupy the world", Eschler says.
![While most machines can be hunted for resources, they have other uses too.](/web/20170224011745im_/http://www.canberratimes.com.au/content/dam/images/g/u/h/r/z/w/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.guhjsr.png/1487649329109.png)
"To write the backstory of what happened to cause the apocalypse, to write about how the tribes have their different relationships with the machines ... So really we wanted to approach this in a way where there are a number of stories that can be told within the world".
The intrigue of the game world is multi-layered, with our curiosity naturally piqued about our own fate, but plenty of more pressing questions in Aloy's world as well. The new world is filled with conflicting religious and political attitudes, as well as myriad people to meet, interact with and help.
"While you can follow the straight narrative and enjoy the story, the player's story of Aloy is going to be different from person to person as you choose which skills to develop, which narrative path to go down, which conversations you have, and how you want to modify your weapons", Eschler says.
"Whether you want to go and do activities and become a champion in the world, or just kind of blast through the story".
Look for our full review of Horizon Zero Dawn, including its fluid and highly customisable action-RPG gameplay systems, ahead of its PlayStation 4 release on March 1.
0 comments
New User? Sign up